An early map of the new Ancient Lands

There’s been some maps of the Ancient Lands before in the past, so if you’ve seen any and remember them, the new map doesn’t really look much different than the old ones.

Le perfectly drawn map
Le perfectly drawn map

The lables seem to be pretty much unreadable, but I think the coasts and terrain are hopefully still fully visible. The main change I made was to remove the open plains of Sanved on the western shore of the Inner Sea and cover it all with forest again, which is actually what you would get on the eastern coast of a continent. (Deserts are always on the western coast because of wind patterns. Except Arabia.) I also beefed the Vestanen mountains up in size and moved them a bit more south, as they will now be the new homeland of the Vandren.

The Border Hills in the west and the Great Plains beyond them are now completely gone. Nobody knows what lies in that direction and when the forests might ever end. In the north I reshaped the Rayalka mountains a bit, but you might be able to make out that there is still a big question mark in the kaas homeland of Yakun. Got to do something with it, as I love the kaas, but that will have to wait for later.

One thing my maps never show satisfactorary is the scale. This area is pretty huge. (Not when compared to those map nuts who do whole globes, but still distances that would take weeks to cover by ship and months on foot.) That bulge in the north is about as big as China and the whole map covers an area that ranges from the Subarctics in the north to the tropics in the South. Imagine you had the Russian pacific coast on the north edge of the map and Vietnam on the south edge. You probably could get all of Europe on this map (though perhaps without the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland).

You might think that the sea coasts are boringly straight and there is going to be more detail in more refined maps, but mostly this is how real coastlines look like. Europe and Indonesia are the exception. Look at Africa, South America, and most of North America and you’ll see that there are very few bays or major islands except for the arctic regions.

Something I’ve seen when searching for other fantasy maps as inspirations and which I still want to add are some major inland lakes. On Earth these are very rare and most fantasy maps do them pretty unrealistically, but they still look interesting and add some variety to the endless sea of trees. Also allows me to do more boat stuff even far away from the coasts. :p

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