The Elemental Empire - part 5 - Terrain Digressions

    Okay, I meant to do a post on the technology I wanted in my new setting, but I'm not going to hit that today.  I've had some ideas about the setting in general that may have me change some things in a pretty big way (while it may not seem like I have a lot of detail for this setting there is actually a lot in my head that I haven't posted yet).  So while I'm re-evaluating things I'm just going to throw out a quick post on some work I've been doing.
    I've been slowly adding terrain and detail to my world map so let me share some of that while I'm working on bigger things.  This is the continent with the Elemental Empire as it currently stands...

    I want a lot of different terrain types in the Empire.  To the south is a mostly desert, though I'm thinking it'll be a region that is pure desert at the top and that is very fertile at the south, someplace that floods like Egypt/ The Nile.
    There are two major mountain ranges to the West and East which divide the Empire.  They are a little too wide proportionally right now, I am still working on this.  They make up the forested lands.  The central Empire is the capitol, inside the ring of magically-created forest (the capitol itself isn't on the map yet) and a lake.  The surrounding farmland keeps the capitol fed, and there are only a few passes through the high mountains to the western and eastern halves of the Empire.  The artic north is sparsely inhabited.  On the south-eastern tip of the continent is a swampy area that may or may not be a part of the Empire (thinking it's uninhabited, with the forested northern parts being more inviting to live in).  Now that I've started laying out the terrain I might have to go and re-draw the shape of the continent.  The big landmass to the north of the capitol seems strange to me, and I'm thinking of adding a lot of islands to the western side.

I'm using the Sketchy Cartography Brushes by StarRaven on Deviantart (link here) which are awesome, a big thinks to him (her? never can tell online) for the great art.

I also found a couple of cool links on making terrain/ climate.  There is this post on Mythcreants about coloring the map (which I mostly ignored :) and this other post on creating plausible maps.  The Tao of D&D had a link to this cool Wikipedia post about the Koppen climate classification system too.

    Okay, admittedly this is not a very big post, but I will have much more detailed stuff to come, promise :)