Pax Orbis: Super ugly, but I'd love feedback!

[Morgan_R]

pax_orbis_01.jpg

So, this is obviously sloppily drawn with a mouse, but I didn't want to spend any time making it pretty until I was sure I was getting it right. So... sanity check? Rivers flow downhill, etc.? Anything that looks weird, geographically speaking? I'm not 100% sure on scale yet, but it's smaller than one of our continents.... maybe the size of western Europe.

[Sapiento]

Looks ok. I can't find anything wrong. Obviously strong west winds.

[Morgan_R]

Thanks! And yeah, I did set it up with a prevailing west wind in mind, but now I'm wondering if I'm overdoing it... hm.

[Veldehar]

Being in an area of west to east winds the rain shadows are good, but also recall that your east coast is going to be a warm water coast (assuming earth-like here) which likely will green up that coast.

[jwbjerk]

It depends on latitude (which you haven't indicated), but i wouldn't necessarily expect that Eastern part to be pure desert, unless perhaps the mountains were extremely tall. With all that surrounding ocean, i'd expect some precipitation.

Also, if i'm reading it right, you have thin bands of forests up against the west edges of all mountains. Unless people chopped down everything else, i'd expect to see more forests.

[Morgan_R]

Thanks for the feedback!

Veldehar, why would the east coast specifically be warm water? It's actually not Earth-like, but it's an artificial environment set up to emulate an Earth-like one. The premise is that this is a chunk of a world encapsulated in a small magical/physical 'bubble,' with gravity being an artificially imposed force rather than the result of mass. So the world is 'flat,' or at least only slightly domed, relative to the dome of the 'sky.'

I may have to invoke 'a wizard did it' for the wind as well, since I can't think of any natural reason for it. The sun is an orbiting body at a slight angle relative to the land, which I think should give me some climate variation from 'south' to 'north.'

jwbjerk, I'm sure you're right about that desert, I was just trying to avoid introducing yet-another habitable zone to complicate my political worldbuilding. But I think I'll plant some grasslands and nomadic people there at the edges. With regards to the forests, that's the old growth, in what I'm assuming would be land too hilly to farm... I think people have cleared out everything else, although now that you point it out, I think it makes sense for them to have done some replanting as well.

[Morgan_R]

Following arsheesh's Eriond tutorial:

pax_orbis_02.jpg

Now to figure out how to add things like cities without it getting ugly...

[Veldehar]

Flat world would change everything, naturally! but basically speaking, warm waters at the equator head toward the poles, while cold waters heads toward the equator and the spin of the world makes that clockwise in the north hem and counter in the south hem. The resulting affect is that currents on the west coasts of continents tend to be cold (less evaporation and drier) while the east coasts are warm water (more evaporation and wetter).

Looking good!

[Morgan_R]

Thanks for the explanation! I wish I knew how to work out what would actually happen in my world-in-a-bubble scenario, but I may just have to hand-wave it.

[Lukc]

A beautiful terrain map!