Regional map for new D&D campaign

[thegnome]

I think I'm following your logic, but I don't get your notes in the second image... I'm assuming the 'erase these' notes are referring to the mountainous regions? in order to create a floodplain? Then in image #3, it looks like you just went snaking around the mountains/hills. Are the blue rivers the only ones you feel should exist? and if so, why? I actually care a lot more about the theory and thoughts behind the actions than the actions themselves. The notes in images #1 & #4 make a lot of sense, and are perfectly understandable, it's just the middle two that I'm having a bit of a hangup with.

[Ascension]

The second pic shows the way things would go as is. The river snakes around and heads north but there is this huge bay sitting so close...it looks like a perfect place for a river to empty out in. The third map shows how I think things should go. It's purely my own opinion, though, so do what you will with that. Now that I look at this thing as a thumbnail, it looks a lot like Europe and my idea of the scale could be way off so you could have rivers doing anything if this, in fact, is meant to be Europe-like.

[thegnome]

Yeah, modeled very much after europe, though I'm considering zooming out a bit and changing landforms to muddy the waters a bit... as I'd like to add a fantasy aztec civilization and have it's location make sense. I'm thinking I may start over, because the resemblance to actual europe is far too noticeable... I think I need to just simplify things a bit and decide which civilizations I would like to include and just draw landforms to match.

I'm still at a stage where I'm drawing maps and fleshing out the "fluff" for my campaign, so nothing is set in stone.

[waldronate]

Whenever I look at the rivers in Europe I can't help but think that the designer could have used a little help with some of the rivers. Some are far too long and look to be going in the wrong direction, a couple start out by a coast and flow away from the ocean, some of them get really close without joining, and so on.
Europe-Rivers-1.gif

[Fransie]

European rivers make more sense if you added a height map to your map. And the closest these get to each other is about 50 kilometers, so there is plenty of room for a mountainrange between them. Some of them do tend to stray from their proper path, when there's insane amounts of rain. Very impractical.