Do you want the reason or the rationale? The reason is bottom-up design. The rationale is that there is an ancient, mostly eroded mountain range that runs N-S through the northern Almalen Forest. The lake and river that merges with the River Almalen just before it enters the sea are in what used to be an old subduction zone--the medium-sized central peninsula east of that lake will one day break off into its own island, having changed direction millenia ago.
Or something like that, anyway. I imagine if I'd started the map with the geology things might be different. But I didn't. So they aren't.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
I was referring to the northern most part of the river that forms the upside down "U". Is that curving around the top of the mountain range then?
Groovy. It is definitely an interesting formation and would easily cause adventurers to get lost if they were trying to use it to get their bearings.
Bill Stickers is innocent! It isn't Bill's fault that he was hanging out in the wrong place.
Please make an effort to tag all threads. This will greatly enhance the usability of the forums.
Yep. The high areas extend out from the forest, ending about where that lower-left city is. The eastern part of the 'U' then flows down into the old subduction valley.
I probably ought to give some thought to seismic activity, but I don't anticipate the campaign taking much longer than a couple of years in game time. I may package the world info for distribution when I'm done with it, though, so I may need to revisit the matter some day.
Navigation in that area might have been difficult long ago, but nowadays it's pretty densely settled, with a well-developed and maintained road network.
Stay tuned for a more detailed map of that part of the world--As soon as the new City Designer is released I'm going to try an interesting map of the Imperial City and environs.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
The map is complete. There is a new thread posted in the Finished Maps forum.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
A quick comment on the horseman image, since the quality is obviously a bit higher than the other two drawings:
For the ship and the tree, I used Fireworks MX to create a transparent image, then imported that into CC3. CC3 doesn't scale bitmaps very efficiently, resulting in a lot of jagged, broken lines. For the horseman, I used CorelPaint to composite it on the final export from CC3. Corel did a much nicer job of scaling, and the transparency tool did a very nice job anti-aliasing the drawing against the map.
In the future, I'll save this kind of element for post production. In fact, I may very well try recompositing this map. I'll likely have to do a revision eventually anyway when the campaign reveals some more towns and cities.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
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