Talk:Ianian

. . . and even if the claims are bullshit, it's hard not to imagine it being an oft claimed bloodline.

• Totes agreed, good change -Slitherrr
  • And re: crossroads, that was what I was going for, so your change is much clearer. Teamwork! -Slitherrr
    • You're shocked my editorial hand is both light and well guided? What do you think I've been doing for the past decade? :P -gm
      • Hey, just giving credit where it's due. I'm used to responding to pull requests, where the context and structure makes +1 seem less like kissing ass. -Slitherrr

PERSIA

• P,E: Looking at that map, as far as low status high influence positions, whoever dredges that river mouth to allow maritime traffic is probably hugely influential. I remember reading somewhere about the major criticism of GRRM's otherwise quite naturalist map is that a huge number of cities are build on top of river mouths. In reality, very few cities actually do this because of silt buildup, etc. Then I thought about it and realized that, yeah, most cities are somewhere on or near rivers in the interior country, but for coastal cities that seems to be a lot less true. New Orleans is a huge obvious contra example, but that's one of the most heavily engineered riverways in the world.
  • New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle all qualify (and New York, but its geographic situation is weird). New Orleans and Chicago are also hugely influential, and like you say, they do a lot of work keeping those riverbeds in more-or-less the same place year after year (and sometimes fail at it). I'll ponder a bit to see if I can think of a way of hinting at that without making it a focus-Slitherrr

None of these became megaports until the industrial and transportation revolutions, though. and all of them rely on some not insubstantial dredging (aka magic). Compare with all the major cities of Europe and Asia built on rivers - Paris, London, Rome, etc. - and you find a city built upriver, maybe with a satellite port town close by on the coast. (Ostia for Rome, for example) A lot of times, also, you might find a big coastal city a few miles in either direction of the river's mouth, but especially in warmer regions, river mouths tend to be swampy shitholes not ideal for settlement except maybe by lizard people. MSA can chime in here, as he is an expert both on river systems and lizard people. -gm

I'm going to go with that other thing you said (magic), although obviously the real answer is "everyone who makes a fantasy map thinks London and Dover are the same city". Does Celestia count as a warmer region? This is all South of the Equator, right? Which is somewhere North of Sidhe Island? I was figuring Celestia's climate to be something like Scotland (cold and a bit rainy), which would probably make the Persia analog have a climate probably more similar to... I dunno, Mongolia? Coastal, but cold and dry, so less Washington and more Chile (because all the moisture would be being pushed to the Celstia side of the Heretic Sea). -Slitherrr

This sounds about right. It makes Celstia an appropriately Celtic level of dreary and cold. Odessa, of course, boasts a climate too diverse to be the British Isles proper, but might stand in as more of a British Empire forced backwards onto the past, with some very warm tropically areas in the North (India and Burma), some very Goldilocks temperate areas in the middle (South Africa), and some appropriately cold and gloomy areas in the South (England and Cornwall). This area currently being contested is more or less Wales: hills and lakes nestled in between mountains that is a hodge podge of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon influences.

This gives Alexia of Olde a Greek/Mediterranean flavor and the Alexia of present a dusty, windswept arid North Africa flavor in the desertifying sections of the east and a sort of Portugese geography in the formerly occupied West. Flannary's heartland is perfectly suited to be more or less that of provincial France, but Coastal Flannary would look and feel more like Normandy or Pas-de-Calais than Nice or Marsailles. Fresia is also the German states of the medieval imagination: the dark and gloomy forests of Grimm, the political schizophrenia of the HRE, along with the free cities and guilds of the Hansa.

Petara was basically fleshed out to be the Near East analog, so obviously with a lot of Persian and Islamic flavor. As the climate modeling for the mainland has become more clear, though, I've started to envision Petara - at least geographically - as less like a straight up Persia an Egypt and more like Persia as reflected by the successor states of Turkey and the Stans, with urbanized areas being more Samarakand and less Baghdad and the desert being more steppe and mountain and less, well, hot sandy wastes.

Sidhe-Praxen is the only land mass that's literally and fully in the tropics, so it's basically the only place to find jungles, sandy hot deserts, and rain-forests while still having high enough mountains to also have snow and glaciers. There is probably more geographic and biological diversity on the Sidhe islands than there is on the rest of the mainland combined.

