Hello! So let me thank you in advance for bearing with me on this. I may have a hard time articulating my difficulties. I also apologize for the length of this

I’m looking to start DMing, and like many prospective DMs I’ve decided that I’d like to start completely from scratch with my very own setting. But I’ve recently hit a series of barricades in my endeavor - namely agonizing perfectionism. Without going too deep into it, it’s preventing me from moving forward because I’m essentially paralyzed by the fear that I’ll screw it up somehow. And believe me, I know I’m overthinking it, I know that I have to learn to let it go and not worry so much, I know all of that. Rationally I know that. Logically I know that. But this perfectionism is like one big branch on a tree of unfortunate mental health issues. The reason I tell you this is because people have a habit of not understanding where I’m coming from when I try to ask for help - so I’m hoping by contextualizing it, we can just sort of work within it.

So because of how my brain works, I decided that before I could start coming up with a physical setting, I needed to know where my starting area exists in the world. One of the reasons for this was so I could know what general climate area we’d be working in, how close it was to the equator and such. So I figured I would kind of roughly map out continents and land masses, and then just fill them in with details and countries and whatnot as I needed, and just focus at first on the starting region.

I would say that my problem is then two sided - difficulties making a map, and difficulties with terrain.

I’ve been playing with programs like Hex/Worldographer and Other World Mapper, which have yielded some results, but then I get really confused about map sizes and map projections and things like that. Other World Mapper came the closest to helping me with this side of the issue because of the program’s built in projection grid. But I wasn’t sure how I felt about having my map by Equirectangular because I felt the shapes that I had made and liked would then look different in realty due to map distortion. I thought maybe I could just make a world map in Worldographer, or even print out some hex paper and do it with a pencil. But the problem then becomes, what size should it be?

See, I’m afraid that unless the size of my paper or Worldographer map isn’t perfect, then it’ll screw up the position of the equator or distances, and things will be askew and it’ll turn into a disaster. So honestly, I’m not even sure I know what exactly I’m asking... for those of you who create full world maps, how do you do it? What size “canvas” do you work with? How do you make sure that everything kind of ... I don’t know, fits Into its right place? Like I’m just so concerned that unless the proportions are somehow exact, it’ll through everything out of whack.

the second point of difficulty is at least less abstract. When placing mountains, I have difficulty knowing how big they should appear on the map. And honestly, I don’t know much about geology or climate or things like that, and a lot of the resources I’ve seen are sort of scattered and hard to follow. I’ve seen maps of Wind currents and how they circulate and catch on mountains, or how rain gets trapped up in mountains and that creates rivers? But I don’t really understand these things enough to actually work with them. And things like deserts or swamps, I’m not entirely sure how they form either...

So I guess I’m wondering if anyone has any easily digestible resources on these topics? Like a comprehensive website that talks about it in simple terms, or maybe a world building book recommendation? Basically anything that might be able to give me a crash course in this kind of world building geology.

Jeez, I’m sorry this is so long. These things have really been weighing on me so I guess it all just kind of spilled out. If you read this far, I’m deeply appreciative. And if you can provide any kind of assistance, even just a recommendation or something, I would be so very grateful.

Hi there

I remember when I had many of the same questions you ask. Although I can't answer them all, here's some things I learnt along the way.

1 - find a world atlas, use that as a kind of 'size template', so that by comparing your map to the atlas, you can have some idea of the scale of things.
2 - Use the 'world map' more as a guide. Things like projections and such are too complicated to deal with for the lay person, but usually, all you need is an idea of where things are in a relative, rather than absolute sense. Wait until you start doing regions to work out detail, particularly distances.
3 - world atlases also tend to have some pages dedicated to basic geography, some more than others. Your local library may be useful at this point. Whilst wikipedia can be quite comprehensive, it can be much easier to swallow something more of the 'incredible cross sections' type pictorial guide.
4 - suspend disbelief. It's a fantasy world, so maybe not all of the natural features are particularly natural.
5 - you might also find things like basic mountain statistics - "highest mountain ranges" and such - in a world atlas.
Now that I've typed all that, I see that I've basically hyped up using an atlas.

Haha, well I never would have thought about using an atlas, so that might be a fair place to start! Thank you, I’ll take a look and see if I can get my hands on one - I’m sure it’ll be a good resource to have regardless! Thank you for the suggestion!

Don't forget that pre-modern cartography methods resulted in truly atrocious maps, but they managed to find their way around anyhoo! You can alway retcon things if you need to. 

Quote from Barbarulo >>

Don't forget that pre-modern cartography methods resulted in truly atrocious maps, but they managed to find their way around anyhoo! You can alway retcon things if you need to.