Mesa Caves?

[soggymuse]

I managed to get a bit of work done on this today, but I'm kind of having second thoughts now that I'm translating the story setting into map form.



You can see here that I've added a length of the river where it reverts back to surface water rather than staying underground. I kind of feel like that whole valley should be water, though, and that the mesas and buttes were cut by water erosion - but then why would the river continue above ground if it also went underground? It's possible the large river was there once, but diverted underground after cutting out the valley and buttes, but I don't know.

The biggest problem is the mudpits, though. This whole region covers a much more vast area of land than I'd originally thought. I had to turn the Burrows into just one small mesa out of dozens just to fix the scale according to novel purposes, and it seems the mudlands are no exception. I've filled in a muted blue to indicate the area the mudpots cover, as well as another attempt to actually draw the pots themselves and the routes through. I'm just not sure a geological feature like this could cover the breadth of the continent (roughly 950 miles).

In which case, I need to figure something else out as a barrier. Maybe the mudpots are only on the western edge closest to the Burrows. I could stretch the marshland further west from Yihlelih's Sea and it would still be fairly impassible, just a smaller area to worry about gas and such.

What do you guys think?