Kingdoms of Cassonia and Latan - WIP

[ElderGreen]

Hey all,

Just started working on a new map, depicting another part of the same setting from the Kawyn map I posted in 'Finished Maps' two days ago.
Figured I'd make a WIP thread here to get some feedback as the process is ongoing.

Currently I have coastlines, major lakes and a massive river delta finished. The river delta system is probably what I need most feedback on. Spent some time looking at reference pictures but you can never have enough thoughts and opinions on something like this.

For context, the topography of this central peninsula is for the most part very flat with most parts south of that inland delta being swamp and marsh; the occasional hilltop poking out. For scale, the lake on the central peninsula is about 90km wide east to west at its widest point.

[KMAlexander]

This is a solid start, and I like the shape of your landforms a whole bunch!

Not sold on this central river:



Mainly because the water already drains into the bay north of it, it'd have no reason to continue through the landmass; the bay wouldn't be higher in elevation than the tip of that island. Water flows down the easiest course. It rarely splits, and when it does, those splits tend not to last long since the water will all eventually chose the most straightforward route and cut off the other. (It's called river bifurcation and the secondary channels are distributaries.) This is why we hear stories of river towns that would cease being river towns along the early days of westerner Mississippi settlement. A block upriver would divert the Mississippi, and all of a sudden, the river is miles away. (IIRC Twain talks about this in Life of the Mississippi.—there's also some super cool maps by Harold Fisk showing how the river changed.)

A lot of people look at Louisiana, but Louisiana is kinda tricky because it's so engineered. (Also, Lake Pontchartrain is misnamed since it's technically not a lake but an estuary.) All that engineering is why we get weird, unnatural landforms like this:



That comes from a whole bunch of dredging. Naturally, it'd all have faded away years ago as the Gulf slowly ate at the Mississippi River delta. So you could technically have a river through that island, but it'd probably need to be a cut canal, and it'd need to be maintained.

(I'm writing a book with a ton of rivers in the settings so I've read a bunch about this. Haha. Hopefully, it's not all overwhelming. Also, welcome to the Guild! I visited Bruges in January. Awesome little town. I drank many beers in 't Poatersgat!)

[ElderGreen]

You're totally right about that river splitting off kind of randomly. Not sure why I didn't notice that but I suppose that's what these threads are for!
Also a good point about coastal erosion eating away at a delta like that because the Mississippi is one river I looked at quite extensively in my reference work but I was unaware of how extensively that delta was maintained.

Made some changes. Most notably I got rid of the two rivers that randomly split off and added a secondary lake connected to the first one to make sure there'd still be plenty of water supplied to that part of the peninsula through this system to support the marshy conditions.



Thanks for the feedback!
And yes, Bruges is a beautiful place to live. Glad to see it's known all the way across the pond.

[KMAlexander]

Yeah, that looks much more natural to me.

[ElderGreen]

Quick progress update:
Colored part of the land to indicate regular flooding, expanded the central river system of this map inland and added the first colored altitude layer.



Will probably adjust most of this as I go to make it more natural looking; getting started is always the toughest part

[ElderGreen]

Quite a lot's changed since the last update, I started a world map as a side project, but that quickly became the main project for a little over a week so I've only really picked this one up since a couple of days ago again.
First and foremost I decided to expand the scope of the map westward. Halfway that peninsula just seemed a strange place to cut it off.
Other than that I've done the altitude map and started work on some of the rivers, though that part is nowhere near done yet.

[KMAlexander]

This is looking really solid. Really like seeing the mountains and the expanded river system.