You have decided to give priority to the following proposal for the final map vote:
The Solaran Arroyo is the name given to the landscape around the Painted Land that receives some benefit of the river that flows from Monsoon Point to the south but is a stark contrast to the relative greenery of the capital region and generally divided into three distinct zones.
To the West is the Great Dry Sea. Believed to once have been an ancient inland ocean the Dry Sea is a massive salt flat that exists in a depression stretching from the edges of the Painted Land and out into the 'Amit desert where the ground begins to elevate once more and transfers from salt into sand. While outwardly unremarkable the Dry Sea holds a unique characteristic of being regularly flooded by distributaries of the river flowing from Monsoon Point during the rainier season up north. While this outwardly doesn't change the region more than being a bit marshy a month or two out of the year to unwary travelers it presents a grave hazard. While most of the water simply evaporates away over time some of it gathers in rocky depressions and gets trapped under a thick layer of salty crust that prevents its complete evaporation. This resulting in turning the Dry Sea into an invisible minefield where one false step can send a man plummeting into a thick brine pool if he's lucky, or a many dozen foot drop to his death if unlucky. The reprieve for these hazards is the rises in the flats that ages ago were once islands surrounded by water but now are encased in salt, dotted across the Dry Sea like freckles and few in number these little hills covered in vegetation provide landmarks for navigation in the flat expanse.
In the Center is the Sandoras Thornsea, the many mile wide valley entrance to the Painted Lands is host to many myriad of cactus families that take advantage of the presence of water. Here a thousand species of cactus can be cataloged ranging in size from as small as a child's fist to taller than a man interspersed among a splattering of cork oaks and stunted juniper trees. Not impassible but certainly unappealing to cross without proper precautions, the cactus mainly sticks to the banks of the river and the distributaries that break off from it to flow into other parts of the south creating thick bands of cactus that form the main hazard in crossing this region.
To the East stands the Motoro Conelands where volcanic energy is just powerful enough to breach the surface before running out of energy and forming the squat towers of basalt known as splatter cones that give the region its name. Ranging from only one meter in height to over twenty these miniature volcanoes pocket the land in the thousands with many of them still active and needing only a slight disturbance to ooze molten rock from the ground. Despite the danger the Conelands have long been a source of intense mining efforts as the splatter cones have the unique quality of having high amounts of metal in them ranging from common industrial metals to vast quantities of gold. Recent years have seen the innovation of forced eruption where the splatter cones found to be under sufficient pressure are breached and allowed to erupt depositing mineral rich lava to the surface, this done typically during the winter months when the cold winds coming off of the Ice Wall are the strongest allowing for a more rapid cooling of the lava. Besides this in the portion of the region populated by less active and even dormant volcanic vents there is a large coverage of greenery that feeds off the rich volcanic soil and distributaries from the Monsoon Point river that allow for a floral bloom rivaled only by the Painted Lands in its abundance.
For the final prompt, you have 25ish hours to define the center third of the map. The region is bound to the east and west by the Ice Wall and Desert of 'Amit and to the north and south by Evergreen Reach and Solaran Arroyo. While describing the center of the map be sure to answer or address the following:
What sort of terrain makes up the region? Is there any difference across the East, Center, or Western fronts?
What sort of weather occurs in the region? Is there any difference across the East, Center, or Western fronts?
The center of the Center contains a very distinct natural feature that should stand out enough to
influence but not
inhibit combat in the area, and must be in some way desirable enough (strategically, economically, aesthetically, spitefully) for some hairless apes to kill each other over in the future. What is it?
Note that a river is described as passing from north to south in the previous two prompts, implying
but not necessitating a contiguous waterway. If you decide to place a river through the center, that is enough to qualify as the distinct feature but is not extraordinary enough to bar the inclusion of another feature if'n someone gets inspired.
Selected Regions:
The desert of 'Amit shrouds the west in heaps of dazzling white sand. The evening winds stir up sharp, stinging sandstorms which scatter the light of the setting sun - an eternally popular subject for landscape artists, who in good weather can often be seen daubing their canvases at a safe distance. Through the heat haze, you can sometimes glimpse the peaks of the Anti-Cholades mountain range, in whose rain shadow 'Amit wallows, grasping at the far horizon.
