[WIP] World of Shantar

[xtianstone]

I first want to say that I am very impressed by the work on this site and all the hours building great maps. I hope to join the ranks, and I am going to upgrade an old world map made with pen and shaded with crayons to a completely new style... who knows I may even display it on my wall when I am done

I broke the task down into a number of smaller ones (this will take a while as I am sure you all know). The first step is to find my style. Here is a small sample with a style of mountain, forest, etc. on the old map.

I have decided to use the Ascension tutorial for creating world maps to properly rough up and change the coastline of my great continents. In the sample, you can see some very round land shapes. I hope to change that using the ascension tutorial.

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After this, I will work on my main mountain ranges and water. I would love feedback! Honestly, the only thing I am attached to now are keeping the general shape of landmasses the same, and I am starting to like the forest colors

Thanks in advance!

[Deadshade]

The river police caught you redhanded and guilty of splitting rivers.
The NE mountain range looks OK.
The southwestern is not realistic - you have a kind of cross with one range running E-W while another runs N-S. This would not happen on a world where ranges are created by tectonics.
Given the river, I would say that the mountain range should run from the SW coast edge towards NE along the river and there would be no mountains E and SE of it.
This gives to the whole mountain system a nice natural vast arc running NE then E then SE - the large southern peninsula and the islands are then on a continental plate that pushes north and created the ranges.

[xtianstone]

I appreciate the comments Deadshade! I am making the islands, etc. now. For the mountain range, the whole range enters the image from the south-east and heads generally Northwest. I am toying around the bottom range to make it more realistic. I like your vision, but the whole plate is supposed to be push NE and not N. I will toy with it and see what you think about the reboot!

Here is the effect of clouds merged with my current world map. I put a "Hard Mix 50% Gray Fill" layer on top and I can see the boundaries perfectly. Now I am going to paint black and white with a 10% fill with a soft brush to form the coastlines. This seems to pull out a bit of randomness and makes it look more realistic, but it is slow! Nice that I can make or fade islands away naturally with this too!

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[xtianstone]

Here is the plate movement of my world. More plates than in our world. Mainly because of magic and the powerful expression of divinities in the early stage. The world is fractured. Two of the plates were created because of struggle between opposing powers. The inner sea is the damage done by a specific divinity in the struggle before they fell. One piece of land in the great inner sea is said to be the head. Another an arm.

I am including this because of some of the feedback I am receiving. I want to be consistent and believable, particularly when bending the rules due to magic. Thoughts?

tectonics.jpg

[Azélor]

I see a problem. The first thing you would need to provide in order to achieve something believable is a consistent full world map projection. I don't know if it is possible to have the tectonic plates right with just one part of the world since they are all related. I think it's important to get the projection right even without taking the plates in consideration. If this is covering the whole world, you could simply add black on the sides until you get a ration of 2 for 1.
It becomes an equirectangular map.

[xtianstone]

Great post Azelor.

From my notes, the planets tilt is not identical to earths. The sun is actually a binary star. The full planetary period is approximately 8 years, and the binary stars period is 1/8th of that. This means that the seasons are dictated more by the position of the two suns. When the hotter star is eclipsed by the dimmer star, winters occur. When the hotter star is fully exposed or eclipsing, the hotter summer seasons occur. So there are 32 seasons (approximately) in a solar year.

This continent is approximately the width of Russia and extends from just south of the equator to the arctic line in the north. Because of the tilt, the polar caps are a little bit larger and several of the seasons are a tiny bit more extreme.

There are two other continents. One covers the southern polar section and is an icy waste. The other is also equatorial, but is very distant, much smaller, and fairly inhospitable to life as well. I was not going to put it on the world map because knowledge of how to travel to it outside of magic have been lost.

Are you suggesting that latitude and longitude lines should be necessary to represent the world with some level of believability? I am definitely open to suggestions! I really wanted to lay out the tectonic boundaries so I could reason where mountain ranges would appear, their intensity (height of peaks as well as volcanic activity) and which direction they would run.

My focus was to capture the "known world". The other continents are considered alternate planes of existence that are tangental to this plane. As far as the cartographers would be concerned, the far N is quite inhospitable and is icy death, and the other three directions are at best unexplored in oral history.

I am concerned that these details get in the way of my mapping project, but if it does offer any insight in a new map for me, I will just do a reboot like in Star Trek

[Deadshade]

Well when one has belieavability at planetary scale as target then it is always necessary to have a whole map e.g a 2:1 cylindrical projection.
Even when one finally wants to show only a part of the globe, one can simply let everything that will not be shown blank but Inside the 2:1 cadre.

