writers and artists will go "this isn't good enough." my brother in christ, you're creating something new out of nothing and expressing yourself creatively. your productivity and unrealistic standards of perfection do not define you or the worth of your art. you're doing great.
modified map of the Empire of the Isles: elevation (land and sea), lakes, major cities, trade routes (red: heavy traffic, yellow: light traffic)
modifications explained below the cut
the main change, which prompted most of the other changes, is that i placed tyvia and morley on one tectonic plate, and gristol and serkonos on another.
i'm not a geologist and possibly there are other explanations to how the isles were formed, but my reasoning went thus: the temperature difference between the north of tyvia and the south of serkonos is too huge for a single archipelago -> the distance between them must correspond to something like that between finland and spain -> the isles are the size of a continent -> a continent, as far as i know, does not split apart unless through the movement of tectonic plates -> there is divergence happening
it could also have been convergence but wow that would mean so many more volcanoes. instead you get block rift mountains
the main tectonic rift is between tyvia+morley and gristol, as evidenced by the very deep chasm -- it's probably smaller in width than it should be, but i'm not going for full realistic accuracy either -- but there is also tectonic drift between tyvia and morley (according to the north american tectonic plate this is a thing that can happen, because that thing branches off in all kinds of directions. could it cause a continent to split on this small a scale? who knows. i'm pretending the answer is yes. can you tell already i just wanted to go hog wild on the tectonic plates) and there are convergent plates above tyvia and below serkonos
now serkonos is half dormant volcanoes, half huge old magma flow from a massive volcanic event at some point in the distant past; tyvia has a volcanic arc as its northmost feature but it's partly calderas; the south of tyvia and the north of gristol is very mountainous (but the area between gristol and morley isn't because the tectonic forces along that axis are transformed [dunno if that's the proper term, basically lateral] rather than divergent
does this also mean there are probably earthquakes everywhere? yes. oh god
OTHER FEATURES: a couple of meteor craters (the shapes were already there, i just decided they would be craters) east of baleton and west of caltan; a void rift deep in the ocean right near whitecliff, pulling in the landmass around it; minor modifications to certain outline areas because i added in mountains. i like mountains. they make things less flat. OH and this was already present in the canon map but the line of islands east of gristol is now a bunch of extinct volcanoes formed as the result of a hotspot at the morley-gristol tectonic limit, now closed; and i just fully deleted an island west of gristol for the hell of it. also the lakes were either already there, or hadn't been colored in right on the canon map, or were Very Weird Interconnecting Rivers i decided to fill in because why not
TRADE ROUTES. obviously all capitals would be trade centers, or at least trade-rich considering their population level, but i've decided several other cities are either merchant towns for reasons such as being nearest to another isle, being conveniently placed to connect to many other cities and thus either the center of trade (like yaro or driscol) or a waypoint (like caltan), or being an exporter of stuff and conveniently placed right on a trade route thus favoring its development (like potterstead, but that's entirely my personal fanon)
some trade routes are heavily used because they lead to many ports of interest, or because they lead to a major port, or because it's the only way to get to a certain major port efficiently (for example, the trade routes to the east of serkonos are little used because if you leave from karnaca you have to get all the way around the trail of volcanic islands, can't dock at whitecliff directly because, see name, it's on a huge cliff, then avoid the dishonored bermuda's triangle [void rift, huge myths around that place, few people risk going through there], then get all the way up to driscol); the heavily trafficked trade route that stops right at the top of serkonos actually leads to the serkonan canal, which isn't even present on the canon map (probs because they hadn't invented it yet when they drew the thing), and is a much faster way of getting to karnaca, but deep-keel boats can't take the canal and series of waterlocks and have to go around the old way; wei-ghon does a lot of trade because it needs to to support its population way in the north, and a lot of tyvian trade goes by boat due to the poor travel conditions inland and the huge fuckoff mountains
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