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This is staggering in it's scale and detail. Fabulous work!
Schwarzkreuz, this is awesome! The mountains, the cities & ruins, the whole thing. Yeah, the trees could use more randomness, but that's no biggie.
I understand leaving some odd stuff in place for nostalgia's sake. But your river issues look fixable. For the basics of river paths, see these threads by Redrobes and by Midgardsormr.
If your former sea basins are all (or mostly?) sand, you need to figure what would happen to rivers on the former land areas, when they fall into the sandseas. It would be believable for the bottomlands to be hotter than the uplands, and for rivers to evaporate or soak in once they descend in some pretty awesome waterfalls. Which would no doubt be fun to draw, by the way !
A few pointers - consider these as realism-suggestions from someone who couldn't do what you've drawn in a hundred years! To the northwest of Mare Alba Ras you have what looks like a delta.
<rats - it's not letting me insert these inline... refer to RiverFix1.jpg below>
Now, I'm not totally sure of your scale, but I'd say the biggest island is unlikely. The red-circled split would not be in place long-term -- the water would go one way or the other, not both. But if you detached the eastern branch something like the green route, during flood times the dotted line might connect the two watercourses - it just wouldn't be permanent. Actually, a dotted line there would be pretty clear - it would typically mean a seasonal or intermittent route. The green circle island might be okay, particularly since any map is generalized, not showing every last branch. The yellow-circled islands are mighty big, but could be believable if the land there is very flat. Again - their extent might best be thought of as cut by many, many additional passages.
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To the southwest of Mare Alba Ras is a major river that could use help.
< refer to RiverFix2.jpg below>
I'm assuming you intend it to flow northwards - that is from interior of the continent to the edge, which is usual. One way to remember how two streams join is that they will more often form a Y, than a T. And the angle where the two come together will be acute, and will point downstream. A FEW could join at a right angle and still look right. But a tributary will almost never come in angled upstream. I marked the okay joins with green angles - see how they make the direction clear? The yellow circles are the iffy ones. The red circles mark most of the outright unlikely ones; I sketched in green the kind of tweak that would make them work like real rivers. Right in the middle the biggest red circle marks an unlikely split and rejoin - something that happens seldom. Small islands midstream - sure. Immense ones 30 - 50 - 100 miles long - rarely would form and stay in place. Always one channel will eventually win out. All you would have to do is detatch the upstream connection like I show in green. You show the river dwindle as it reaches the coast. It rather ought to be broadest there, like my sketched extension.
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This third snippet has only a few real problems.
< refer to RiverFix3.jpg below>
Like the last one, it probably ought to reach the ocean - your linework makes it look like it dwindles to nothing. It won't cross the coastal hills, but like the example path I show it could snake through a gap. The OK tributary joins I show as green angles - pointing downstream. The yellow ones are iffy - at pretty much right angles, a few would be OK. The small red circle has two backwards-looking tributary joins, with corrections suggested in green. Sure, at this scale the river linework is many, many times the width of a real river, and within that "2-mile-wide" bank line, there's room for the tributary streams to turn and do a proper join. But the cartographer's job is to generalize enough to make the result look right as well as be a decent representation of ground-truth.
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The fourth bit has to be viewed before the forests to make sense.
< refer to RiverFix4.jpg below>
The river network itself is almost all right - breaking the four spots I have circled would make it obey the "rivers join downstream but do not branch downstream" rule. A few of the joins slant "backward" - can you see those, based on the earlier examples? The aspect of this river system that borders on implausibility is that those sources near opposite coasts don't have visibile high ground to drain from. the broad yellow lines are where there has to be enough height to force water away from the very nearby coast, and across to the opposite one. Granted, there don't even have to be hills - cliffs at the shore and a gradual slope inland would do it. In that case you could tweak at least the near shore to show a steep rise above what I think you're calling a sand sea? The far coast is harder to symbolize <shrug> ... once the forest is placed it's pretty hard to see enough to feel bad about anyway, there :-). The yellow circle I'm just not getting. One source on the mountainside would not split into two. And the "dwindling into desert" explanation would take some more symbology of some sort to work. Is that kind of what you intend?
Ummmm - I don't suppose you intend that river there to run under the mountain? If you do, then a more prominent dotted line to connect them is in order, or even little symbolized "tunnel openings". If not, then you may want to shift one a little to keep them from lining up.
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This last one I'm not sure how to fix.
< refer to RiverFix5.jpg below>
It depends on what you intend. Scraps of river don't just "happen", and die out. In extraordinary circumstances one can have a river dwindle into a desert, or into salt flats/ marsh area. And I know it would be tough to symbolize a gradual shallow basin in the middle of this continent. Is that what you intend for the yellow areas I indicate? If so, what you show is not effective. Think: where's the water come from? Or why doesn't the sea fill the interior if it's low? I would expect the middle of the continent to be at least a little above sea level, so the green arrows are places I would expect outflow. If you do want to show something entering a desert or basin and vanishing, intermittent-stream dotted lines might work. You could even get away with just connecting the east end of that northern isolated network to the little lake near my arrow. Use dotted lines at several places if you like - as an example, these days N. America's Rio Grande and Colorado rivers pretty much vanish before they hit the oceans, BUT in occasional flood time there would definitely be flow all the way to the sea.
If that northern set of channels does flow eastward, there's a few wrong-way connections to tweak the angle of.
If your whole world is drying up there's just less moisture around to make rain in the first place. Even though you don't have to figure a full system of cliamte and weather and winds and ocean currents, you might ought to think about what would encourage deserts, or what would form rivers.
The sand sea idea is delightful. I take it that's what is happening at the east end of Oceanus Desperae? Thing is, it looks there like the original shore has been lifted, rather than the sea level falling -- otherwise you'd get either shoreline cliffs all over the place, or some kind of indication worldwide that the coasts used to be farther inland.
Like I said - there's nothing wrong with this map that isn't easily fixable. And there's so much right with it that I'm not going to wait til it is done to give you some rep: very nicely done!
This is staggering in it's scale and detail. Fabulous work!
River Police can kiss my backside. All that water in the Underdark has to come from somewhere.Originally Posted by Galendae
I am surprised the "River Police" did not jump this earlier.
Thank you jbgibson for your huge amount of help there, and thanks to all who like my map. I am very sorry I didnt finished it by now. It all got me so depressed that I couldnt touch it since end of October. You guys now, Its a Map that I worked on for 2 decades now, as a little kid I invented lots of the areas and so on. But all the things that went wrong at the time making these grande edition of the map depressed and freaked me out. I will work on it again now, just found a trunk full of my old maps at the holydays at my parents place, my old room. So I am about to adding new stuff. And finalize it now.
This is an outstandingly fantastic map! I love hand drawn maps the most, so pleasing to the eye.
Great work! I can't wait to see the finished version!
+rep!
Great job ! I think i mumbled more interjections than i do usually when i'm impressed. Don't discourage yourself and keep on !
Thank, I try my best
Just now peeped your thumbnail from October with the Mountains as I was delving into this thread, that alone was rep worthy. Great work. Thanks.
Here is an updated Look on how the Labels are on the nearly finished version
It looks fantastic, BlackCross ... I love how the map is *just* 2.5 GB heavy at present
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