Basic Terrain for Pointcrawls

Lots of digital ink has been spilled on the merits of hexcrawls and pointcrawls (though I think Dinkie Rizzle has the right of it), and something I've always noticed when looking at pointcrawls, including ones I've made, is that they tend to be fairly straightforward lattices: the actual shape of the web can occasionally be interesting, but I think there's a lot of neat tech that can be borrowed from other map types.

The land of Generica, made in Inkarnate to show off some of the tricks I like.

1. Different Travel Times: If you look at something like Stanford's Orbis project, a travel-time map of the Roman world, you'll notice that in the pre-railroad era water functioned as an area's superhighway. In my sophomore year of high school, my US History teacher Mr. Hagstrom told us that it was cheaper to ship goods across the entire Atlantic than to get them thirty miles inland. That can be a bit shocking to us living in the age of the plane, train, and automobile (going to the mall and back is a 40-mile journey for me), but there's no reason not to subject our hapless adventurers to the same thing. Instead of having each area be directly connected, there are instead segments. Each segment is one day's worth of travel, and so overland and rougher terrain's travel times can be directly communicated to the players instead of needing to do mental math. This isn't new-variant travel times are ubiquitous in any hexcrawl worth its salt-but precisely because it works I think it's worth stealing.
2. Bits off By Themselves: Having pieces that are a bit out there and separate (like the Weird Bird Skeletons in the Southeast) also adds a nice bit of texture to pointcrawls. Similarly, the Isle of Wights is an isle, and can thus only be accessed by boat from Busytown or Orc City. It establishes that these areas are isolated and will be a journey to get to. Y'know, like an adventure. 
3. One-Way Gates/Changing Conditions: Coupled with bits being isolated, I also like areas that get cut off from each other, forcing players to weigh decisions about whether they want to risk being stranded. In the Generica map, the Mountains of Majesty have a chance of sealing themselves up in a rockslide behind the players every time they pass, changing the shape of the map. In the Scarlet Sunset map, the gravity lanes mean you can only access the central star, the Sling, from Apollyon and Szuriel. This kind of thing is easier to do/justify in more constrained areas, like the Underdark, or with systems of travel fantastical enough it doesn't make the players go "Wait why can't we just go around it?" This can also be tied to some form of ongoing clock-say, a monsoon season that makes travel along the coast take longer and be more dangerous.
4. Diegetic Routes: Pointcrawls (and indeed any form of map-based exploration not at the man-to-man level) are fundamentally abstractions of physical space that we will never see, but adding in physical "terrain" helps it feel a lot more verisimilitudinous. Looking again at Generica, the rivers are occasionally straddled by bridges, explaining why this is The One Place You Can Cross. The wizard tower is situated such that it's a day out of town, which probably tells you something about the wizard. That kind of thing.

The Scarlet Reach from my short-lived Daggerheart campaign

In conclusion, maps are a land of contrasts. I personally adore the pointcrawl format due to it giving me some much-needed direction when it comes to exploring a given region, and so I thought I'd share a few of my techniques for spicing the bad boys up.