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Greetings, Paizo messageboards.
I've been working on a homebrew campaign setting, and have arrived at a stage where I am interested in some feedback. I am doing this so that in a few months when I start running a game, players will not look at me and say something like: "I study geography for a living, and there really can't be mountains there." Or "I am a historian who specializes in looking at great migrations, and I can tell you that there's no way that those people could've moved so far so quickly." I can easily deal with my mountain ranges being in the wrong places, but it's definitely better if I am made aware of that before I show potential players what I've worked on, and before they begin to create their backgrounds which depend on the mountains being where they are.
Additionally I would like people to ask questions they have about the setting. I have not yet written anything about magic and the gods, but they both exist. Magic functions pretty much exactly as it does on Golarion, and there are gods, but I have not yet clearly defined my pantheon and its history, so I would like you to refrain from asking questions about those topics unless you feel that you have to. A good question would be something like: "I see that you keep saying nations are at war with each other, could you try to make it clearer how these wars play out and what they are like."
I am not very good at naming things. Many of my names were chosen by using the first letter of a bunch of words, or by mashing to words together (e.g. Varig=very big). Not all of my cities have names yet. I will name cities after the aliases of people who are helpful. Please let me know if you hate any of the names, and I will try to change them.
Here is a link to a timeline of the history, which also has some more specific questions about geography.
Here is a link to my working map.
You'll need a reason for the detached Lopin and Coldspar Mountains. They are too close and the Coldspar mountains to small to be natural mountain ranges. It's pathfinder so something like "a great battle blew away a mountain separating the two" or "A mighty demon is buried under the Coldspar Mountains, and it struggling to escape causes the earth to bulge".
The Antioch mountains could be fine, you just have some really weird tectonic plates.
This map seems to be for you, which is fine. But do not give this to players. It is very busy and uses a lot of color. I recommend a more ascetic pallet for the player map, even if it is less informative.
Thanks Rhedyn. The mountains, since it can be difficult to get a good sense of scale on my map, are about 165 miles apart at their closest point, which is indeed quite close. I will have to think about what to do about the Coldspar mountains. I could on the one hand make them much taller, on par with the Lospin mountains, and say they are a part of the same chain. In that case they might be too far away, although I can't really say if that is the case or not. I could alternatively take your suggestion and build in some sort of fantasy reason for why they exist, of which I can think of several.
Thanks also for your opinion on the map, it is definitely very dense and it took me quite a while to make, I will be making a simplified version. I also have a substantial amount of cleaning up to do, but I think what I have currently is quite serviceable.
I would revisit the rivers and lakes. Rivers start in mountains and other high ground and run downhill into the sea. As rivers meander from mountain to sea they are joined by tributaries. It is extremely rare for a river to split, it is more likely that they would run one course or the other.
Similarly a lake is likely to have several rivers running into it, but only one river running out of it. A lake without a river will continue to fill until it overflows somewhere and creates a river.
On your map you appear to have:
- several lakes and rivers that do not run to the sea
- Ondine river looks very odd, running in two directions at once
- Althned must be a near sea level pass through the mountains to allow the river to run through it
- There are no rivers exiting the Lospin Mountains, instead the continent's major water supply is from two rivers that run through the desert.
Hope that helps
Good to have some free map stuff and free timeline peekings out there. ;)
Thanks a bunch for the notes on rivers Hugo Rune, it does in fact help. I'm going to summarize what should be changed.
The Lundine has a split in it, and does not flow towards the sea. A river coming off of the Alped lake should flow in the direction of lowest altitude, which is most likely to be towards the sea.
The Ondine river splits off from the Lundine, both rivers flow north south. Because this was not apparent to you, it seems that it is not what would be likely to happen, for the reason that water likes to flow towards the sea.
The Ondine and Oldnod rivers intersect at Masd. I suppose they might want to join into one big river? Is this the case?
The Winding River...winds...basically going in a big loop. I don't suppose that's too likely to happen. The Icy Falls looks good to me though, and they eventually merge.
The Alped lake does not appear to have a ton of rivers feeding it, neither does the Olnod lake. Both have multiple rivers exiting them, so it looks like they'd dry out.
This seems like it might be solvable by a number of changes.
First, the Alped lake should get some tributaries.
Second, the Lundine river should probably flow into the Olnod lake.
Third, the Ondine should originate in the West Lospin mountains, instead of splitting from the Lundine.
Fourth, the Ondine should follow the Oldnod after Masd, instead of flowing south to the dessert.
