Aestrix @aestrix - Tumblr Blog

Can you make [you shall never again go away] public? I have the compulsion to have actually read TOSes before representing that I have to the signup clickthrough, so I don't have a Glowfic account.

I can't, sorry. It's been full user locked on another author's behalf, not mine.

officialunitedstates

i DO NOT CONSENT to daylight savings

#what is this rebloggery #whyyyyyyyy

aestrix

I’m fiddling with a setting, and decided to make a map of a continent for it! So here it is. It’s about the size of Australia, and other continents in this world are not making an appearance in this post. They will likely be ignored until they suddenly become relevant, which might be never. We shall call them Schrodinger’s continents.

I am not a geologist of any kind, but gosh did I try to make it look at least a little bit reasonable. Except for the scaling of the rivers, the scaling of the rivers is aggressively terrible. I wanted to show relative sizes of the rivers without adding Google Maps levels of zoom. I regret nothing, and I’m not sorry, but I invite you to imagine they’re a little bit more reasonably sized, width wise.

While I have some idea of what’s going on, geologically, not everything is quite figured out. Here’s what I have so far, but please take it with that entire inland sea’s worth of salt. I am not a geologist or any kind of qualified, I’m just some woman with Photoshop and Google, doing the best I can. I’d appreciate any kind of offered feedback and will be more than happy to nudge things around so they make a bit more sense.

The mountains to the west are imagined as Appalachian equivalents; once the biggest mountains in the world, now slowly getting ground down into very picturesque scenery. Next to it, a clockwise ocean current tries its very hardest to make a peninsula. Give it your blessings, everyone, it’s got a long way to go.

To the north, the coastline is a bunch of scars left by various glaciers, from before this continent migrated south for the epoch. The northwestern section in particular is rather dry and rocky. Unless I’m mistaken, it does not quite make it all the way into being a desert, because to be honest, this whole continent is rather wet. Even with those mountains helping it out, it just doesn’t look like it could credibly make it. It would if it could, probably cursing its terrible fate.

Speaking of salty, the inland sea! I haven’t decided if it is ‘salty,’ ‘very salty,’ or ‘it’s so high in salt intake you can almost walk on water.’ Are the rivers enough to keep it from becoming Xbox Live? Realistically, no, but they seem like they’d at least help. I could probably use an expert opinion there.

South of the sea of questionable salinity is its less impressive but more stable little brother. The tiny strait that connects it is just enough to keep this one roughly attuned to the ocean, and maybe the home of a few sharks that wanted to go somewhere exotic for their vacation.

Next to that is a respectable peninsula, which might have once been part of the Not-Appalachians ages ago, but definitely isn’t anymore. Luckily it has several island friends to console itself, so it’s doing okay.

To the east of the peninsula and its island friends is their stiff competition. The eastern peninsula is a bit less popular, but it’s very close with its large and impressive looking BFF.

North of the introvert peninsula is another mountain range! I believe this one is a result of subduction, and consequently has a volcano or two. Or three. Or half a dozen. It’s probably fine. Don’t worry about it.

How did that horn get there, you might ask? What an excellent question. The coastline was looking a bit dull without it, so I added it to spice it up a little. Oh, you mean a geology reason? Uh. A wizard did it. A geology wizard.

On the subject of geology wizards: Hey, @fantasy-cartography, would you like to have a look at this and tell me how I’m doing? I would really appreciate feedback!

fantasy-cartography

Hey Aestrix! Thanks for the submission, sorry it’s taken me a bit to get around to looking at it!

So I’m going to open with a bit of first-impressions-based brutal honesty; this continent looks like someone shoved hydraulic jacks underneath the north coast and lifted the whole thing up by ten degrees. Don’t get me wrong, you’ve done a really good job thinking through all this stuff, especially the coastlines, and I love your analysis of it all, and I think that rivers and lakes are an underappreciated geological feature for fantasy storytelling, but the fact that the rivers flow exclusively south really bothers me for some reason. I reckon that there are a couple of fixes for this. You can either move the Appalachian-esques from the west coast to the north coast (don’t put mountains on three coasts or you’re looking at Floating Mordor), or you could shift the origin points for those rivers slightly southwards and/or shift the north coast northwards, and then and add more rivers flowing into those fjords. On balance I like the second solution slightly better, although I acknowledge that it’s more work from a drawing perspective.

