30+ Lake Features For Fantasy Worldbuilding24 min read

Puddle and pond, lake and loch! Welcome back, Outlander, to the 3rd entry in Mythic Ecology, my series on how learning real-world landscape features can enrich our fantasy worldbuilding and storytelling. In this post I return to my minimalist framework for Dungeon Masters, Game Masters, fiction writers, and similar worldbuilders to merge the realms of general myth and geomorphology. Last week we looked at wetlands. As I resume my journey sketching a framework for designing Yridia, my unique D&D 5e fantasy world, let’s learn some lake terms, with a visual guide!

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Let’s revisit my minimalist framework for my worldbuilding, which will unfold gradually. The six archetype tags with which I will flag all the various real-world land features in my Mythic Ecology Series:

1. Settlements: habitable regions of either Work or Play, Familiar or Exotic, offering diverse narrative functions: a Day in the Life, Home Base, Personal Reasons, Gathering Supplies. Can subvert tropes with Ruins or Escape.
2. Omens: sensational, temporal, or particularly pointed features that offer narrative functions of forshadowing, and good or evil portents. Can subvert tropes with a Wild Goose Chase.
3. Overlooks: sites of magnitude and grandeur, living monuments which can function narratively for finding resolve, invoking spirits, or as a Call to Adventure. Can subvert tropes with Dread or Betrayal.
4. Passageways: transitional journeylands, including magical portals, functioning narratively for initiation and return, thresholds and tests, shortcuts and setbacks.
5. Abyss: a void or confined space presenting scarcity or temptation, desperation and danger. Can subvert tropes with a Timely Rescue or Secret Refuge.
6. Battlegrounds: sites fit for epic, sprawling encounters and climax conflicts. Can subvert tropes with Alternative Solutions.

Feel free to submit your own ideas, or draw outside the lines. Alright, let’s see how lakes fit in.

A “lake” simply refers to a large body of water localized in a basin and surrounded by land, apart from any outlet that would feed or drain it (forming an endorheic basin). A “pond” just refers to a smaller version of that. Likewise, “puddle” just refers to an even smaller pool of liquid, usually rainwater. Beyond that, “loch” just refers to the Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Scots word for lake or sea-inlet. Nothing too fancy.

Lakes come in several types based on origin. You can generally find them in mountainous terrain, rift zones, and regions of ongoing glaciation. Sometimes drainage basins, or near mature rivers, and particularly as the aftermath of former glaciers.

The basic categories of lakes for our purposes include: tectonic lakes, glacial lakes, fluvial lakes, solution lakes, landslide lakes, aeolian lakes, shoreline lakes, organic lakes, and impact lakes. Let’s take a look at those, before proceeding to some other types arising from content or behavior.

Formed by the deformation of the Earth’s crust and resulting lateral and vertical movements, such as faulting, tilting, folding, and warping.
[Settlements, Omens, Overlooks, Passageways, Battlegrounds]

Found in local depressions like craters or larger basins, such as volcanic calderas. A “maar” denotes a shallow one arising from explosions of groundwater meeting hot lava or magma.
[Settlements, Omens, Overlooks, Passageways, Abyss, Battlegrounds]

Created by glacial action and continental ice sheets. Includes versions with direct contact with ice, glacially carved rock basins and depressions, morainic and outwash lakes, and glacial drift basins.
[Settlements, Omens, Overlooks, Passageways, Abyss, Battlegrounds]

Epishelf Lake – highly stratified lake with a layer of freshwater, from ice and snow melt, dammed behind a coastal ice shelf.
[Omens, Overlooks, Abyss]

Finger Lake / Fjord Lake / Trough Lake – narrow linear body of water in a glacially overdeepened valley, sometimes impounded by a morainic dam. If one end touches the sea, can become a fjord or sea-loch.
[Overlooks, Passageways, Abyss]

Proglacial Lake – formed either by the damming action of a moraine as glaciers melt, as a glacial ice dam, or by meltwater trapped against an ice sheet.
[Omens, Overlooks]

Subglacial Lake – under a glacier, such as an ice cap or ice sheet.
[Settlements, Omens, Passageways, Abyss]

Tarn / Corrie Loch – a mountain lake, pond, or pool formed in a valley amphitheater (cirque) excavated by a glacier. Glacial debris may form a natural dam below it.
[Settlements, Overlooks, Passageways, Battlegrounds]

Produced by running water, especially rivers. Sometimes form as fluvialite dams when tributary sediment blocks the main river, or as a lateral lake when when the main river sediment blocks a tributary.
[Omens, Passageways, Abyss]

