[WIP] The Northern Continent

[JonathanCR]

I think that for lakes A, B, and C, all the options you suggest look absolutely fine. With the big middle lake, the outlet 6 looks fine too, and I don't see why there shouldn't be that smaller lake on the way. If you want to keep river 17, why not just extend it so it flows into the big middle lake?

The question of how many rivers to show is really just aesthetic. If this were a real landscape, it would have rivers of all sizes, right down to tiny little streams that you couldn't possibly show on a map of this scale. Someone making a map of a real landscape has to decide how big a river has to be before they show it. So if you think the map looks too empty, you can add little tributaries for the rivers. If it looks too cluttered, take some of them out on the understanding that they still exist but aren't shown because they're too small.

[Jean-Abdel]

So first of all, you will (almost) always have only one outlet per lake. You should connect A, B and C together (I'm not sure that 3-1 is the best way to connect B and C, the shortest path is probably better), but I would make the final outlet to the sea going from A, so remove 3-B and 3-C. The lake 6 is ok, you can have lakes anywhere you want, and you can also keep river 8 if you want. For 17, remove some of the tributaries and make the hole basin a tributary to the big middle lake. The small lake in the mountains south of the Subtle woods could be a spring for that basin. I think you should also have river basin with spring in the mountains east of the swamp flowing to the north through the woods, maybe the small lake I talked about earlier could be a spring for this basin (but only one basin at a time. Rivers ARE predictable, because their path is always decided by topography, something unpredictable is something wrong (if by predictable you meant not fancy enough, they can meander as much as you want in flat terrains).