Kurnheim

[micayam]

My first attempt at a map for a campaign I am going to run. Still puzzling out how I want the land to lay, rivers, etc. I was thinking a large mountain range in the large, northern land mass and the large island to be rather mountainous.

I would welcome any help or thoughts on how the land might lie, or any other aspects of the map so far.

Kurnheim.png

[Caenwyr]

I like your landmasses! When it comes to mountain ranges, there's one simple rule: mountains either run along the coast, or they steer clear of the coast altogether. Mountains never ever are perpendicular to a coastline. Apart from that, you can do pretty much whatever you want!

Seems like you have some nice longitudinal features that could benefit from a hefty mountain spine. From the top of my head I'd say...

• A mountain range along the western coast of the southeastern island;
• another across the southern peninsula of the mainland;
• another along the isthmus that links the peninsula to the rest of the mainland (maybe linked to the previous one);
• and a series of ranges across the northern mainland, wherever you'd want them. One hugging the western coast wouldn't be bad, for example.

All in all, this map gives you the opportunity to go wild! So go ahead and start posting some sketches

[Lawine]

I like your landmasses! When it comes to mountain ranges, there's one simple rule: mountains either run along the coast, or they steer clear of the coast altogether. Mountains never ever are perpendicular to a coastline. Apart from that, you can do pretty much whatever you want!

The Ural Mountains run perpendicular to the Arctic seas. Just because it isn't common for mountain ranges to form along such lines, doesn't mean they can't.

[Caenwyr]

Well no, they don't. The northern tip of the Ural mountain range actually swings eastward and then westward, where it runs ALONG the coast and forces it to jut out towards the Novaya Zemlya island chain (which in fact is a continuation of the same mountain range).

Mountain ranges never meet the coast at right angles. Keep in mind that a coastline is nothing more than a line linking all points of the same elevation (to be more precise, a coastline is a line linking all points undergoing the same amount of gravity, but that's almost the same thing). Like other elevation contour lines, it is shaped by the terrain and not the other way around. A mountain range meeting the coast at right angles would imply a ridge line that nicely rises up from the surrounding terrain at one side, then rises and falls with the different stretches of the mountain range, and then, very suddenly, ends in an almost vertical drop of 1000s of meters. Not even a massive meteorite impact would result in such a scene (simply because a meteorite impact large enough to disrupt a mountain range would probably cause even greater damage to the surrounding terrain, submerging that even further than the mountains, once again resulting in a coast that juts out where the mountains are).

Being a geographer working in the space sector, I don't know of any mountain range that stops so abruptly, neither on Earth nor on Mars, the moon, ...

[sangi39]

I had originally had the same thought as Lawine until I read this part of reply:

Mountain ranges never meet the coast at right angles.

Before that, I'd read:

mountains either run along the coast, or they steer clear of the coast altogether. Mountains never ever are perpendicular to a coastline. Apart from that, you can do pretty much whatever you want!

... as "mountains never run, on a larger scale, at a right angle to the coast" in the way that, on the larger scale, the Urals and the Pyrenees do. Having read the "meet the coast" bit, it's a lot clearly that you meant that, where such mountain ranges meet the coast, the "direction" of the mountain range changes so that it runs along the coast. Before that, it was kind of ambiguous.

This map:



For example, does demonstrate your point fairly well in relation to the Urals in that where it gets closer to the Arctic coast, as the altitude drops it also turns gradually eastward. The Pyrenees, towards the Mediterranean coast, show a similar pattern, where there is a gradual decline in altitude starting around 100 miles inland, with lower offshoots turning towards the direction of the coastline as the fall in height, as seen near the Cap de Creus in this much larger image