Kingdom of Kalthaross

[Vorhees]

This is a Map i just finished for my DnD Group , Done in MS Paint and Excell. Had am issue with river placement so will read up what you guys wrote before i add more.

[Steel General]

MS Paint & Excel??? Wow are you a glutton for punishment!

It looks quite nice.

[Vorhees]

there programs i know, i have tried Gimp but could not get Mountains at all, Excell lets me Layer and store Pics and Resize were paint wont and The Fonts work better.

[jbgibson]

Goes to show it isn't the tools that make the map, but the cartographer. That's a perfectly serviceable map , Voorhes, and pleasant in layout and execution. Well done!

As far as plausible river placement <shrug> ... water flows downhill. Think of your mountains and hills not as the individual lumps and clumps as depicted, but as high and medium-high land, and take an example raindrop on a wander from some summer thunderstorm to the sea. Add a trillion sibling drops, and it's a big river. If said droplets run into another wander-too-the-sea route, you've created a tributary. For a map this scale it would be fine to just show a couple of major rivers, just figure your players have a hundred not-shown streams, creeks, and ponds to deal with as well.

[Vorhees]

wasn't really the River that Concerned it was a Lake, mostly if there can be a run off into smaller Rivers and if it Would run to the Coast Once or as many times as there are off shoots, im sure it would actually depend on the height of the surrounding Terrain.

For a map this scale it would be fine to just show a couple of major rivers, just figure your players have a hundred not-shown streams, creeks, and ponds to deal with as well.

This is a very good point the whole idea of this map was to look some what like an 80's dnd Source book map and to A/ be easy to add to as the players discover and B/ easy to Print

[jbgibson]

Ah, well for a lake, you may have many inputs, but there's only going to be one output. Do a thought experiment - your lake is a bowl with a ragged rim. If it fills up to the lowest point (there'll ALWAYS be a lowest point, even if only by a few inches or feet), that's where it starts to overflow - where the outgoing river forms. Any other low-ISH points on the rim will forever be dry, since the bowl continually drains down to the level of the lowest rim point.

Works the same for anywhere it looks like a river might choose either of two almost equally-likely paths... one will be ever so slightly lower, and all the water will go that way. Only real exceptions are where you've reached Dang Near Flat terrain like a river delta - then it's reasonable for water to go both (or many) ways. But deltas are pretty small in relation to the whole drainage basin. And plenty of rivers meet the sea or a lake with no delta. So you may get modest little splits-and-rejoins along a river's course, but they won't be even a few miles long, usually. Such splits really are just big islands.

[Vorhees]

thank you very much indeed there mate