Flat (and then round?) world

[Eochaid]

Thanks for all you comments!

The problem with what you want is that you want to transform a natively flat surface onto a sphere, while cartography is always about the opposite.

Yes, that's my big problem. Indeed, soil, rock and such can strech, break and distort more than a piece of paper, the basic idea was that while the world was flat, tthe Gods had a `spell' that enabled the world to ignore the most basic properties of gravitation, i.e. large lumps of matter go into a rough ball. When the spell failed, well... it wasn't good to be there for a few millenia. So I can definitely allow for a little deformation, but I'd like to find a way to get a `not-too-unplausible' result (if there is one).

As for the matter of size, the flat world is a sort of truncated pyramid, with the big base (where the continent is) slightly larger than the earth diameter (so that the whole pyramid has roughly the same mass as the Earth). So yeah, the continent will cover about half a globe. My idea was to break it in 6 not-so-big chunks, with rifts radiating form the central island. Which will, as you correctly guessed, initiate tectonic movement.

Here is a first draft I made with this idea a few months ago (I'm definitely most unhappy with the result, I measured planar distances and tried to put them on Google Earth to get the spherical equivalents, and that's really messy). Either way, I don't like the way the chunks collided with one another, so I plan redoing the tectonics from scratch.



There are more landmasses than you get with only the continent: a little chunk from the periphery, some new volcanic islands in subduction zones, and the big southern continent from the bottom part of the pyramid.

@Gidde: Thanks! I had a quick peek at hugin, seems promising.

@waldronate: Yeah, that's sure possible solutions! I especially like the propaganda gods... Doesn't fit to the settings I plan for this world, but still!

Thanks again guys!