This particular point is at the northern extreme of the continent, bounded by its coast and containing multiple natural harbours. Although it does not contact either the great desert of 'Amit or the great Icewall, it is in reasonable range of the climates that are contacted by them - if the world were for some incomprehensible reason cut into three lanes, Monsoon Point would be at the extreme end of the middle, presumably temperate one. Monsoon Point is so named because winds that come off of the coast, off of 'Amit, and off of the Icewall contact to create a spectacularly broad storm network which ensures Monsoon Point is constantly lashed with rain - an extremely rainy season dominates nine months out of the year, and then during three months of the year there is what can't be called a dry season so much as a "less rainy season".
The landscape in Monsoon Point itself is surprisingly dramatic as a result - a hilly region has been carved out into a land of beautiful red cliffs, with intense and verdant greenery blooming across the tops of slopes that host streams and waterfalls. Besides making the land itself fertile (although without the heavy plantlife protecting the soil this would not be the case), this has a couple of other effects on the land south from the capital - this half of the continent has much more rain and other inclement weather than the southern half, and streams and drenched water table in Monsoon Point flow down from the hills into a river down south.
Evergreen Reach is the broad name for the general area that spills out from Monsoon Point between 'Amit and the Ice Wall - although this is a very large area and crosses distinct biomes, there are some clear commonalities as a result of the intense weather patterns to the north: the presence of heavily forested terrain (usually, go figure, plenty of evergreen pine trees), and heavy inclement weather that lashes across the Reach, albeit usually much more intermittently than in Monsoon Point.
The specifics of the Evergreen Reach vary from West to East, though. In the East of the Evergreen Reach, temperatures drop dramatically and the rough hilly terrain present in Monsoon Point in fact heightens significantly, leading to mostly beautiful alpine forest terrain - except that it is beset by vicious snowstorms for most of the year. A notable landmark out here is a point of the land where the hills flatten out into much shorter, rolling little hillocks with curiously far fewer trees. Though seemingly more hospitable, this area, the Frosthollows, is in fact so much sparser because it is full of... well, frosthollows so cold that they don't let trees grow in them.
In the center, the hills flatten out. The central Evergreen Reach is a temperate rainforest - unbelievably lush, unbelievably green, fed both by brunt of the rainstorms coming down from Monsoon Point and the wide, fast-flowing arterial continental river flowing down from Monsoon Point, central Evergreen Reach is... well, it's wet as hell. The riverine environment leads to plenty of mud, fallen logs, ponds, small lakes, and streams, but other than that it's actually quite a pleasant place to be in, if humid.
In the west, the temperate rainforest grows hotter and transforms into a tropical rainforest, the nature of the forest and species of its inhabitants changing with it (though, somehow, there's even a tropical goddamned pine). The tropical rainforest is, while still most CERTAINLY wet, less wet than the temperate rainforest - you can still expect to get soaked, but it isn't very riverine. Instead, the tropical rainforest rolls across gentle hills, fed by the Monsoon Point rainstorms which gather here and bowl against the Cholades, a short mountain range at the edge of the 'Amit which reinforces it with rainshadow. What you have to deal with in the tropical rainforest is more the underbrush, the fact that the canopy is thick enough that the light is dim, and the many forms of wildlife.
The Solaran Arroyo is the name given to the landscape around the Painted Land that receives some benefit of the river that flows from Monsoon Point to the south but is a stark contrast to the relative greenery of the capital region and generally divided into three distinct zones.
