Forming of worlds

[Ferret]

Tectonic stress map of Australia.

Are these the mini-fault lines? But the plate is still larger and not on the edge of austrailia, right?

So if I get it right, Major mountains are made by plate boundries pushing each other, minor fault lines still shape the land, and islands can be made by volcanos.

 

[MerakSpielman]

More or less. The minor fault lines can cause earthquakes, but they're rarely strong enough to be felt. Volcanoes are often at the edge of plates, but sometimes hot spots punch up in the middle of large plates, making island chains like Hawaii.

I took a Physical Geography class in college. I swear I thought of it as the "D&D Map Creation" class.

 

[MerakSpielman]

duplicate post! The horror!

 

[Umbran]

How big can lakes get? When are they seas? Could a lake/sea be as big as mongolia?

A lake is a sea when the folks roundabout decide to call it such.

Or, a lake is a sea when it's water is saline, rather than fresh.

A lake or sea can be as big as anything. All it needs to be is a relative low-point that traps water.

 

[Desdichado]

Our own Great Lakes, and all the myriad smaller lakes (one report I've seen says Michigan has over 10,000 lakes) are also the result of past glaciation during the height of the Ice Age. I'm not sure when a lake is a sea, since the Great Lakes and the former Lake Bonneville are quite a bit bigger than some bodies of water that are named seas (the Dead Sea, or the Sea of Galilee being good examples) and it's not salinity either because Lake Bonneville (the pitiful remnants of which are the relatively tiny Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake of today) are much saltier than the ocean.

Certainly a lake/sea could be as big as Mongolia; isn't the Mediterranean Sea roughly that same size right now? Interestingly enough, the Mediterranean is also a pitiful remnant of a much more expansize prehistoric Tethys Ocean. In the next several million years, the Mediterranean will completely close up due to continental drift.

 

[Hand of Evil]

When drawing a map build from the low point to the high, I try to go in the following order:
..Coast
..Rivers
..Mountains
..Hills
..Cities
..Roads
..Forest

Don't forget that you have gods in your world, while it is nice to be realistic you do not have to be. Build myth and legends, the mountain range is the body of the god of the earth and fire, fallen in defeat from the creation myth of the dwarf lords! There are a number of spells that could explain why you may have the world look like it does.

Also you don't have to map out your whole world, just the general area of your game, the rest can be unknown with no detail.

 

[barsoomcore]

In the next several million years, the Mediterranean will completely close up due to continental drift.

I'll miss the blighter. Snif. Things just won't be the same around here without him.

Ferret: Look at lots of maps. Lots and lots and lots of maps. You'll start seeing the patterns, and your homemade maps will start looking more and more realistic.

Curved mountain ranges: Um, the Himalayas? Anyone? The Alps? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

What I do when I'm drawing out my maps is start with the big stuff -- mostly the height of the landmasses. Where is it low, where is it high, what are the transitions in between like? Then you just sort of "pour water" on it. See where it flows. Water flows downhill, so your low spots will fill up, become seas or lakes, and the direction of the rivers will be pretty obvious. Then you know where your deserts are going to be, where the best beaches are, and so on.

Rivers do flow regularly through mountain ranges, at least out here on the Left Coast. From the Rockies to the Pacific there's just one row of mountain peaks after another, ending finally in the Coast Mountains right on the shore. Major rivers form up in the Rockies (like the Fraser, which I'm looking at right now), wind their way through the rows of peaks (sometimes cutting very deep channels on their way) and eventually reach the ocean.

So yeah, rivers can cut across mountain ranges -- though they always find the simplest path. And while in the endless war of water vs. rock, water always wins, the battles are very, very long...

 

[Xeriar]

Wow! I didn't know that.

From the map I found It looks like a lot of the country's edges are on plate boundries, austraila (not the plate) isn't near a plate boundry. Shoot me if I'm wrong.

Another little-known fact is that there is a fault line running from Hudson Bay (IIRC) to southern Minnesota. It's old and has largely fused back together, but still over a billion years after the fact we get ~2.0 Earthquakes every now and then from it.

Regardless though, all of Australia's continental shelf eges either are on such a tectonic boundry, or they were long ago, and has since refted away from it.

 

[Xeriar]

Our own Great Lakes, and all the myriad smaller lakes (one report I've seen says Michigan has over 10,000 lakes) are also the result of past glaciation during the height of the Ice Age. I'm not sure when a lake is a sea, since the Great Lakes and the former Lake Bonneville are quite a bit bigger than some bodies of water that are named seas (the Dead Sea, or the Sea of Galilee being good examples) and it's not salinity either because Lake Bonneville (the pitiful remnants of which are the relatively tiny Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake of today) are much saltier than the ocean.

Lake Bonneville was originally comparitavely freshwater I believe.

Lake Agassiz would have rivalled a good number of countries.

Certainly a lake/sea could be as big as Mongolia; isn't the Mediterranean Sea roughly that same size right now? Interestingly enough, the Mediterranean is also a pitiful remnant of a much more expansize prehistoric Tethys Ocean. In the next several million years, the Mediterranean will completely close up due to continental drift.

I thought continental drift made the Mediterranean? One awesome warefall...

 

[s/LaSH]

Don't forget about reclaimation projects, and disaster scars. Humans can be responsible for both - look at the Netherlands for reclaimation; huge chunks of the country are both coastal and below sea level. We haven't managed to create orbitally visible disaster scars yet, but you know the type: a huge crater on the map, possibly more than one, the site of an ancient divine struggle or something. Normally, these will be coastal, as most civilisations tend to be coastal - big, important cities that people fight over will be on rivers or by harbours, simply because ships have been the best transport method for 99% of human history.

That's for the bit where you put cities onto the map, too.