Mere – a shallow but broad lake, typically alongside a river rather than having a river run through it.
[Passageways]

Oxbow Lake / Billabong – crescent-shaped lakes forming in valleys from meandering rivers.
[Omens, Passageways, Abyss]

Plunge Pool / Tinaja – a deep recession in a streambed at the base of a waterfall or shut-in.
[Omens, Passageways, Abyss]

Typically underground, occupying a basin formed by bedrock dissolution, as groundwater fills cavities and sinkholes. Karst ponds indicate smaller ones. Becomes a karst lake if in an extensive closed depression in limestone. Most underground lakes occur in limestone.
[Omens, Overlooks, Passageways, Abyss]

Created by the mudflows, rockslides, or screes blocking valleys. Large and deep but short-lived.
[Omens, Overlooks, Battlegrounds]

Formed as basins dammed by sand from wind action. Found mainly in arid locales, or as remains of older arid climates.
[Settlements, Omens]

Created by blocked estuaries or uneven development of beach ridges.
[Omens, Overlooks, Passageways, Abyss]

Created by plant and animal action and typically short-lived, such as beaver dams, coral lakes, or vegetation dams. Can include bogs.
[Settlements]

Created by catastrophic impact of meteorites or asteroids.
[Omens, Overlooks, Passageways, Abyss]

Lakes also differ in their content or behavior, not just their drainage basin or catchment area, inflow or outflow, but also nutrient and oxygen profiles, pH, and sedimentation. We can add in the dimension of seasonality and time as well. For fantasy worldbuilding purposes, we’ll exclude thermal stratification classifications.

If lakes progress from Oligotrophic to Mesotrophic to Eutrophic states, their biological productivity increases due to higher nutrient contents, the water muddies and develops aquatic plants and algae, oxygen levels decrease, and fauna multiply, but eventually algae blooms may overtake the waters, causing suffocation.

In terms of storytelling and worldbuilding, the first suggests a mood of clarity and stability but scarcity as well, the last suggests murkiness and precarity but potential abundance, with the second lays somewhere in the middle. You can play out those moods storywise if you choose, using them to support themes.

See also: “Dry Lake” section in Temporal Lakes.

Acid Lake – naturally acid lakes can form from igneous and metamorphic landscapes, peat bogs, arid environments, or volcanic craters.
[Omens, Overlooks, Abyss]

Alkaline / Soda Lake – a strongly alkaline lake characterized by high concentrations of carbonate salts, typically sodium carbonate (causing their alkalinity). Many also bear high concentrations of sodium chloride and other dissolved salts, making them saline as well since high pH and salinity often coincide.
[Omens, Passageways]

Salt Lake / Saline Lake / Brine Lake – lake with a concentration of salts (typically sodium chloride) and other dissolved minerals significantly higher than most lakes.
[Omens, Passageways, Battlegrounds]

Dry Lake / Playa / Clay Pan – basin or depression which formerly contained a body of water, but evaporated. Includes alkali flats and salt flats / salt pans. May possess a phenomenon called sailing stones.
[Omens, Passageways, Abyss, Battlegrounds]

Ephemeral Lake – short-lived, drying up seasonally. Often fills karst fields (poljes).
[Omens, Passageways, Abyss]

Lacustrine Plain / Lake Plains – lakes filled by incoming sediment, which gradually drain to become a fertile plain, or else wetlands or desert.
[Omens, Passageways, Battlegrounds]

Playa Lake – shallow, intermittent and occupies playa either in wet seasons or in especially wet years only.
[Omens, Passageways, Abyss]

Shrunken Lake – existing lake which permanently shrunk considerably in size over time, possibly dividing.
[Settlements, Omens, Overlooks, Passageways, Battlegrounds]

Vlei – shallow lake varying considerably in level by season.
[Omens, Passageways, Abyss, Battlegrounds]

I hope you enjoyed this third entry in my Mythic Ecology series! I look forward to continuing with it, I have some greater ambitions for developing this series into worldbuilding web tools. Give this a share if you liked it, and let me know in the comments if you have any feedback. I publish new posts on Tuesdays. In the meantime, I post original D&D memes and writing updates daily over on my site’s Facebook Page. Also, if you want to keep up-to-date on all my posts, check out my Newsletter Sign-Up to receive email notifications when I release new posts. A big thanks as always to my Patrons on Patreon, helping keep this project going: Anthony, Eric & Jones, Geoff, Jason, and Rudy. Thanks for your support!