The last unreleased set from the AEG era.

The one where mantis got obliterated by the Spider.

1 hour ago, Kinzen said:

Fixed that for you. :-P

Most kind!

13 hours ago, Kinzen said:

Alas. I had my fingers crossed that with the reboot, we might get a redesigned map that has *any* comprehension of how rivers work. (Hint: NOT LIKE THAT.)

What's wrong with the rivers? They look fine to me.

14 hours ago, Shiba Gunichi said:

Also worth noting that at the last Winter Court RPG event run by AEG, the Crab were looking for naval backup to their existing fleet activities in the Sea of Shadows (which they ultimately got from the Mantis and the Phoenix, once the GMs got around to informing the Phoenix delegation that yes, we actually had a navy worth contributing, despite no mention of it anywhere, including the section on navies in the Book of Water)

In Way of the Thief the chapter on pirates had a section discussing Clan backed privateers and how Shiba of flexible virtue will on occasion 'acquire' supplies to boost the Phoenix's coffers, just as the Yasuki and Daidoji do for the Crab and Crane.

1 hour ago, shineyorkboy said:

What's wrong with the rivers? They look fine to me.

In Way of the Thief the chapter on pirates had a section discussing Clan backed privateers and how Shiba of flexible virtue will on occasion 'acquire' supplies to boost the Phoenix's coffers, just as the Yasuki and Daidoji do for the Crab and Crane.

There should be many small rivers inland joining together to make a bigger river as they flow toward the sea. Not a river somehow getting bigger as it splits into multiple rivers and forming what amount to islands all along the coastline. The map of Rokugan is the equivalent of a lovely painting of a mountain where the pointy top is in the ground and the wide base is in the air.

1 minute ago, Kinzen said:

The map of Rokugan is the equivalent of a lovely painting of a mountain where the pointy top is in the ground and the wide base is in the air.

Sounds like a paiting done by a Dragon: "Mountain, you shall find your own path, even if it means going the opposite way from your fellows mountain friends"

15 hours ago, Kinzen said:

Alas. I had my fingers crossed that with the reboot, we might get a redesigned map that has *any* comprehension of how rivers work. (Hint: NOT LIKE THAT.)

Not being a cartographer, could you explain what the issue is; I'm honestly curious now.

Edit: And just noticed the post above. *sigh* Watashi wa baka na gaijin.

Yeah, there's also that stretch of river that starts at one river and ends at a completely different river...I don't even know what direction that's supposed to flow, but it's definitely not natural.

1 hour ago, Kinzen said:

There should be many small rivers inland joining together to make a bigger river as they flow toward the sea. Not a river somehow getting bigger as it splits into multiple rivers and forming what amount to islands all along the coastline. The map of Rokugan is the equivalent of a lovely painting of a mountain where the pointy top is in the ground and the wide base is in the air.

Isn't that how deltas work though?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile_Delta

Deltas would make sense, but the map doesn't. Its rivers seem to run in arbitrary (and sometimes contradictory) directions.

I'm really bothered by the south west part. The carpenter's wall just stops and half of the land is on free access for the Shadowlands. What prevents them to just actually go north?

39 minutes ago, Khudzlin said:

Deltas would make sense, but the map doesn't. Its rivers seem to run in arbitrary (and sometimes contradictory) directions.

As opposed to rivers in real life? All rivers care about is getting from the high elevation to the low elevation. That's why we have the Nile and Rhine going north, the Amazon and Ganges going east, the Mississippi and Hudson going south, and the Colorado going southwest, then west, then south.

2 minutes ago, Hellvlad said:

I'm really bothered by the south west part. The carpenter's wall just stops and half of the land is on free access for the Shadowlands. What prevents them to just actually go north?

Pretty sure there's a line of mountains there. I mean what ever stopped the Shadowlands from going west into the Burning Sands and coming at the Empire from a different angle?

5 minutes ago, shineyorkboy said:

Pretty sure there's a line of mountains there. I mean what ever stopped the Shadowlands from going west into the Burning Sands and coming at the Empire from a different angle?

