Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

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Kwandulin
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Kwandulin »

Since the campaign is taking part in certain forbidden and cursed parts of Lintanir, it'd be great to extend the northeastern point of Lintanir a bit and make it patchy. Other than that, I'd need foothills next to the rivers.
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skeptical_troll
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by skeptical_troll »

I have two last comments, then I promise I'll stop :whistle: :)

the two rivers you've drawn (north and south of the new mountain range) weirdly bifurcate towards their mouth, while it should be the opposite (unless they have a huge delta, but it would be weird for short rivers like those). Also, I'm not sure about the swamp connecting the lake and the source of the Great River's tributary, as it basically closes a loop which doesn't make much sense.
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Bitron
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Bitron »

removed the rivers, since I don't necessarily have a use for them, as well as the swamp skeptical_troll mentioned. Changed the forest left to the big lake a little.
@Kwandulin, not sure what you did there with the Lintanir Forest, you might want to re-add the changes. :|
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by WTrawi »

Wow, just seen this thread and I... I can't tell how glad I am to see it! :lol: By the way I recently made this (all of eliddel's works put together):
BIGGEST OLD MAP THAT EXISTS
A Teljes Nagy-Kontinens.jpg
The North-West part of it was left from the new map
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Bitron
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Bitron »

WTrawi wrote:Wow, just seen this thread and I... I can't tell how glad I am to see it! :lol: By the way I recently made this (all of eliddel's works put together)
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by WTrawi »

I don't know, it was "created" (or whatever, I'm not English :lol:) before Khalifate came, but it's possible :D
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Lord-Knightmare »

So far we have seen the western edge of the Great Continent...it would be nice to see the eastern edge of it too. Will it have the Silver Land regions such as Lithia? Plus, I think the Great Continent deserves an official name.
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by tr0ll »

i thought it was Irdya
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Iris
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Iris »

Irdya is the name of the world, not the continent. It is officially and consistently referred to as “the Great Continent” in canon.
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Can-ned_Food »

Mmm … I doubt my comments will carry much weight here, but I should say that I think this is going about things the wrong way.

It helps to have some idea how the world formed and why the continent is the way that it is. Who or what shaped it, and how? How many continents? How large is the planet? Is it actually a spheroid?

Crowdsourcing for expansion could lead to disappointment or a messy world that looks like it was built at a quilting bee. It would probably be better if the coastline and major geological features were already known and mapped, and then we were interpolating smaller details.
Indeed, most players in that world should probably never see the whole of it, as skepical t0ll reminded us: seeing a horizon in a fantasy world is usually better than actually exploring it; and, when you do finally explore it, there needs to be another horizon to dream about.

Maybe the continent is on the top of somebody's head, and that quasi-god swats at explorers who venture too far around.
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Sudipta »

It helps to have some idea how the world formed and why the continent is the way that it is. Who or what shaped it, and how? How many continents? How large is the planet? Is it actually a spheroid?
There are many different theories in many of the campaigns but personally i like shadowm's and revansuriks concepts the most. IMO, its best if certain things are kept unclear. Knowing everything spoils the fun and the player/UMC creator can make their own answers to these questions.

If i may give my own 2 cents on the matter, I think the bigmap for the great continent is wayyyyy too big. Instead of being a great continent like Asia, it feels more like a supercontinent like Pangaea. The current scale feels really off to me. I think we are getting carried away while expanding. Keep in mind that that the known parts of the Great Continent ( The Kingdom of Wesnoth, and the known lands south of the Central River, The Northlands with Knalga, and the Heartfangs, and the Far North with the Orcish homeland and the Frozen shores are together a very large geographical area which took thousands of years to colonize. Now the new map is like 6-7 times as big. Even the elves with their lifespan of 250+ years wont be able to wander such a continent. And all the geographical features are also off the charts in size. Gigantic forests, gigantic swamps, gigantic deserts, etc etc. Its ruining the map. Its best to just double or triple the continent for now and fill in the terrain details in a more scaled manner.
Maybe the continent is on the top of somebody's head, and that quasi-god swats at explorers who venture too far around.
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by skeptical_troll »

Just for fun, I tried to overlap the map of Europe with that of the Great Continent presented here. I followed Zookeeper's suggestion in this thread that the distance between Elensefar and Weldyin is roughly comparable to Berlin-Paris, or a bit less. Taking into consideration that Google uses a Mercator projection (I assume) which dilates territories in the north, I'd say that the drawn part of the Great Continent has more or less the same size of Europe (which is ~3 times smaller than Africa and ~4 times smaller than Asia).

