Island in gimp - attempt to turn hand drawn into atlas-ish style map

[jbgibson]

Yes, sometimes an idea seems to jump into place fully formed in detail. If the details are altered it seems somehow wrong, even if the edits were to 'improve' the initial setup. But more often my dreams vanish and my awake imagination has to do all the work. I find landforms a HUGE help to imagining societies and events and characters and stories - even if random at start.

Rivers. Well, yes - you have simultaneous greatness and weakness going on. THe great thing is you have the knack for hand-scribbling into place river courses with believable varying degrees of roughness. Some people can hand-wiggle lines, but all the curves are about the same diameter. Yours include big and little, and include random-ish diversions that if one knew the topography would make sense. And therein lies the weakness: some of the implied topography doesn't make sense. When drafting our imagined worlds, it is usually best to keep all the mundane characteristics earthlike - the laws of physics, the way biology works, human nature -- unless and until you have a *reason* for a difference and then it becomes an important defining distinction. I'm sure you've read fiction where the author tried to make *everything* unlike earth.... tiring, wasn't it? Well, water should run downhill. Some of the rules of thumb that generates are that a lake can have many inlets but only one outlet. If there were two outlets, even temporarily, one would be just a *little* lower and would 'capture' all the outflow. the extra flow would deepen its channel, and it would wind up substantially lower. Sure, in flood season, an overflowing lake might for a day or a week go back to leaking in more than one place. But the odds of there being multiple exactly lowest places in a lake's coast are tiny, and pretty much zero, long term.

You have some lakes and rivers doing the unlikely multiple outflow thing in your middle western coast.

Another way of thinking of this is that from any one point on the land, there's most likely only ONE "most downward" direction. Water will flow that way. If there seem to be two ways 'down', one will be 'most down', and water will go that way. If two ways 'down' differ by but an inch in drop, and the water depth is a foot, the difference will be overwhelmed, true. But at a low enough flow, one will be the wet channel and the other will be dry.

Seeming exceptions to this usually involve same-level water - like the threaded channels of a delta, or a river that parts around an island. Think of most such islands as almost like a bit of lake with a big island in its middle, leaving only narrow channels around its sides. THat's only approximately true, but it is true that most all such situations have the water on either side of the island rejoining soon, not many many miles downstream, nor all the way at a coast - which is rejoining since all the water along a given coast is the same level. If you want some unique stuff, great - make it a necessary feature of the setting. Shoot, Earth even generates weird stuff like rivers that run backwards (google Tonlé Sap). But the more unnatural things your setting contains, the more attention your reader/ player/ viewer devotes to them, and less to the plot/ narrative/ whatever you want the focus to be. Attention is a limited resource. Renewable, yes (like, introduce strange aspects in turn, not all at once - the viewer who's gotten used to a red sky in one chapter can go on and accept mountains that float in the next, and eventually politics that make sense. Well maybe the latter is too fantastic...). But at any one time limited.

If this makes sense, fine. If not, take a look at a Most Very Useful tutorial in the tutorial section titled How to Get Your Rivers in the Right Place.

Another weakness that also has to do with water flowing downhill is the reality that headwaters are higher altitude than mid-course, which is higher than river mouths. What you draw for watercourses implies a huge amount about your topography. For instance higher ground separates two near water bodies, be they lake, river, or sea. A river course that arises near one coast and meanders to a distant coast of the same sea COULD happen, but the same amount of 'down' has to happen in the direction the water didn't flow, and a whole lot quicker. Some landmasses are like that - tilted plateaus for instance with cliffs a the high side. More often you'd expect high land to be somewhere in the middle - unless you INTEND coastal ranges that divert most flow away from a near coast.

Take that West to East river emptying into the great southern bay. See how close it starts to the southern coast? If you intend sharpish mountains there, fine. Otherwise, not so believable. And when your viewers are reasonably knowledgeable about hydrology - even instinctively or subconsciously - such an arrangement will slightly irk them. Same thing for the southernmost river on that southern island - if it got that close to the southern coast, why does it not 'fall off' into the southern sea, and instead wander off to the west? The North-South river in the middle of that island: its believability depends partly on the scale. A thin peninsula exists because it is a general ridge sticking up out of the water. Higher in the middle. If that's three miles across, or maybe even twenty, it looks like a river running down a ridgetop ( *unless* you intend and indicate a pair of coastal rises enclosing a trough in the middle). If that's fifty or five hundred miles across, I'll buy it.

Can you see the topography that your watercourses imply? If you can visualize in three dimensions, and see the rises and falls, that'll help you continue. If you can't - well, rules of thumb and generalizations will suffice :-).

Don't be dismayed that some rivers currently 'break rules'. You can remedy most by breaking *them* in a few places. Then you'll have pairs of rivers flowing opposite directions, in a somewhat likely configuration.

[Ferra Dubrinsky]

Thank you for the feed back on the rivers. those dual rivers in the west, i completely forgot about them the other night. i was so frustrated with how the rivers were turning out and how long it took, i guess i blocked it out. thank you for the catch.
the map below should help explain some of the geography a little better.






brief description:
on the west side, there is a folded mountain region that runs from north to south of the land mass. these are similar to the Andes, Himalayas, or rocky mountains andthey are high enough to block most rainfall to the intward part of the land mass.

the light and dark green represent grassland/forest areas (possibly small farming areas) respectively

the light tan sand color is desert. doestn't mean its a sahara sandy desert, it's just not a place that many trees and many flowering plants can survive. there is flora and fauna, just not of the forest veriety.

the orange is a different set of mountains. not nearly as high as the light and dark grey folded mountains, these are the type you'd see in new mexico etc.

the ground slopes from west to east, most everything east of the grand mountains wants to run to the east.

[Ferra Dubrinsky]

i give up trying to get that post to look right lol

anyway, from a side view here is what the immediate land mass looks like... in a very simplified way
before bigger and heavier land mass hit it and after

[Ferra Dubrinsky]

i know it's hard to assume when looking at a black and white picture as to what the other person is seeing. i should have included a color one that has the basic geography, that way it's easier to tell if i got it backwards. thank you for the feedback, i've actually printed out a copy of what you said for future reference