[Illustrator] Randland

A friend is running a game set in the world of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels. He asked me to provide a map, and I happened to need a subject for my final project in my Illustrator class. So, with the aid of tcberry's and HandsomeRob's tutorials, and using Ellisa Mitchell's painting as a reference, I've started mapping "Randland," as it's called by fans.

I am aware of the issues at the junction between the rivers and their deltas. They'll eventually be covered by city icons.

C & C welcome.

Geographically that lake is unlikely. If all the small tributaries are flowing from that point then its probably the highest point on the map or at very least it definitely is on the watersheds of all the rivers. Lakes don't form on the watersheds. You do occasionally have lakes high up in mountainous regions but the rock would have to be impermeable like granite. But these are usually in the basin of even higher regions as water collects into them.

I always find it much easier to get the height of an area first and then determine water flow based on guessed watersheds and then where a lot of water is naturally collecting and the ground is flat is where lakes go. If you are going to apply some hill graphics and mountain symbols then its going to be interesting to see what you do at that point.

Perhaps a caldera might be an option tho ?

I think Midgardsormr intends to try and set all the features the way they are in Wheel of Time canon. Even where they don't make sense geographically ;)

Oh I see. I looked up for other maps and found some like this one below - section attached. The lake is draining from two channels into two different rivers to the sea. I guess the original map designer should have come here and read up about our "river violations" post.

Heres another one This one is interesting because the mapper here obviously does understand river flow and has made excruciating contortions to the mountains to make the rivers flow as they were drawn. Notice that the lake is surrounded by a thin mountain range one side and yet drops to low lands instantly on the other. Its like a curtain of mountains thousands of feet high.

According to the original map, that river on the east side doesn't flow out of the lake. The text indicates that those mountains are very steep on the east side, and no one from the Two Rivers (the area between those two eastern tributaries) had ever crossed from east to west. Later on, though, refugees began crossing west to east, which indicates to me that the western slopes are significantly gentler than the eastern.

In any case, yes, I am limited by the information presented in existing maps, which can be somewhat excused by the backstory that hundreds of powerful magic-wielders wrecked the world as they went terminally insane. Who knows what bizarre geographic results that would have? Personally, I've always found that long, narrow archipelago on the southern coast improbable. It's far too straight.

edit: Oh, hey, I just followed the link to that other map--that's the original painting by Mitchell that I just posted the closeup from, and it's the one I'm working from.

Your maps fine but I think the original has some faults. Even if the terrain had been torn up by magic the water flow would still be natural unless the water itself was magic. But anyway, you gotta go with the flow :oops: I mean the original maps' direction.

I'm working on developing a style for the mountains now. I'm not real sure about it yet, but I've done just a bit in the southeast corner. I'll also run it by the guy who's actually going to be using the map to see what he thinks.

At the moment, I am leaning toward keeping this style, but it'll need some cleanup, probably, and some additional detailing.

Interesting style, has an almost 'cartoony' quality to it.

Yeah, it's hard to get away from that in Illustrator. Hopefully adding some effects will soften the lines a bit, but there are so many nodes in this thing that I'm hesitant to apply anything like that until the very end. I'm already having trouble due to the complexity of the piece.

Anyway, all of my mountains are laid in now. I don't think they're going to need as much detailing as I thought they would, although there are a couple of places I'll definitely want to touch up. Next step, I think, is going to be some city icons. We'll see how that goes; I haven't managed to come up with decent icons yet, and I've tried it a couple of times. Mayhap it'll be easier with Illustrator than it was with CC3.

Have you decided how you're going to handle the wastelands in the north?