One of the reasons is tectonics.
But I think that a much more important reason is the climate and biomes. The lattitudes allow to know where is what climate (e.g temperatues and precipitation) and from there the biomes (colors and texturing) follow.

A comment about your binary stars. It is a place which is not very favorable for life. The main reason is that a 3 (and more) body system is chaotic and unstable in the general case. Only a very small part of possible planetary orbits is stable and all are extremely sensible to perturbations.
For instance the best planetary orbits are those where the 2 stars have equal mass and the planet has an exterior orbit (e.g orbits around the star couple and is very far).
When the star masses are different (what your remark about luminosity suggests), the orbit of the stars around each other is no more simple and the planet starts to follow crazy orbits (like rounded triangles etc). If it is rather near to the couple of stars then the orbit becomes unstable and the planet escapes to the void thus ending all life on it (if there was any to begin with).

So in summary.
If you make your stars identical and far of the planet (e.g the distance between stars is negligible compared to the distance star-planet), then you will have a reasonably stable exterior orbit with 4 seasons like on Earth. But because the planet has to be far to have a regular and stable orbit, it gets little energy and all 4 seasons would rather look like a more or less mild winter

[xtianstone]

First, I really appreciate everything that has been said. One of the reasons I wanted to start a thread here for my map is to not only improve it in a whole number of ways beyond just visually, but also to learn more about fantasy cartography.

I do have the latitudes marked on the map. It is just not displayed here. I was going to tackle that as a next step once I am happy with the plates and the layout of the mountain ranges. I was then going to worry about coloration. I am sure to get some good criticism on my biomes, since I have rivers going all over the place that make no sense in my adult mind. The rivers fed forests. I needed a forest, so I put in rivers Now I am taking a more "natural" approach. Put in plates, decide the effect of divinities and magic and draw hard rules as to how it may or may not effect the world, and then let rivers and streams flow from the mountains. I already see plateaus moving, rivers and streams shifting all over the place, and marshes drying up... great!

So here is my question. For purposes of feedback and development, does everyone need a full world map? Would latitude demarkations suffice with plate tectonics? I marked with arrows the direction of movement from off map plates.

I actually have two solar bodies of similar mass but different sizes. One is larger and cooler. I checked into the habitable zone of planets around binary stars, and my model works with one major exception. The solar period would be an order of earth days and not a earth year. The planet is fine taking 8 earth years orbiting larger stars, but a longer solar period requires a greater distance. I was keen on having the seasons dictated more by the two stars rather than planetary tilt, but I am trying to reconcile the physics of it all. What may seem to work is a distance of about 3 AU. The planet would be around 4 AU. This brings the solar radius to 1.5 AU and that fits the habitable zone model quite well. If one star is larger the whole system still works. You would have a solar period of about an earth year, and things would be pretty workable.

However, since I want whatever solar and planetary model I end up with to produce an earth-like habitable planet, let us assume that first. I will make any final determinations on solar events reconcile against that fact.

And, ha! I never thought I would be discussing astrophysics in my fantasy world My storylines are compelling enough for the players such things never occur to them... yet.

[Deadshade]

I actually have two solar bodies of similar mass but different sizes. One is larger and cooler.

Well as I said you can't. For main sequence you have L= k.M^3.5 with k some constant. So same mass => same luminosity => (approximately) same temperature. Unless you evoke magics of course. I imagine that a player who listens to the story might ask that question because it seems to me that it is pretty easy to find out that there is an obvious problem.

However, since I want whatever solar and planetary model I end up with to produce an earth-like habitable planet, let us assume that first. I will make any final determinations on solar events reconcile against that fact.

.

My point was that this doesn't work. Sorry I am too lazy to check external stable orbits for an isomass binary star system but I think they would be much farther than what you assume. If you get too near to the binaries, your planet flies away into death at the first perturbation.
Of course here you may evoke magics easily by having a compassionate god nudge the planet back to orbit everytime it tries to fly away and almost nobody would notice that particular problem anyway

[xtianstone]

The interesting thing is that they are finding planets in the habitable zone of binary star systems with a distance of 3-4 AU. Pretty cool eh? It seems that is a very common distance for planets and also where the projected habitable zone is. Also, if you want to use the same physics of our universe, a white dwarf and black dwarf are all in the same mass range as our sun but each has a significantly lower luminosity. So mass is not equal to luminosity unless you are considering the stars to be of similar age. Is this wrong?

I would also like to get back to the map itself Again, world will have seasons but possibly with more or less variation at the equator and poles.