OGF Mapping Diary

I spent some more time playing around with the river systems and decided to shift things from the last draft. I'm not sure about the lake geography. I'm going to try to look for examples of other lakes to better refine the size. I definitely want some kind of large-ish lake in the middle, but there will be other finger lakes in the northern mountains, I haven't reached that level of detail yet. Next steps are tracing this map into JOSM to get a rough outline of rivers and some administrative boundaries. The dotted lines are what I envision as states/districts/region type things. The Northern district is the biggest but also likely the less populated. The middle two will probably have about even population, the capital city is in the middle district at the mouth of the largest river. I'm excited to design that area eventually. The southern two districts are much smaller. I'm not sure if having them split into two is justified unless there was another major city cente

Following the advice of OGF's Making Realistic Countries , I used Inkscape to trace Embla and draw a preliminary elevation map: Which I then used to imagine some major waterways, mostly rivers and some lakes: And then from there, I placed cities and large towns where people might be most likely to settle: I'm definitely going to continue to tweak the elevation model and the rivers. I wanted district/state boundaries to be based on watershed-type areas. I have to think about the terrain outside of my country boundaries as well, to make things look continuous and more realistic. I'm very happy with this rough draft though!