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Okay, here's my excuse to vent a personal pet peeves. :-) If you're going to publish a map of your imaginary land, map out the watersheds and make sure they make sense. You don't have to include those details in the final map, but they should inform the final map. Real rivers go somewhere. They don't just stop in the middle of nowhere.
There is an active fantasy map drawing community over on Reddit in /r/Worldbuilding, Maps range from truly amazing... to quite awful. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/search?q=flair_name%3...
in the Languages of the Night, a collection of Ursula K. LeGuin's essays on writing, there is a section(IIRC I read it more than 20 years ago) where a famous fantasy magazine editor had asked her to go into how she mapped out her world and created all the documentation beforehand so she could refer to it when needed, her process as it were, and she replied something to the effect of this is not how I do it. The descr…
(How many more stories would she have written in that world? I wonder)
Also: collection to her maps
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Maps/Index.html
as well.
Okay, here's my excuse to vent a personal pet peeves. :-) If you're going to publish a map of your imaginary land, map out the watersheds and make sure they make sense. You don't have to include those details in the final map, but they should inform the final map. Real rivers go somewhere. They don't just stop in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah? Have a look at the Morghab River in southern Turkmenistan. It flows from some mountains in Afghanistan out into a desert, where it splits up into a delta and just sort of... stops. The satellite view on Google Maps is striking. (There are several canals connecting to the delta now, but historically the river stopped in the middle of nowhere.)
Rules of thumb like this aren't laws, just patterns which have exceptions. (That said, yes, imaginary maps are sometimes ridiculous.)
in the Languages of the Night, a collection of Ursula K. LeGuin's essays on writing, there is a section(IIRC I read it more than 20 years ago) where a famous fantasy magazine editor had asked her to go into how she mapped out her world and created all the documentation beforehand so she could refer to it when needed, her process as it were, and she replied something to the effect of this is not how I do it. The descr…
For the Wizard of Earthsea books, there's an afterword (at least in the later editions I have around the house) where she says she just sketched out the map first even before any characters, and filled it in with the stories as she went. (How many more stories would she have written in that world? I wonder) Also: collection to her maps http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Maps/Index.html as well.
Earthsea is one of the most underrated settings for roleplaying games...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you'll enjoy this "guide" from /r/imaginarymaps: https://i.imgur.com/Vy0FS8F.png
The "rivers never split" rule is BS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_bifurcation
Anything that deviates from these rules is usually wrong. Rivers don't split around two sides of a mountain, for example.
Okay, here's my excuse to vent a personal pet peeves. :-) If you're going to publish a map of your imaginary land, map out the watersheds and make sure they make sense. You don't have to include those details in the final map, but they should inform the final map. Real rivers go somewhere. They don't just stop in the middle of nowhere.
The Okavango is Africa's 4th longest river. It flows into the Kalahari desert, becomes a swamp and dries out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okavango_River
I'm complaining about fantasy rivers that literally just stop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
underground is somewhere ...
But does it show up on a map?
My opinion: Features like this have no business being in a fantasy map unless the author has an above-average grasp of geology.
Or there's a magic portal somewhere. That's fine, just don't pretend it's natural.