Posts tagged geography
I have designed a group of medieval towns located on a valley, all of them connected by a navigable river wich ends on a big waterfall. There are some elevators at the side of the waterfall that co...
Our world is surrounded by a metaphysical barrier that separates us from other dimensions and the things which inhabit them. This barrier is made up of 7 layers, with the last one being the closest...
Imagine we're in a world where massive, outrageous amounts of energy are available at our fingertips. Perhaps one of those crazy cold fusion ideas panned out, or we eventually built ourselves a --p...
When designing a world it is convenient to decide how places will be named: Elements like the continents and the oceans. However, it is likely that the different cultures of the world will not ag...
What type of climate would I have to have to face a perpetually foggy forest at the base of a mountain range?
I don't want my world to be infinite, that would be a pain to draw maps for. And I need it to be flat (for a slightly unrelated reason). How would I explain why no one has looked over or seen the e...
I'm in the process of naming some routes and roads in my medieval fantasy themed world, and I want to specify routes that could only be managed on foot. I'm tempted to say trails, but since every b...
Some islands can survive for very long. Madagascar, for example, has been around for 80-100 million years and is likely to remain isolated for hundreds of millions of years more. Volcanic islands,...
I am working on a story where I will take the geography of our world but install new peoples, cultures and histories. This will likely include fantastical elements as well as mundane. In working ...
Apart from the obvious difference that liquid ammonia needs a much colder temperature than liquid water (but ammonia-based life forms wouldn't feel that as particularly cold), what would be the mos...
I'm currently designing a super earth with a surface gravity of 1.5g and a thick oxygen rich atmosphere. Now since the gravity is higher, how exactly would that affect my world? For example: Geogr...
If there was a life-supporting planet that was cubical rather than spherical, would it be feasible for there to be a unique but similar civilisation on each 'Plane'? I know that cube planets are i...
While working on some local geography in my world, I came upon these wonderful formations called volcanic plugs and crag and tails, and decided I wished to incorporate them into the land. My insec...
These humans must never see the ocean and should still be able to survive. They can only get out of the land if they improve the technology level. Is it even possible? The lakes or seas should prob...
I am currently building a campaign for DnD. The main plot plays out on an island the heroes are stranded on after their ship goes off track and sinks. They discover that this island is ruled by m...
A part of the story I am writing involves two continents that centuries before the story takes place sunk into the sea. I want to have a way to explain this that does not come down to just the sea...
I need a huge natural plateau to form but with a slope. There can be some variation, a few hills or even mountains here and there, but the ground needs to be mostly gently sloping north to south. ...
So I had this idea of a world with an ocean sized pool of super hard glass that formed millions of years ago on this planet. I started to think of the implications of something like that: In some...
Creating a map of Koppen climate zones for a very Earth-like world is quite easy, with the right instructions. However, what if the climate is several degrees cooler? Do I simply shift all the clim...
I initially assumed my world was going to be pure fantasy, but the more I think about it, the more I consider having the story take place somewhere on Earth, either as alternate history or the far ...
One of my main problems when it comes to drawing maps is how landmasses get distorted at different points. One of the continents in my story stretches almost to the north pole, but it looked very d...
One popular theory to explain how Earth got its water is that it was delivered by asteroid/comet/etc. The form this theory usually takes is that many small impacts occured over a long time, each d...
Suppose a two-storey timber cottage has been left unoccupied for 15 to 20 years. The entire structure is wooden, including all beams and supports, with a rammed earth foundation. It's situated with...
My world has giant geysers. The height of these geysers oscillates over a cycle of 3 or so days. Things you need to know: 1. There is an unknown force in the core of the planet, which exerts pres...
A town dating back to the late 1880s in northern Wisconsin has a dark secret that must be kept hidden by as few people as possible. How can this town keep itself isolated and off of maps during the...
I'm trying to explain a large continent-sized archipelago that doesn't run in any particular direction. As such, plate tectonics cannot possibly explain its existence. This is an Earth-like planet....
