Reply With QuoteWhat do you mean? I thought it was perfectly reasonable to assume unicorns drag the rivers into place while the singing pixies make them all shiny and stuff.
I was just about to say that possibly the terrain you have in Iceland, with massive run-off from ice sheets over relatively flat areas, results in forking rivers.Likewise I'm personally very familiar with terrain that is probably ridiculously mountainous to someone from, say, the eastern two thirds of the USA and don't think much of sticking buildings on 45° slopes
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Anyway - the way rivers behave on Earth doesn't matter at all, as long as you have a *reason* for it (it's a fictional world after all) ... although it's good to have a better reason than "MAGICK" (little stars and unicorns fly around singing).
What do you mean? I thought it was perfectly reasonable to assume unicorns drag the rivers into place while the singing pixies make them all shiny and stuff.
Heretick! Everyone knows that Unicorns are vile beasts that decimate fish populations, while singing pixies are the bane of glassware the world over! It's the nixies that make the water gush like the milky effluent of Hapi the Hippo Goddess, while the Neucrottas of Chull Nazhib are those who sing and make the rivers shiny and spumey!
Dwarves
I thought the Neucrottas were a band of folk singers. Meh, shows you what I know.
Anyway, since I am having so much fun making the map, I thought I might share with you my vision of the dwarves and elves who live there. This is not a complete creation of Dwarven society and the Elves will come later if there is interest.
So, what do you think?Dwarves in this setting are not like the Dwarves seen in D&D or many other games. They are the creatures of earth, stone and clay. As master craftsmen, I don't think it is too farfetched that Dwarves are able to create life out of stone.
There is no definition made between male and female Dwarves. In fact, the Dwarves have only one gender: Dwarf. They create offsprings by molding them in clay and stone, and then giving them life. A Dwarf is "born" fully grown and conscious, and able to go straight to work.
Dwarves are miners and they are constantly working. Only rare few Dwarves do anything other than mine and they usually become scholars and politicians. The importance of the mines makes the miner caste more important than others, however, and only kings receive more respect than they do.
Dwarves commonly have grey skin, but their beards can have any earthly color. Dwarves are divided into clans based on the color of their beards, and the longer beards get more respect. No Dwarf is allowed to have a longer beard than the ruling king but only criminals are clean shaven. A Dwarf without a beard has no rights in the community at all.
Dwarves believe that they are immortal and absolutely cannot die. Upon "death" they simply fall asleep and turn to stone. It is called the sleep eternal (or the eternal sleep, depends on the Dwarf). The sleeping Dwarves are believed to be able to speak telepathicly, giving rise to ancestral worship.
In the center of their religion, Dwarves believe there was the First Maker, aka the Master Craftsman or the Great Maker. At the beginning of time, he created himself and the World. He was the first Dwarf and made many like him. The one they believe to be the First Maker sleeps eternally in a large cave deep in the earth, a location that is a mecca for Dwarves everywhere.
As for society, Dwarves live in a caste system that is divided into clans. Oathbreakers are at the bottom, with criminals just above. Scholars (includes what we might consider politicians), runecasters and other workers (brewers included) are next. Miners and craftsmen are only second to the king himself.
Dwarves eat mushrooms and anything else that grows underground (which is to say, not much), but they can go on for days without eating anything at all. Some develop a taste for raw meat and occasional hunting parties to the surface have become myths and legends of the human race.
Dwarves rarely travel to the surface and when they do they only travel during the night. Dwarves see perfectly in complete or partial darkness, although they see everything in black and white, and shades of grey. Bright light can blind a Dwarf, and daylight has left a Dwarf blind for days. Even faint light is enough to make a Dwarf complain. They are also accustomed to living in the cold Earth, although some do work or live near some source of heat, such as magma. Dwarves make little or no use of fire, except to forge metal.
Distributaries do occur, but they are short lived and don't go very far before either rejoining the main stream, or flowing into some larger body of water. They tend to occur where there is a lot of sediment being deposited which causes flooding and shifting of the channel. Mostly, this occurs in floodplains, particularly deltas, but it can also occur on a slope in a structure called an alluvial fan. Sometimes a river with a LOT of sediment in it starts rapidly branching and merging over an extended course, these are called "braided rivers".Originally Posted by Skari-dono
Some Icelandic rivers certainly have a lot of braiding, but they don't show repeated branching over the entire length of the river, with no merging, to spread over a wide area.
True, but that is not to say it is not possible. If a hillside is shaped like an arrow, a stream of river hitting its tip might split up and not join again. A frozen area might split up rivers and then melt away after the water has formed rivers in the soil underneath. Although it is unlikely that a river gets split up on more that one occasion and not rejoin later on, certainly in a world of fantasy, light or dark, it is still within the scope of possibilities.
But, if I really wanted to do the impossible or unlikely, I'd have a landmass made entirely of ice in a floaty sea of fire. If my rivers are really that impossible, I'll either remake them (again) or propose an alternative, in-world historical event that might explain them. If they are fine as they are, I will begin re-labelling the map.
There's also stream capture—basically what happens when one stream (which has a steeper path towards the sea) cuts back far enough to meet another stream and begins siphoning off its water flow. These kinds of distributaries (the most notable is the Casiquiare, which is in the process of capturing the upper Orinoco and diverting it into the Amazon basin) last only a very short amount of time, geologically speaking. Like... a few thousand years.
Right, without too much changes to the layout, I decided to give coloring a go. And I mean a proper coloring, not just some attempt at making an old-looking paper background. I used some material found here and some tutorials. I should give credit but I honestly don't remember where I got all this stuff, so I'm going to go on a hunt and add them in when I've found out. If I do this properly, nothing will go uncredited.
As for labelling, I did that in Adobe Illustrator. I can still "fix" them if needed and I do intend to finish labelling the map properly.
Actually, Unicorns are the fantasy equivalent of Bears, goddless soulless killing machines.
"..the next Riddick movie? It's a wild ride, I hear they're calling it Alice in Underverse."
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