So in principle it is definitely possible to wander around it in a life time and to go even beyond and return. The fact that it has been colonized only slowly might be true only from a Wesnoth-centric perspective, i.e. there were already other folks out there who didn't want intruders, or there were natural barriers making migration hard (or unnecessary, if Wesnoth was nice enough).
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Chewan
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Chewan »

Kwandulin wrote:... it'd be great to extend the northeastern point of Lintanir a bit and make it patchy
Not sure if this information is still valid:

Contrary to the Far North-map, BfW-Help (1.12.6) > Geography > Northlands states that Lintanir Forest is just the southernmost portion of The Great Northern Forest / Lin-Elens.
The eastern and northern boundaries of this gigantic wood are known only (by) the elves! And zookeeper.
(Their capitol, Elensiria, has only seldom been visited by humans … and isn't mentioned anywhere, AFAIK.)

And according to BfW-Help > Geography > Far North, the High Elves (known as North Elves in human lands) reside further east to the North Plains (= Barren Plains? once Wild Steppe?). There, it is rumored they rule a vast kingdom ... Where would that be?
Sudipta wrote:... known parts of the Great Continent ( The Kingdom of Wesnoth, and the known lands south of the Central River, The Northlands with Knalga, and the Heartfangs, and the Far North with the Orcish homeland and the Frozen shores ...
Heartfangs: perhaps worth to mark the most dangerous part of the Heart Mountains on the BfW-map?
Central River = Great River?
Frozen shores = Is this a set term for the northern coasts of the Frosty Wastes?
Last edited by Chewan on July 5th, 2017, 10:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Sudipta
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Sudipta »

Heartfangs: perhaps worth to mark the most dangerous part of the Heart Mountains on the BfW-map?
Central River = Great River?
Frozen shores = Is this a set term for the northern coasts of the Frosty Wastes?
By central river, yeah i mean the Great river. And no frozen shores is probably something i drew upon from a mix of the Sunset Islands and Warcraft 3. I meant the northernmost shores of the Far north.
I followed Zookeeper's suggestion in this thread that the distance between Elensefar and Weldyin is roughly comparable to Berlin-Paris, or a bit less
I didn't know this piece of info. This does bring clarity on the scaling issue and now with your projection the great continents size does seem believable. But then its strange how little land has been colonized in all the years of the kingdom, not just by the humans but by all known races. Europe does seem too small. I was thinking the great continent was somewhere around the size of africa. :hmm:
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Re: Let's (try to) expand the great continent!

Post by Whiskeyjack »

Sudipta wrote:I didn't know this piece of info. This does bring clarity on the scaling issue and now with your projection the great continents size does seem believable. But then its strange how little land has been colonized in all the years of the kingdom, not just by the humans but by all known races. Europe does seem too small. I was thinking the great continent was somewhere around the size of africa. :hmm:
Well, you have to keep in mind that the current game is very Wesnoth centered (in story, factions, campaigns and pretty much everything else).

From a Wesnothian perspective: Why should anyone try to move into the dreadful Swamp of Dread? Those giant wastelands in the south must be impossible to cross. Northlands? Check. Northeast? Those pesky elves just won't let us burn down Lintanir to make space. The rest? Ocean.

This is, of course, exaggerated by a wide margin, but then consider this: How much did Europeans know (for hundreds of years) about central Africa? What about Asia? For almost anyone, the Silk Road was more legend than reality. I don't see a problem with the fact that we haven't met the few adventurous individuals in any official campaign, that did go out to explore the world (and returned). What about some rangers? Elensefars seafarers? Some holy knight on a crazy mission to cleanse the swamps? A couple tree-huggers romanticizing a beautiful elvish lady? What about the Lintanir elves and their eastern borders? What about the human states in the far north-north-east we meet as enemies in SotBE?

IMO, there is vast potential for UMC here, but no real problem that the big Wesnothian/Northern Alliance politics or local small city affairs we see in campaigns don't refer to "the world out there".
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