Recently, I found this map of Africa's paleolakes in the Imaginary Maps reddit: Finding this map was mere coincidence, but this map definitely interests me. Now there have been multiple what-if...
I'd like to know if a climate with snowy and gloomy winters and rainy and cloudy summers is possible. Because the climate of Russia in summer is sunny enough and the Icelandic ones isn't so snowy....
Background I just read this question about how to get a planet to have one hemisphere with tropical climate and one with polar climate. The (not yet accepted) answer with the highest score recomm...
In our world, mountains generally only move up (while forming) or down (while eroding or sinking). Otherwise they follow the tectonic plates they happen to be on. In island chains like the Hawaiian...
In an effort to gain inspiration for planetary formation and, at the same time, inspiration for governmental/territorial boundaries between residents of said formed planets, I've recently encounter...
There lives in a desert a large nomad culture, composed of many tribes who wander about herding camels, goats and sheep, trading and offering services to cities and towns, and occasionally raiding ...
This is the Bering Sea today... ...and this was the Bering Sea as recently as 25,000 years ago. Truth of the matter is, the Bering had been shifting back and forth from land to sea for 100 mi...
I have an Earth-like world (approximately 1000CE technology--horse/mule for travel) that I want to have my characters traverse over the course of the book. I want the areas to have distinct geograp...
In my fantasy series of ''Diggoran'' ( pronounced Dia-Ran ) Humans initially came from a continent in the northern hemisphere known as ''Atmoran'' which spans 20.561 million square miles. For over ...
During much of the Late Pleistocene stage, the world's most widespread biome was the so-called "mammoth steppe" - a cold, dry grassland which spanned eastward all the way from Spain to Canada. It w...
First of all, yes I'm Australian, and yes I am using a kangaroo to type this up. If you take a look at Australia, it's a pretty sad place geographically. Very flat, very dry, mostly desert and for...
So I'm currently working on a fan project to redesign Superman's home planet of Krypton. This new Krypton is 1.6x the size of Earth and orbits the red dwarf star known to us as LHS-2520, 27.1 ligh...
Writing about suspended cities within a planet's atmosphere! The story itself focuses on the air forces that fight for each of the hundreds of floating city states living in the sky, but that's her...
This is a small civilization (more than just a town or two) almost under the shadow of the regional hegemon. The dominant civilization knows they are there, but don't go too deep into that swamp be...
Fantasy and sci-fi works often are set in worlds of dramatic terrain, because, well... it's dramatic. A few examples of the kind of thing I'm talking about: I understand that Earth has som...
If a great division occurs, sealing two warring cultures apart for many generations, my only explanation so far is a tectonic shift. I imagine water flooding between a long split. But as I understa...
Two rivers converging into one is obviously extremely common, most often when one is clearly dominant over the other (whereby the lesser one is the 'tributary' of the greater) but also sometimes wh...
I'm creating a world for a webcomic and I'm running into some difficulties "“ namely, my own limitations. I'm not a scientist, and I don't even know how to start asking the questions I want answere...
By "short period of time", I'm referring to the timeframe of weeks to months (not days or hours). For example: at the start of one day the land is flat, but after a few weeks or months there is a m...
I'm trying to find a justification to the sea level on Earth decreasing by a large amount (in the range of 1000 / 2000 m). The change would begin during the Modern Era or in the future, and last l...
I'm still working on world map of this pear-shaped planet for my alien race, so I think land-to-water ratio would be something 40/60% or 30/70% (I don't know which one makes creatures much bigger),...
I've pretty much finished the map of a world I'm building for a fantasy novel, but I've realised that on one of the continents I need there to be forest on both sides of a large mountain range. I'v...
Would potato- or grain-like crops be able to flourish in northern alpine regions? There's a lot to be said about the Andeans, but the have the benefit of living near the equator that other civiliza...
A supernatural geological event occurred and created a huge caldera-like formation on the coast of a region similar to Scotland. Over time the caldera filled with water and became a bay surrounded ...
