New mapmaker with a conundrum...

[Preypacer]

Well, there are a lot of ways to approach this but this is what I do. I make my world as geologically accurate as possible as if mother earth made it herself...but within reason. I'm not a fanatic zealot about getting my continental plate boundaries and climate patterns all that accurate..."good enough" is good enough. Then I go back and fit in whatever elements need to be in certain places...like a swamp here, some mountains there, etc. If this doesn't fit with the underlying terrain then I have to alter the underlying terrain a bit to sort of "blend" things together...like a desert right in the middle of the continent isn't all that natural unless mountains and climate permit it. If those elements aren't present I either add them or tweak what's there to make it work, like having no lakes or rivers.

That makes a lot of sense, actually.

Something that might have helped in my initial post that I forgot to mention is that the world was "magically" created (not literally by magic.. but for example's sake, it may as well have been), so actually some areas that wouldn't naturally border each other might be found as neighbors... this is where the rifts come in between them resulting in a bit of chaos in cases where opposing elements collide, which also play into the lore. However, as for the rest of the map, it would have evolved/eroded/etc in as normal a way as possible given the circumstances... water from mountains would have created rivers running to larger bodies of water, etc. etc.

Basically the world was created with everything in place, and then the elements were allowed to do their thing over time.... within the restraints that those specific areas remain intact.

So that's where the "natural but not entirely" comes into play.

Anyways.. thanks for the response! You're pretty much on with explaining what I have in mind. And, incidentally, the style I'd like to go for with my map is something of a combo of your Aalder and Lessonde maps.. that sort of realistic style, but with stylized icons.