Meanwhile in the fandom...

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BRUH WHAT KIND OF BLACK MAGIC IS THIS 😂😂

HOW DID YOU GET IT SO SPECIFIC I actually think I might cry I’m scared.

You know who I feel bad for? THE FRIENDS.

Like imagine you know this couple and they're kinda weird but hey you're friends and it ain't like you aren't weird yourself.

And then one day one of them shows up as an elf. And the other one, naruto. And it's INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS that they're playing some sort of mind game or power game with each other.

Okay okay my god okay okay

First NOW it's spiraling? Now, buddy? You think it's getting out of hand NOW????

Second, break up or act like adults. Sorry, you're both in your 20s? You two need to sit down and have a conversation about this, and moreso about your communication problems. And the mind games clearly being played here.

Doing what she's doing is going to solve what, exactly? This IS petty and ultimately causing more problems than it's solving. To say nothing of what might be going on with her.

Cities - go near water!  freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there.  Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.

for rivers in general - because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end.  rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat

mountains - i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains!  mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey).  a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half.  These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks

Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact.  think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies

forests - depends on how warm the area might be.  coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too

If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower).  if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)

You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)

and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains

Though, for fantasy, you can make the world operate on entirely different principles:

With that done, the actual topic of city placement can be covered by videos like this:

Or

Once you have your places, if you want help naming them in realistic ways, this video can help:

This one is on architecture, which is definitely a subset of cities:

But for a more relevant practical guide on making settlements realistic:

Here’s a quick guide for making demographics:

”The Dawn Will Come” overlaid with the song that plays at the Battle of Ostagar in Origins–remember the part when King Cailan’s army prepared to face the Darkspawn horde? The soldiers bracing themselves, the Chantry priestess swinging incense? This is the song that plays during that scene. It is sometimes mistaken for the Origins title theme.

The musical and visual connections across the entire Dragon Age franchise are fantastic, and when I first played through the best scene in Inquisition the fall of Haven, I thought of that scene at Ostagar immediately.

From ancient to abstract, this one sure got around.