My incomplete poorly thought out thoughts on rivers was this: start them near the mountains and have them move towards a body of water or the ocean. I wanted the middle of the island/continent to be the highest elevation but not in a volcanic or 'mountain range topped by one mountain at the center of this island' kind of thing. The original outline of the continent was created by the guy running my D&D game and I wanted to go digital with it, so keeping to his original creation I tried to topographically justify what he'd already made. The two major lakes were already created by him and somehow pivotal in what we are doing so I have to keep them. I figured thier creation would be dependant on either a glacier withdrawing in the days of old and leaving behind a deep lake bed with streams/rivers back to the mountains, or a trickle down of water starting at a mountain. Those ranges were set to sort of break up the zones he'd pre-created. So...the challenge at hand is keeping elements that are not topo/geographically sound but must be kept for story sake and still visually justifying everything in the form of a map. That being said, the logic used to create the rivers I feel (very ignorant of other princepals that may improve my logic, mind you) was that the island was high in the middle, the amazonian region was a low lying drainage basin that centered around the expulsion of waters into the ocean by use of a large lake, I was going for something between the basin around the lakes in the Congo and I wanted to illustrate the type of terrain by using a lot of rivers. I think more small 'pools of water' around the area are needed to illustrate the excess of water/swamp. As far as the southerly lake/rivers,what would be the guideline to determine the flow of water to create a river? It's south of a mountain range and the land, in theory, goes from mountainous to plateau and dips into the coast. tldr; what are the rules/algorithms/guidelines for determining (manually) generation of believable rivers?
Yeah that lake is pretty starkly round. The coastline was generated using the cloud render as a layer and playing with it that way. I agree that if feels very 'streamlined' as a coast line and I think that comes from me being sort of scared to shy away from the tutorial videos too much. There is another huge group of islands/continents that I have to illustrate for my DM and I think I'm going to play with it a lot more to create a greater sense of jaggedness and randomly dispersed land. I think this map feels to fluid and too contrived to be believable.