How Bad is My Coastline: Continent of Alm

[jbgibson]

Umm - yeah, that was me getting all wildly detailed :-). It's fun for me - if it isn't fun for you remember nobody says you HaVe to justify everything ! One aspect of what I did in that thread was land was pretty well distributed around the globe. If you make a couple of basic decisions about size of your continent, you'll be able to figure whether it dominates the weathermaking systems, or if it's more like an island in a mostly ocean globe. "Course at a lot of stages of societal development, hiding another major continent or three 'round the back side of the world wouldn't have much effect on the one you're concentrating on. How 'bout it - are your people Great Navigators who would have already bumped into a new world on the way to Cathay, or are they landlocked geologinoobs, who aren't even too certain the world is round?

[waldronate]

The overly generalized vegetation layout according to Erwin Raisz:

Attachment 37806

There are many exceptions to this general layout, but the important parts here are total north/south extent and proximity to ocean and currents. Did I miss a scale and global placement on this map or is it more of a flat-earth idea (in which case the above does not apply)?

[Fox Lee]

jbgibson: Not at all! I did ask for realism, since that's my (big HUGE) weak point here. You should learn the rules before you can break them, in my mind, so it's much more useful to have information that's too detailed.

As for my people, they're ind of new around here :) They used to be slaves on a separate continent, then they had a huge uprising and shipped off to the new world. Which was covered in beast-races like gnolls and such, but hey why should that stop humanity from going "okay we own this then!". Okay, maybe that's a bit cynical, let's say they really needed a new home and the gnolls would probably have tried to eat them anyway >3>;

waldronate: No scale yet, because I'm hopeless at that >3>; And I will probably paint myself into a corner when the players start saying "no, the distance is right there, it would only take us x days overland...". I'll put one in eventually, I'm sure, but not quite yet ^_^;

SO! I tried to take away all your advice and step up my game a bit.
Alm map Southerly preview.png
So first of all I decided I could let go of the shape after all. This may have had something to do with my inability to find interesting things to fit in all the extra space. So I chopped and changed a bunch of stuff and roughed up my coastline in a more natural fashion. Using noise and blur still didn't do the trick on such a big scale, but using the node jitter in Inkscape worked very nicely (I expect I will use the noise/blur technique when I do regional maps, since those will want more detailed coastlines).

Then I realised that actually, damnit, I did want a Southern hemisphere continent. Everybody has Northern hemisphere continents! I've never seen a "Frozen South" on any fantasy map, even though in most games you pretty much can't spit without hitting a North Wastes. So I flipped some things, reversed some things, chopped some things off and put them on the other side, and actually wound up oddly close to where I started ^^; But this time with a plan!

This version works really well for the climates I wanted, allowing for the rainshadow between those two peninsula(...e?), which should be facing the right direction now that we're in the Southern hemisphere. The equator would be just above the Northernmost island ("Madagascar I guess") above the mainland, and the Southern edge is not quite polar enough to be permafrost, but damn chilly in winter. Also, I added mor character to certain places on the coast - more jagged edges and little islands around the rocky areas, and a smoother edge around the desert.

You can see the two smaller continents I defined, in this version - since I made the humans slog all the way over from somewhere else, I was nice and gave them a bit of a land-bridge a la North/South America (too bad about the mountains. Sorry, humans!). Over to the East is the abandoned land of the Obligatory Technologically-Advanced Precursor Race Who Died In An Unspecified Magical Catastrophe. Perfect for treasure hunting!

Here is a profoundly ugly terrain sketch:
Alm map Southerly wk3 terrain preview.png
(Actually it looks kind of okay in the folder thumbnail, but good grief, those are some nasty looking mountains up close. I guess in the final I just need to make the detail fine enough to blend like that. OH WELL! We're not trying to be pretty yet. Anyway, I looked at a bunch of real world maps and I was kind of amazed at how sudden the change in terrain seems to be at this scale. I never would have guessed there was such a distinct "banding" effect in places like Africa. Gosh this is being good for my education O:

So, what you say you all? More convincing now?

Thanks again everybody, I feel like I've made great progress ^^ It looks kind of a lot like the very first version, but it makes lots more sense, which is exactly what I wanted :)

[octopod]

I like your supercontinent!

So do you have a warm shallow sea with lots of coral reefs there between the two continents, and that big mountain range in the west of the second thumbnail is an active uplift zone, like the Appalachians in the Paleozoic? I like that a lot!

What is the idea behind that crazy three-pointed mountain range?

[waldronate]

Perhaps the three-pointed mountains range is a hard rift that hasn't fully opened yet? http://maps.google.com/?ll=11.867351...753418&t=k&z=6 shows what happens when a couple of arms are open on such a rift and the third is opening.

[Fox Lee]

The idea is that I needed mountains in some places to shove the plot in the right direction. No I mean waldronate totally had it right, I knew that all along! :D Not really.

Actually, now that I think about it I don't actually need the north-pointing branch any more, since I moved the homeland of my nasty facsist army over to the south-pointing fork. Even better! :D

[octopod]

Perhaps the three-pointed mountains range is a hard rift that hasn't fully opened yet? http://maps.google.com/?ll=11.867351...753418&t=k&z=6 shows what happens when a couple of arms are open on such a rift and the third is opening.

That photo also shows that there's a rift going down the middle of such mountain ranges, lol.

Fox Lee, by north-pointing you mean the one that runs north-south, or the short one that runs toward east-northeast? Either way it'll look better with only two. And hey, you got the 120 degree rule right, that definitely helps the believability!

[Fox Lee]

Fox Lee, by north-pointing you mean the one that runs north-south, or the short one that runs toward east-northeast? Either way it'll look better with only two.

Whups, that was ambiguous huh? I meant the one pointing northeast. In last year's version I needed it to separate two kingdoms from obliterating each other, but in this version I moved one of them, so now they are divided by the southernmost branch already. So, no worries

And hey, you got the 120 degree rule right, that definitely helps the believability!

Hey, go me! Umm... so I don't have to operate on luck next time, would you like to tell me what that is? ^_^; Something about the maximum angle between branches maybe?

[octopod]

So there's this thing where intersections of three tectonic plates tend to form 120 degree angles. It's pretty much purely a matter of how you can tile a sphere -- think "soccer ball" -- nothing tectonically complicated here, just straight geometry.