To the West is the Great Dry Sea. Believed to once have been an ancient inland ocean the Dry Sea is a massive salt flat that exists in a depression stretching from the edges of the Painted Land and out into the 'Amit desert where the ground begins to elevate once more and transfers from salt into sand. While outwardly unremarkable the Dry Sea holds a unique characteristic of being regularly flooded by distributaries of the river flowing from Monsoon Point during the rainier season up north. While this outwardly doesn't change the region more than being a bit marshy a month or two out of the year to unwary travelers it presents a grave hazard. While most of the water simply evaporates away over time some of it gathers in rocky depressions and gets trapped under a thick layer of salty crust that prevents its complete evaporation. This resulting in turning the Dry Sea into an invisible minefield where one false step can send a man plummeting into a thick brine pool if he's lucky, or a many dozen foot drop to his death if unlucky. The reprieve for these hazards is the rises in the flats that ages ago were once islands surrounded by water but now are encased in salt, dotted across the Dry Sea like freckles and few in number these little hills covered in vegetation provide landmarks for navigation in the flat expanse.
In the Center is the Sandoras Thornsea, the many mile wide valley entrance to the Painted Lands is host to many myriad of cactus families that take advantage of the presence of water. Here a thousand species of cactus can be cataloged ranging in size from as small as a child's fist to taller than a man interspersed among a splattering of cork oaks and stunted juniper trees. Not impassible but certainly unappealing to cross without proper precautions, the cactus mainly sticks to the banks of the river and the distributaries that break off from it to flow into other parts of the south creating thick bands of cactus that form the main hazard in crossing this region.
To the East stands the Motoro Conelands where volcanic energy is just powerful enough to breach the surface before running out of energy and forming the squat towers of basalt known as splatter cones that give the region its name. Ranging from only one meter in height to over twenty these miniature volcanoes pocket the land in the thousands with many of them still active and needing only a slight disturbance to ooze molten rock from the ground. Despite the danger the Conelands have long been a source of intense mining efforts as the splatter cones have the unique quality of having high amounts of metal in them ranging from common industrial metals to vast quantities of gold. Recent years have seen the innovation of forced eruption where the splatter cones found to be under sufficient pressure are breached and allowed to erupt depositing mineral rich lava to the surface, this done typically during the winter months when the cold winds coming off of the Ice Wall are the strongest allowing for a more rapid cooling of the lava. Besides this in the portion of the region populated by less active and even dormant volcanic vents there is a large coverage of greenery that feeds off the rich volcanic soil and distributaries from the Monsoon Point river that allow for a floral bloom rivaled only by the Painted Lands in its abundance.
The river born in the slopes of Monsoon Point reaches its southern terminus in the distant Painted Land. What began as clear streams of babbling rainwater has been transformed into a wide, slow thing laden with sediment. Millions of years of river action have carved a canyon through the country's soft rock strata, sharp and jagged at first but growing as broad as the horizon by the time it reaches the sea. The land is called painted because the bands of rock exposed by the river form such a panoply of color: white limestone, black shale, and sandstones in pink, red, yellow, and every color in between.
The highlands beyond the canyon walls (a distinction less marked as one proceeds southward) are relatively arid, with hot summers and cool winters. The soil in these highlands is rocky, but tolerable for thin forests of cork oak and scrubby grasslands home to herds of kudu. Groundwater is exposed to the highlands by limestone sinkholes, or cenotes. The riverine lowlands are much more fertile, irrigated by predictable cycles of flooding. Papyrus reeds and olive trees grow in abundance here, while alligators sun by the riverbanks. The coastal delta experiences a cooler climate, with sea breeze coming off the ocean to regulate temperatures. Here, temperatures are mild to warm year round, with gentle rains falling in the winter. The waters beyond are a vast inland sea of sun-drenched archipelagos, favored by traders for exotic spices but seldom visited due to hazardous shoals and sandbanks.
The sedimentary rock of the Painted Land bears countless karst caves, connected by underground rivers and home to strange species of eyeless fish and cave-adapted lizards.
While borders can be quite fluid in nature, the easternmost extreme of our land is harshly cutoff by a monolithic wall of pure ice, 3000 meters tall. Although a sparse population has carved out a home within the sheer surface, our ability to project power over them has always been extremely limited, even when the ice box made their home a lucrative trade resource. Few expeditions have dared scale the wall, and none have ever found what must lie beyond it, only an everstretching plane of blinding white.
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Topic: Let's Make a Map: Day 8a - Smile Harder (Read 4720 times)