Mto, pronounced /m̩.to/, is a world not entirely unlike Earth. It's at just about the same size and same composition. Its sun is a lot like our sun, and its axial tilt is close enough to ours not to matter for my purposes right now.
Currently I am writing a novel that takes place in Mto, with vagueish plans to write more, especially as I come up with ideas for around the world. Ultimately, everything takes a back seat to the story, though I would like to flesh out some degree of history, culture, and so on, to make the world come alive—and for the three people who like reading appendices.
There are a handful of countries I know about in the world, that I have mentioned elsewhere on here, along with bits and pieces of their languages. But before I delve into that (especially with how much that stuff is changing right now), I wanted to first go into geography.
So first, a world map. I put this together to get a rough sense of where the various continents are, so that I can do some climate plotting, because that does have an impact on the story. I went with an equirectangular projection so that I could use G. Projector to give myself a better idea of what this would look like on an actual globe.
The other thing to note is that the continent coasts are really super super rough. I just want to get a general sense of position and arrangement for climate purposes. I don't imagine filling in anything will impact the broad strokes that much, though I have room for fiddling if necessary.
Here is the super rough continent map in its current draft.
Blue is ocean, green is land. Reddish brown indicates major mountain ranges that are high enough to really impact climate, and also to give myself some idea of plate tectonics. There are mountains/hills/rivers not particularly marked on this map, and plenty more small islands that aren't around. The letters roughly indicate continents/nations, and just convenient ways of discussing the map without 1dealing with nation names that keep changing.
I know that to really get climates down, I need to figure out wind patterns and ocean patterns, but I still wanted to get a broad-brush understanding.
Here is what I think so far:
N is icy polar desert in the middle, but the edges (where all the people are) are basically all tundra or continental subarctic.
The "mountain range" between P and N is where oceanic parts of the crusts have been colliding, so there's probably some volcanism there, and the islands between them are actually the upper parts of the mountains.
I'm not really sure what sort of climate P has. Generally temperate in the north, desert in the middle, something hot in the south?
I mark off E because I know for a fact there's a nation amidst those islands. My thought in general is that they should be reasonably temperate, kind of Japan-like, in fact. Just in Mto, the islands aren't subject to lots of earthquakes anymore.
I think K is probably Mediterranean in the south, moving to cold in the north. K is thoroughly colliding with N, making the area north of that mountain range a high plateau, similar to how on Earth India has interacted with Asia.
My original thought with H was that it would be a desert, but then I remembered how Ferrell cells work, and now I kind of think H in general would be a nicely temperate and moist continent. Except for the thin strip east of the mountains, which are probably pretty much desert.
I think S is tropical rainforest almost entirely. I want it to be; it's mostly a question of whether its shape and the location of the mountain range is enough to make that reasonably plausible.
I would say V is a long desert, but it's also got enough coast that I think it's probably more of a veldt throughout, with more desert-like parts in the northwest, against the mountains with which it abuts S. The southern tip might start being more temperate.
I think X actually has a east-west ridge in its middle, but otherwise I think is probably pretty temperate.
The Y/D/F continent is interesting to me. Y is probably pretty desert-like, and the south-west portion of D is almost absolutely brutal desert, trapped between two mountains like that. The north-east portion of D is possibly rain forest, and F is possibly temperate, with the eastern peninsula more marshy (kind of like Florida?).
The southern pole is of course covered in an ice sheet, but it's also a major volcanic hotspot. There might actually be a nation in A that no one knows about yet; it's pretty well ignored by the other nations.
This is a lot of guesswork and broad-brush painting, like I said, given that I haven't put together wind currents or ocean currents yet.
Once I get my geography and climates a bit more hammered out, then I'll start posting about the individual nations.
I would like some concrete feedback, if you would be so kind.
First: is there anything glaringly problematic or unrealistic with the configuration of the continents?
Second: are my rough evaluations of climates on point, or am I way off base? Is there some interesting climate thing that I missed in my evaluation, like where monsoons are going to happen?