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| made by me |
One of my favorite things to do is to draw maps. I really like making my own versions of the World of Greyhawk, as you can see from the map above. I tend to make more tributaries than the official versions have because I grew up around mountains and rivers and it's weird for there to be so few. Even the number of rivers that I have in this map are probably too few for how many there would actually be.
The below map, from databayou.com, provides a look at just how many rivers there are in the United States of America. It's rather eye opening when you think about this in relation to the sparse number of rivers in Greyhawk.
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| from https://databayou.com/american/rivers.html |
I've always assumed most areas only showed large lakes and large inland seas and large rivers. You might show some of the secondary size rivers on a regional map, and by the time you get to the point of a Kingdom, you'd be putting in significant but not very large rivers (along with sloughs, deltas, splits, everglades, and so on... all sort of wet areas).
ReplyDeleteI wonder if there is some data that tells what the largest (in volume per day or equivalent) to get an idea of what a cut off should like at the world level. Then you'd look for the cutoff for the regional, then kingdom sized or something in this vein.
That's an interesting idea.
DeleteI tend to think that all major rivers should be shown, and it's clear that this has not happened. We know that civilizations in the real world tend to build cities along rivers because fresh water is such an important commodity for survival, as well as, for commerce and travel. If we extrapolate this to the fantasy world of Greyhawk it becomes clear that we're missing a lot of rivers and freshwater sources - especially when we look to the west of the Yatil Mountains and the Barrier Peaks.
It's certainly an idea worth thinking about when exploring these areas in our home games.
If you were going to look at what other smaller rivers and roads, the locations of towns and cities will be a good guide to start with.
ReplyDeleteIn history, trading and moving goods was easier on water if you have good large lakes and larger rivers. Especially in forests and rough terrain.
The best way to do some of these things is on a graphic tool that has layers and then you can create the map as it is and then on other layers, have 'large rivers', 'medium rivers', 'large lakes', 'medium lakes' etc. then you can see what parts you want to see at any one time.