I wasn't even talking about the border of the map. Thre are indeed supposed to be mountains over there that for creatures waiting to destroy al the living don't like to cross :D. But with the map they made here the Carpenter Wall seems to stop nearly in the middle of the landmass. The whole west side is not looking to be protected, and you have a nice clear path not even blocked by the Shinomen forest spearing straight into the lands of the Unicorn. I''m not an full expert on the lore but I'm pretty sure I never heard about any other defense system besides the wall that would protect that part of the empire

Well in the old lore the Wall stopped where it did because Razor of the Dawn Castle already existed and blocked the only pass through the mountains on that side of the Empire.

If you play close attention you will also see a few places where rivers climb up mountains.

2 hours ago, Hellvlad said:

I'm really bothered by the south west part. The carpenter's wall just stops and half of the land is on free access for the Shadowlands. What prevents them to just actually go north?

Reasons.

Really that's it. Somehow the Shadowlands never tought of using the Plains Above Evil.

At least not until the Spider started moving into the Shinomen and infiltrating the Sparrow.

14 hours ago, Vlad3theImpaler said:

Sweet Christmas, where is that image from?

There's second published mantis art from this set. Just scroll down.

http://www.chikan.pl/index.php?topic=8903.0

14 hours ago, Tetsuhiko said:

The last unreleased set from the AEG era.

The last unreleased set of Twenty Festivals. There were others.

7 hours ago, shineyorkboy said:

Isn't that how deltas work though?

Deltas happen at the mouth of a river. They're essentially a giant mudflat, in which the water branches apart because "the path of least resistance" is pretty much anywhere it wants to be -- and moreover changes on a regular basis, unless you have modern engineering forcing the branches of the delta to stay put rather than shifting.

Rokugan's rivers somehow branch . . . everywhere. Middle of a plain, edge of a mountain range, wherever they like. And the branches are almost always in a direction that implies the water is getting divided instead of collected, which is the entire concept behind a watershed/drainage basin.

6 hours ago, shineyorkboy said:

As opposed to rivers in real life? All rivers care about is getting from the high elevation to the low elevation. That's why we have the Nile and Rhine going north, the Amazon and Ganges going east, the Mississippi and Hudson going south, and the Colorado going southwest, then west, then south.

I don't think it's possible to draw an elevation map of Rokugan that would make sense of the river system. If the water is flowing from high elevation to low, why does only half the water go one way and half the other? Even if the elevation at the spot of the branch happens to be exactly the same, the river would eventually carve out a deeper channel along one path (the one with a softer bed, probably, or the one that drops off more steeply later, leading to more rapid water flow), and then it would send all its flow along that channel. This is how the Mississippi used to jump its bed, before the Army Corps of Engineers poured huge amounts of money and effort into keeping it where it is right now.

I mean, off on the eastern coast, you have the Lake of Sorrows and the Lake of Shining Glass on opposite sides of a MOUNTAIN RANGE that are somehow connected. Yes, sure, there's a pass . . and apparently that pass is at the same elevation as the eastern shore of the northern lake, because the water can't make up its mind whether it would like to take a short jaunt to the sea or . . .

Okay, I just realized that as pretty as this map is, it made things worse . In every other map I'm looking at, the Lake of Shining Glass feeds only into the Lake of Sorrows. Which makes sense from an elevation standpoint, even if I wonder how one of the biggest lakes in Rokugan apparently just arises from a spring up in the mountains, with no rivers to feed it. But here, it also has an outlet to the sea. Plus the one that crosses the mountain range. That just . . . what . . . I can't even.

6 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

Deltas happen at the mouth of a river. They're essentially a giant mudflat, in which the water branches apart because "the path of least resistance" is pretty much anywhere it wants to be -- and moreover changes on a regular basis, unless you have modern engineering forcing the branches of the delta to stay put rather than shifting.

Another, more stable version of a forking river is a big island in the middle of a river. Check Montreal's map for an example. https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.5367109,-73.7601299,10.25z?dcr=0

It is still a very limited phenomenum and nowhere near the scope and irrealism of Rokugan's map.

24 minutes ago, Tetsuhiko said:

Another, more stable version of a forking river is a big island in the middle of a river. Check Montreal's map for an example. https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.5367109,-73.7601299,10.25z?dcr=0

It is still a very limited phenomenum and nowhere near the scope and irrealism of Rokugan's map.

Except that you're seeing that on a close up if you scale out the island becomes almost indistinguishable from the main flow of the river. Don't always take our modern cities as perfect examples of how land mass would form as we do a lot of work to shore up for erosion and other factors that would naturally cause a river to divert otherwise.

