♦♦♦ Fred Vanterra joins the Guild ♦♦♦

[Fred Vanterra]

Greetings, my brothers!


I'm Fred Vanterra, a musician from Germany, and creator of the fantasy world "Mythanien".

My Instagram buddy @danielsmaps recommended me this Forum, since I am totally fascinated by the art of cartography, passionate about maps of all kind and eager to learn how to create them on my own.

Both my fantasy world and my music album (which is designed to be the soundtrack of Mythanien) are somehow unfinished or work in progress, but if you like you can check them out and provide some feedback.

I am so excited to join this community and to get to know so many people who share the same passion.

Looking forward to have a great time in this Forum!

Best to you all,
Fred~

[DanielHasenbos]

Hey Fred, good to have you here. You should have a look around the tutorials subforum, there's a great deal to learn around there. I look forward to seeing your first map post!

-Dan

[Fred Vanterra]

Hey Fred, good to have you here. You should have a look around the tutorials subforum, there's a great deal to learn around there. I look forward to seeing your first map post!

-Dan

Will do! Thanks a lot for the advice, Dan and thanks again for showing me this great forum!

Best,
Fred~

[Diamond]

Welcome to the Guild, Fred. I like your music - very upbeat and relaxing.

[Fred Vanterra]

Welcome to the Guild, Fred. I like your music - very upbeat and relaxing.

Thanks a lot for the warm welcome! I'm glad that you like my music! I'll keep you posted about my progress; whenever there will be a new song, I'll let you know!

[Josiah VE]

Welcome to the Guild!

[Fred Vanterra]

Welcome to the Guild!

Thanks a lot for the welcome, Josiah! As I see, you're also quite new here, right? But you've posted... more than 1000 posts within 5 months? Holy moly!

[jbgibson]

Wow, Fred - in what way is that album unfinished? It's awesome that your world has a soundtrack - and then the music itself is delightful, to my tastes. If I'm working at my IT job or if I'm drawing maps, I need instrumental music -- stuff with vocals draws my attention too much. So those tracks are likely to underlie some of my work as well as yours - nicely done, sir.

Map feedback - that's a serviceable map, I'm just not inclined to believe some of the river behavior. If anything flows like it does for an intentionally odd reason, say, "because, magic" or the like, fine. But take the Tahara - flowing the length of a skinny peninsula isn't a long-term course a river would take. Pick a number - say the peninsula is 400 km long. In its lower reaches a big river might easily drop one or more hundreds of meters over 400km. Yet the topography just north of the M in the label "Solsteime" has no more than what five or ten km between river and bay? if the river is maybe 400 m above sea level there, to keep it from having found its way to the sea the shortest way likely, means there must be heights well over 400m in that short 10 km stretch, and you haven't indicated the peninsula is an outright trough, with pronounced ridges all along the N and S edges. So - could happen, just not terribly likely.

With the low contrast between woods, river, and labels, I can't tell for sure what you have the Efa doing, but if you intend it to start in the southern Kristalkamm mountains, flow north, split, and flow two separate ways to the sea via both Castelle and Amri, I'm not buying that as normal water :-). Water pretty much picks the single lowest way downwards at any point in its path. Forks tend to be brief, making an outright island, or in pancake-flat terrain, can meander and thread their way along as a delta or marsh. But two widely divergent long routes would be highly unlikely. In the same way if it is only twenty or *maybe* as much as fifty km from Saruegg-Tugo to the sea, I could believe the various river courses as a delta, but if that's a hundred or more km from the northern ocean, that much splitting is implausible. Not totally impossible - you could probably craft a rationale, say involving former canals, and flooding, and temporary situations... and if that's central to some story, fine. But a good precept for fantasy worldbuilding would be to minimize the number of things the viewer has to suspend disbelief to accept. Supporting terrain, or culture, or language, or what-have-you works best if plausibly 'normal'.

Real-world example - The Atchafalaya is a 220 km 'alternate route' for the lower Mississippi to reach the Gulf of Mexico. What with floods and river-wandering, the Mississippi REALLY wants to turn west and 'choose' to go down the Atchafalaya channel... which would turn the water next to New Orleans into mere Gulf backwaters with negligible flow. Tourism and disposal of nasty substances from industry *demand* New Orleans keep the Mississippi, so heroic measures with dams and levees are employed to force flow to the present course. One reeeeeally big flood, and a hundred years of Corps of Engineers work will be flushed out to sea, and all that lovely barge traffic to points abroad may not even be able to go through New Orleans.

If what I'm saying doesn't make sense Redrobes has a wonderful thread in the tutorial/how-to forum titled How to get your rivers in the right place that is full of rules of thumb and sensible-looking hydrology.

But no matter what, that's a nice starter map, and it (and the music and the worldbuilding and, and...) deserve some reputation.

[Fred Vanterra]

Wow, Fred - in what way is that album unfinished? It's awesome that your world has a soundtrack - and then the music itself is delightful, to my tastes. If I'm working at my IT job or if I'm drawing maps, I need instrumental music -- stuff with vocals draws my attention too much. So those tracks are likely to underlie some of my work as well as yours - nicely done, sir.

Thank you so, so much for your positive feedback. I am really pleasantly surprised that my music is getting such a positive feedback here. Other people hearing my music - that has always been a dream of mine. I hope you still enjoy it! Thanks a lot!

Map feedback - that's a serviceable map, I'm just not inclined to believe some of the river behavior.

I have to thank you again or even more for your detailed and elaborated feedback. I would have never thought that someone takes such a close look at my map examining every river course. Wow. Thank you so much! Alright... let's discuss the rivers of Mythanien!

Tahara - Well... that makes total sense... Okay, I'm telling you what I had in mind and you tell me if that's possible, okay? I was thinking of the "Solsteine" surrounding the Tahara, keeping the river in shape, not allowing it to escape left or right until it finally makes its way down the cliff at Casoley. The whole peninsula was meant to be at least 100 m above sea level, I always had this picture of a great waterfall at the very west end of Mythanien in my mind...

Efa - Yeah, you got me. The low contrast couldn't conceal this unrealistic river course. So, it would be more realistic if I just create another river coming from the Western Mountains, flowing through Castelle and Maryat? In that case, I could do without the splitting and let the Efa just flow through Amri.

Saruegg-Tugo River - Same thing. If I just increase the amount of rivers, I could minimize the amount of crazy splittings, right? That's fine, as long as I can keep the wetlands around Pholdezi, this region is quite central to the story.

Thanks again for your post. Looking forward to hear from you again soon!