I have some difficulty trying to figure out what to do about the Winding river, since I do not wish to connect Varig and Arven, as they at one point made war, and in general have a more hostile attitude towards one another than Westin and Varig. I think my solution is going to be to have the lake which is west of Muin in the Mallod forest become somewhat larger, and then fill it with particularly deadly monsters, so that it essentially splits the river in two for the purposes of trading. The river can then run out of this lake and through Varig towards the sea. I will probably want to rename it then.
That very much did help, thanks again.
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I've updated the map by changing the rivers, and revised the timeline somewhat to take this into consideration.
I have still yet to decide what I wish to do about the origin of the Coldspar mountains.
Thanks Rhedyn. The mountains, since it can be difficult to get a good sense of scale on my map, are about 165 miles apart at their closest point, which is indeed quite close. I will have to think about what to do about the Coldspar mountains. I could on the one hand make them much taller, on par with the Lospin mountains, and say they are a part of the same chain. In that case they might be too far away, although I can't really say if that is the case or not. I could alternatively take your suggestion and build in some sort of fantasy reason for why they exist, of which I can think of several.
Thanks also for your opinion on the map, it is definitely very dense and it took me quite a while to make, I will be making a simplified version. I also have a substantial amount of cleaning up to do, but I think what I have currently is quite serviceable.
The Tarrasque was fighting with something just as large. It's buried there still sleeping off the fight.
Dddot!
An eight thousand foot shelf won't just cause a rain shadow. In the process it will cause a massive amount of rain where the prevailing winds hit the rise. There's a spot on NZ's West Coast which gets the 3rd highest annual rainfall in the world with a smaller rise. The same with the Lospins, one side will be very wet, one side dry.
Also between the Lospins and the Frostwood, with a desert to the south, looks like a place where high pressure systems are likely to linger for a long time. It might be semi-desert but for the rivers running down from the mountains and the plateau perhaps.
What's the approximate latitude here?
I'll post about the origin of the Coldspar's at the end of the week.
Good to see someone talking about the rainfall. The Lospins are actually quite a bit more than eight thousand feet tall, the goal being tall enough that the dwarves are deterred from living there in large numbers. My preference is for the southern side of the Lospins to be the wet side, and the north to be dry, for the reason that a big part of the history is the trade between the wet, tree filled south and the dry, dwarven forge populated north. Looks like that's not in fact the case.
The approximate latitude is about 45˚ north, though in order to get the desired rainfall I am willing to move that around a bit. I can also give some very rough geography of the rest of the world, although I don't plan on really clearly defining other areas.
Thanks for the interest everyone!
20 000'? Yeah, I wouldn't live there.
Most likely the prevailing wind is from the west or a touch southwest then. More or less parallel to the Lospins. Make it a bit more southerly and you'll get the wet/dry sides where you want them - maybe there's a land mass SW deflecting the winds to the north a bit. Storms could easily drive coastal shipping trying to round the Lospins on to the shore and likely some nasty rocks and cliffs, which may be helpful in making Althned a trade link. Shipping via sea or river is usually much more efficient than trade caravans.
I still think the encircling mountains could trap high-pressure systems. Perhaps the rain is strongly seasonal, with rain and blizzards in winter and long dry summers.
It's hard to explain the desert short of magic though. I suggest using magic (e.g. nothing grows there due to ancient necromancy, but the rainfall is normal enough), adding a mountain range to its west (not ideal), moving the desert (or the whole area) quite a bit further south, or removing the desert.
With all this heavy rainfall there's likely to be a lot of erosion. The big rivers are probably always muddy and you might get seasonal floods carrying a lot of silt, like the Nile.
There's no reason that the prevailing wind direction couldn't be from the East. I.e. the whole planet spins in the opposite direction to Earth. That might fix the rainfall in the Lospins. Though it might introduce a whole different range of issues.
Deserts tend to lie along the 30 degree line of latitude.
Alrighty, a large land mass to the southwest makes sense, I will keep that in mind in case it becomes relevant. I do want the sea to be stormy, as otherwise I think the secession of Althned just wouldn't be that huge of a deal for Varig.
I don't know if it's possible, but maybe they go up towards the Unridden Plain? That could certainly be more seasonal, since seasonal rain produces grass more than trees.
I put the dessert there as a big natural boundary. I could replace it with the sea, but that creates problems because the elves arrived a few hundred years ago, and I would rather they came from far to the south than from across the sea. I also don't want to have more than one or two big geographic features be dependant on magic, since that feels too much like hand waving. Is adding mountain ranges to the west a problem because it cuts off the rain further north? What if they are far to the south, so that the western edge of the dessert is further south, thus opening up a long corridor for rain to sweep in? I don't know if that would be possible.
