I give you Schiehallion:
I really need to come up with an overall name for the world/planet, but so far nothing has come to me.
That does give me reason to give you another link:
Serendipity - Fantasy Name Generator
Please excuse. As you'll see the site is in the process of a rebuild ( !@#$%^&* spammers!) but what is back is great. The feature I miss most is the ability to generate a list of names because I used that a lot to put multiples together and make minor tweaks. There was another clever one that gave very English sounding place names - I think the old description was something like "for those new housing communities that wish they were quaint towns in the English countryside". My fingers are still crossed that it will come back again.
Mmmh. The individual landforms are still recognizable, and I doubt that any sort of plate tectonics could create such a continental outline. You should definitely come up with an explanation for the landforms - even if you fall back to "wrath of the gods" or something, I think knowing that will help you a lot when you place mountains and so on - plus, it might even influence the cultures living there.
ReplyDeleteThe only real explanation is that an asteroid struck Landen ages ago and shattered/separated the lands. I don't know how I'd tie that in story-wise because I haven't figured how to explain how the people/cultures would learn that. Maybe that knowledge is received through divination of some sort.
ReplyDeleteIf they are primitive and some of their ancestors were alive - OR if there are obvious impact signs (huge crater, whatever) then it's probably some "the might hammer of the gods struck the earth and incinerated all those who lived upon it with the fiery wrath of the heavens" type myth.
ReplyDeleteIf they are more modern, say like we are, then thy'll figure out the real reasons just like we would.
Real impacts probably do not look much like this. However, I think there are moons in the solar system that were involved in a collision, broke apart, then settled again under their own gravity. Except now they are in a "mess", since they didn't quite smooth out. Suspension of disbelief would probably let you get away with that.
I love me some huge impact craters myself, even if they are a bit of a trope. (Check out fantasy maps on cartographers' guild, chances are you will find huge impact crater on many of them....)