36 minutes ago, Schmoozies said:

Except that you're seeing that on a close up if you scale out the island becomes almost indistinguishable from the main flow of the river. Don't always take our modern cities as perfect examples of how land mass would form as we do a lot of work to shore up for erosion and other factors that would naturally cause a river to divert otherwise.

Not Montreal. When you scale out, it's the Saint-Lawrence River that actually disappears (Montreal and Laval are really big islands), and it's been that way for a long time before it actually became a city.

Maybe the Saint-Lawrence River is a special case (I'm neither a hydrologist or a geologist, so I don't know), but it's a phenomenum that happens at several places along its bank, with islands much bigger than the actual river diverting it along two or three paths for a kilometer or two. (Montreal area, Ile d'Orléans, the Sorel-Tracy area are only examples) Some of them are also uninhabited and in natural preserves, so I assume they are in the most natural environment possible.

Like I said, the way rivers are handled on the maps doesn't make sense, but sometimes rivers do fork sustainably for a few kilometers.

4 minutes ago, Tetsuhiko said:

Not Montreal. When you scale out, it's the Saint-Lawrence River that actually disappears (Montreal and Laval are really big islands), and it's been that way for a long time before it actually became a city.

Maybe the Saint-Lawrence River is a special case (I'm neither a hydrologist or a geologist, so I don't know), but it's a phenomenum that happens at several places along its bank, with islands much bigger than the actual river diverting it along two or three paths for a kilometer or two. (Montreal area, Ile d'Orléans, the Sorel-Tracy area are only examples) Some of them are also uninhabited and in natural preserves, so I assume they are in the most natural environment possible.

Like I said, the way rivers are handled on the maps doesn't make sense, but sometimes rivers do fork sustainably for a few kilometers.

I would counter that with 1) Montreal and most of Quebec are on the Canadian Shield and in geological terms are relatively young rebound development area from the last Ice Age. 2) they are also a very hilly/mountainous region so watercourses take some odd turns up there (just look at all the lakes we have). Islands happen in most rivers and lakes as they are a natural effect of a temporary high point (normally caused by a base layer of harder rock than the natural soil around them). The issue is that once you get cities built up there is a natural effort to protect the land that would normally be eroded and as the need to expand grows efforts are made to "reclaim" what would have been naturally lost land. In Montreal's case there was a lot of development to expand the island using the excavated soil from the Subway lines. We have the same thing in Toronto where most of our waterfront shouldn't exist except that we dumped lots of back fill into Lake Ontario to expand and reshape our waterfront.

Woah wait, are these straight rivers or curved rivers?

12 hours ago, shineyorkboy said:

In Way of the Thief the chapter on pirates had a section discussing Clan backed privateers and how Shiba of flexible virtue will on occasion 'acquire' supplies to boost the Phoenix's coffers, just as the Yasuki and Daidoji do for the Crab and Crane.

You know, 'Shiba of flexible virtue' sounds like something completely different, and I now wonder if there were ever any Shiba at the Seductress Actress school.

30 minutes ago, TheItsyBitsySpider said:

Woah wait, are these straight rivers or curved rivers?

They are Weierstrass rivers. Words like ‘curved’ and ‘straight’ have no meaning in this here, the magical land of Rokugan.

Oh, sweet kami. The more I look at the new map, the more hydrologically nonsensical it gets. I'm too lazy to root around for the names of rivers and lakes, but the old map had that lake up in Phoenix lands draining to the west, where it joined up around the City of the Rich Frog and then proceeded southeast to the sea, with the aforementioned Lake of Shining Glass draining into it along the way. I could draw an elevation scheme that would make that reasonable (albeit a little weird). But the new map helpfully provides that river draining the Phoenix lake with a new branch leading directly southeast, through another mountain range . . . while the other branch still goes west and then hangs a turn to go southeast as well . . . with the Lake of Shining Glass draining both north and south . . . the entirety of Lion territory is a freaking island now, surrounded on all sides by water. And the tiny little river near Otosan Uchi now both feeds into a lake/bay/thing and somehow has enough flow to also go south and make itself the biggest delta in the entire Empire.

I had hoped the new map might make things better. Instead it's made them worse .