I suppose the whole of Mithras could be further to the south, with the dessert along that 30˚ latitude belt. Not sure how well that'd work.
I don't want the planet to spin in the opposite direction if it causes a bunch of different issues. Also because it seems weird, even though I know that's arbitrary.
Thanks for the mention of muddy rivers, I made a note of it so I don't forget.
Desert not dessert, unless it's made of sugar.
The problem with mountains creating rain shadows for your desert is that sometimes the wind doesn't come from the prevailing direction. That doesn't matter to, say, the Gobi desert because it's surrounded by dry-ish lands in most other directions, but there'd be scrub and/or grass rather than sand in this case I think. Also the other side of the mountains is probably OK to travel along (rough terrain but certainly not waterless) which negates your natural boundary.
There are plenty of magical excuses for a desert, from magical wildlife to necromancy to rains of fire. I'd find such more convincing than a mountain range in this case. From 45 N to 30 N is about a thousand miles, and a definite change of climate. Are you OK with that?
Haha, man, I was really consistent with the dessert thing as well, like, I clearly really thought that it contained a second s.
I like that it's pretty far north, nice and cold, as it is now. A thousand miles is about the size of the whole of Mithras, so if it starts at 30˚ it would end at 45˚, which isn't really what I want. If you find a magical reason for the desert to be more convincing, then I shall try to figure one out. I had an inkling that Kobolds burrowed into the sands along the edge of the desert and preyed on the fringes of society, perhaps there's a very powerful dragon who doesn't like plants. I generally like to let things like this sit with me for a few days in case I think of anything I like a lot, so decide definitely about the reason for the desert on saturday or sunday.
After much consideration, I have arrived at two conclusions.
First, the Coldspar mountains no longer exist. Fashith is larger, and has gained another city. There are four mountains northeast of Terlin, which do have a fantastical origin, a particular kind of rock which rises away from the centre of the earth in phase with the moon.
Second, the Ahralk desert is a product of a large dragon and his brood. The elves migrated from the area now known as the Ahralk dessert instead of coming from far to the southeast, and those who did not migrate were killed. I shall be revising the timeline.
I am happy with how this thread has been proceeding so far.
Always use qualifiers. Most who did not migrate that way were killed. Some dug in and became drow. Some formed an undead cult and are surviving with the protection of ghouls and banshees. Grey skin elves always do what they need to survive.
Also, there should be a flying city, made from that lunar rock. It mostly travels during the full moon. It's evolved into a gypsy culture.
What do you mean by qualifiers? Do you mean when I say that "The elves migrated from the area now known as the Ahralk dessert", you think I should say "Most of the elves migrated from the area now known as the Ahralk dessert?" Saying most of the elves migrated would be technically more true, but I want to use the most authoritative tone possible, as the history is one from an external point of view, that is, it is not a timeline you would find in a book which exists on Mithras.
The elves migrated less than three hundred years ago, so they have not had time to become drow yet. The land there isn't particularly sandy, (just blasted by dragons and therefore uninhabitable for a variety of reasons), so there probably are some groups who try to live underground. There are problems with this, however, that make it not likely to be widespread. First, there are a large number of kobolds who would happily enslave/eat/torture whatever they came across. Second, dragons are smart, and would figure out that the elves are underground and then eat them. Third, living underground isn't really possible on Mithras outside of a few isolated places in certain mountains. The Ahralk dessert would be particularly conducive to starving people who live underground. There also aren't a ton of undead, although there are almost certainly dragon cults which have significant elven membership. Most, however, simply moved north, and the dragons didn't follow them because they don't want to die, and Ahralk the Terrible has settled into another long nap.
I don't want a flying city. It's a nice, creative idea, but I feel like it would make the magical rock too mundane. It's more of an ancient and primitive form of magic no one understands and most people don't even know about.
I'm definitely not above the occasional gnomish sorcerer of immense power flying around in a little house, though.
Even though I don't think I'll be using your suggestions directly, I do appreciate your input, Goth Guru, every powerful image or cool creative idea or observation is worth something, and I'm glad you took time to suggest some.
Much better.
What does much better mean? What is it in reference to?
The changes you made.
I didn't mean to offend you.
Ah, glad you think so. No offense taken, I'm glad someone's taking time to try to tell me something.