The good thing with those fjords is that the area must have been pretty mountainous when they formed, even if those mountains are mostly eroded away. You could have a bunch of really short rivers which flow radially into each bay. Depending on how far south the continent has drifted since they formed, then you could even have the rivers around the fjords being mostly dry valleys, with the rivers only flowing dependent on which valleys it rains in (if they were mostly glacier-fed and the glaciers dried up). Hmm, that makes me think about a nomadic culture which moves dependent on which valleys have water in them in any given year. Maybe they have seeds which remain dormant except when watered, or maybe they rely on divination magic to tell which valleys will get rained on…

Your concerns about the big ol’ inland sea being too salty are mostly unfounded – I think it would have enough drainage to keep the fresh water cycled through, meaning that it wouldn’t be as salty as the ocean. More Lake Erie than Lake Eyre. This would depend on the underlying geology, specifically the question of how salty the soils at the bottom of the sea basin are, but unless they’re unusually salty you can probably assume the water would be fresh.

The peninsula on the south corner of the lake, between the two rivers, definitely has a major city on it. Maybe there’s a nation whose territory officially stretches between those two rivers, with one major city on the lake peninsula and another one on that smaller river in between the two? That would give them a pretty strong monopoly on water-based trade, which is definitely going to be important on a continent shaped like this. For the record, those rivers in the south definitely have pretty strong tides (assuming an Earthlike tidal system), so you should put the south coast’s major towns some distance upriver.

The far north end of the sea, around that long thin island, might be a bit saltier than the south end, because I can’t see water being cycled around too much there unless there are more rivers flowing into that part of the island that you haven’t drawn in on the map. I wonder if that part is a caldera lake from a very large volcano, and maybe the island in the middle is a reforming cone? Or maybe the island belongs to some kind of trade/piracy-based city-state? Or maybe there’s a mining town on the coast nearby and the island is being dug out for valuable ores, with the miners heading back and forth in rowboats every day? Lots of possibilities there, definitely pay attention to it.

I hope I’m not stepping on your toes too much by coming up with three possible major cultures for your world, but I think it’s a good sign when an internet rando looks at your map and says “Hey, I think there should be cities here, here, and here, and I can see a whole bunch of stories coming from those locations…”. I can’t think of a good concluding statement, but this is a great first draft and you should stick with it!

aestrix

Oo! Brutal honesty! Thank you very much, I appreciate it and the overall feedback a lot! As my lovely and talented coauthor @shitifindon put it: your feedback is amazing. The line about the hydraulic jacks was very enlightening, and also great. I giggled. I will definitely be fixing that problem now.

You are absolutely not stepping on any toes by coming up with three possible major cultures for the world! Even if the ideas themselves can’t be used or re-purposed, the logic behind them is still important and I absolutely want to hear all about it. You even found several of the spots where cities are planned, and pointed out how great they’d be for building cities at, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. You agree!! Delicious validation, yes!

I like your second solution for the river problem more too; the not-Appalachians need to stay right where they are for story reasons. There will be a wizard of with a dramatic mountain lair in them, and I cannot take away his mountains. He would be so sad. Even better, the northern part of the continent has been overrun with horrifying magic monsters. This means that expanding the north will expand the monster hordes. I love it, and cackled accordingly.

Your thoughts about the skinny sea island were also very interesting, particularly the bit about the northern part of the sea being an old caldera. The ravagers did not have a source before. No one had any time to write anything down about how they showed up, and ultimately it didn’t really matter much. Now, however, they have a source! They burst forth from the earth in a large, volcano-like explosion. From right there. :D

So! With your (and @plain-dealing-villain‘s) criticism in mind, have a revised map, now with so many more rivers, more north, a slightly fiddled with coastline, and one large body of water, scootched slightly to the north.

#aestrix crawls out of her introvert hole #the land of horrible magic monsters