It's hard to do better than Egypt as an example of urbanization of a river delta. Alexandria was the biggest city in the world for some period of the Greek era, and it's smack on the western edge of the delta and the coast. I haven't looked into this much, but I'm sure there are some pretty specific geological requirements to building a city on a delta (ie. bedrock and such). It's notable that Cairo was not in the delta proper, but more at the inland part where the delta began. Also notable that there were quite a few cities in the Delta. I think you can get away with delta cities in moderation, but I do think probably many deltas are not suitable for development. --Msallen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanis#mediaviewer/File:Lower_Egypt-en.png

Don't link me Alexandria like I never heard of it, jeeze. I named everyone's Goddess after the place! ;) It's certainly true what you say, but the Nile itself is pretty amazingly predictable and manageable as far as rivers go, but it's worth noting that alexandria was probably the most planned city of all the planned cities in basically in the history of the world. (Many of them, as it turns out, also named Alexandria) Floodlands is also generally lowlands which means floods can be frequent and devastating, and flood and fire are the two great urban disasters. Also, it was founded by Alexander the Great WELL into the development of the Nile River valley. In terms of Egyptian history, Alexandria is very late to the game. As much time passed between the first Pharaohs and the founding of Alexandria as has passed between the founding of Alexandria and us having this conversation. So, I think it's safe to say that Alexandria is anomalous in terms of river outlets. Additionally, it was founded basically by the most arrogant asshole in world history and incidentally probably the first person in the world to have a full idea of the physical geography of all of the heart of Afro-Eurasia. Also someone who whose general policy towards geography was "more elbow grease." I mean, he built a land bridge to a fucking island fortress just so he could lay siege to it more or less to prove a point. That's insane. I can't imagine the amount of labor it to to basically show up on a basically undeveloped swamp and say "The greatest city in the world goes here." It's certainly possible to plant a city directly on top of a river's mouth, and the advantages of doing so are pretty large when you get it up and running, but the startup costs are large enough that the generally organic forces that make tribes and peoples glom together into into urban units dissuades the practice, and the upkeep costs of keeping the harbor clear of silt and debris is enough that only the most strategically located cities generate the income to thrive. -gm

All true, I just cited Alexandria as a "did it happen" example. I'm sure there are also geographical requirements around the rock structure in the area and such, like Slith mentioned with NYC (which used to be a swamp, but has amazing bedrock). Of course, "because magic" basically means the world is probably more like a post industrial revolution world and has been for some time. What river is Ianian at the mouth of? Is it the short one that runs up to Stormchalice? If so, you could imagine the city is basically the most efficient route for Peteran, Celstian, and even probably Odessan goods to reach old Ubrekt and a lot of the central mainland, so it would be worth the aggravation to make it a big port. --Msallen

Sure. I only ever said it was very, very unusual for pre-modern cities to be situated at river mouths. In Westeros, like every major city that isn't Winterfell is on a river delta, and we can't even excuse it with "well magic," because High Magic is basically Not A Thing, and the Maesters seem a lot more theoretical than practical when it comes to engineering. I can't imagine ancient-ass Pycelle or any of the others out there on the riverfront supervising dredging projects. I think your read on Ianian is pretty solid, and I think I tried to set it up that way, and I think Slitherrr has done a good job expanding on that. -gm

Also: Alexandria isn't built on the Nile delta. It's to the west of the Nile's mouth. Even New Orleans isn't ON the river's outlet. Cities are just not built that way because you don't build cities on Swamps. The economic outcomes are bad and the public health outcomes are bad. And yet fantasy maps are ALWAYS putting cities on river mouths. absalom 14:54, 30 November 2014 (EST)

• E: I've read too much about ancient and classical cities to not always be really angry at some feature or another of fantasy cities. In this case, it drives me crazy all the dock frontage for Ianian is on the east, landward side. Probably there are significant docks for the blue water vessels south of the city not featured. Or so I tell myself. The east side docks are obviously smaller fishing craft and stuff. It's the only way it makes sense.
  • Ha, yes. It might be worth drawing some shitty mspaint piers on the West side, with some sort of artificial protective barrier (whatever would make sense with Move Earth and its ilk)--it doesn't make much sense to have them South of that wall, but it also would be some really shitty exposure to the Heretic Sea if it was just glommed onto the West side, there. -Slitherrr
    • I guess the main problem with that is that all the buildings on that side look really residential, but honestly, that's kind of a problem on the whole map--all that greenery and the size of the buildings makes the whole damn place look like a suburb, to me. -Slitherrr