That's beautiful - does Nouvelle Bretagne still control its colonies or have they broken away?
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Map Thread XIII
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That's beautiful - does Nouvelle Bretagne still control its colonies or have they broken away?
Billions of refugees but on the bright side, the Aral Sea has finally been restored...
How is rural Picardy industrialised, but not coal and steel-producing Lorraine?
I've probably gone overboard thenA lot of maps online assume an 80-100m rise; perhaps the science has since moved on.
As far as I can tell it's a mixture of fanaticalism and people taking older general sea level rise maps that were created not for accuracy, but as thought experiments, as scientific truth, plus a bunch of conspiracy people and others espousing it continually.
Well Paris and Belgium were industrialising, and loads of rail lines were built connecting the two. With all that infrastructure Picardy began to industrialise as well. Meanwhile Lorraine's resources mostly got exported towards either the North where the factories were already going up. That and worries about a possible German unification leading to an invasion of Lorraine at some point the French wanted to keep from developing too much industry in the border regions. (That and I cut off the 'moderately industrialised colour a little too far south for Lorraine, it's somewhat industrialised, but not at the level of the North.)
Would you happen to have a blank version of the elevation basemap you're using?
yup.
It's somewhere in the last thread. Can't upload now because it's already taken my around 5 minutes to post this. When my internet stops trowing a fit I will.
I don't recall there being deserts in Mordor, just devastation. (And Tolkien seems unaware that volcanic soils are quite fertile. Maybe it's just that Mordor has evil volcanoes.
Out-of-universe it's the old Fisher King evil-ruler-poisons-the-land thing, though interestingly in the literature it was volcanic first, and Sauron chose it for the location of Barad-dûr because it was extremely defensible, both due to the mountains and the fact that Gorgoroth is a flat, inhospitable lava field that cannot be sieged (not unrealistic - think Holuhraun in Iceland, though you wouldn't want to base your army there in real life).
The nearby plain of Núrn IS semi-fertile (again - Fisher King; the closer you get to Sauron the shittier everything is), and supposedly supports Sauron's armies, but as you say it should really be some of the choicest farming land in Middle-Earth due to the ash - Mordor should look like Naples.
This article attempts to make Mordor's economy make sense, suggesting that they were an industrialised export economy. They suggest pigs as the primary food animal, though I don't recall hog roasts being very prevalent in the book (and a Google search brings up passages from Lord of the Flies on the first page instead). Orcs are stated to eat human meat - it's possible they subsisted on the men of Núrn, though I don't think this is mentioned, and the only Orc food mentioned in LOTR is, I believe, 'maggoty bread' (the poor quality could be consistent with having to import wheat from other nations under Sauron's thumb).
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I think it was just that Sauron kept the volcano active. Active volcanoes aren't good for farming. If I remember correctly there were times when he wasn't around and the volcano calmed down allowing people to start moving in (though turning rock to soil takes a long time).I don't recall there being deserts in Mordor, just devastation. (And Tolkien seems unaware that volcanic soils are quite fertile. Maybe it's just that Mordor has evil volcanoes.
Upvoteanthology
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Does anyone know of any good equivalents to Inkscape? It's not letting me download it on my Mac.
This map I found might be of some use in refining the southern parts, though I don't know how accurate or reliable it is.
EDIT: Also found an earlier version of Middle Earth you made:
As well as a larger one by Gandavien:
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