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Originally Posted by Anaraxes
You could also shift the river north or south, to change its position relative to this planet's analog of Hadley cells.
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Hmmm. So maybe something like the Patagonian desert, or Gobi desert? Though I think those are both noticeably colder than Egypt/Mesopotamia, where I'm drawing all my cultural inspiration from, and I'm not sure either ever hosted a river civilization. Plus, for reasons I'm somewhat unclear on, the Gobi doesn't extend all the way to the eastern coast of Asia. Maybe if that region were flatter the Gobi would extend further east?
On the whole, maybe I could get on board with this idea if I had a better sense of all the implications for the setting, but I'm not sure what those implications are.
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Or if you really want to make it not an analog of Earth, spin the planet the other way around.
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This crossed my mind but I'm not sure it's coherent. What do "east" and "west" even mean independent of the planet's spin?
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Originally Posted by Anders
Wouldn't it be easier to have the wind be the breath of the river god - one breath in and one breath out per year?
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That's not quite the flavor I want. That sort of thing implies "mythology all the way down", whereas I want a world that has a purely natural layer underneath all the supernatural stuff. Though could maybe see myself invoking a portal to the elemental plane of water, or a permanent weather control effect, somewhere in the highlands of the not-Nile's basin.
An option that hasn't been discussed is to have the not-Nile deflect either significantly north or significantly south once it's gotten ~100 miles beyond the "first cataract" / "Zagros mountains" region. But I'm concerned the results would be very unnatural looking on a bird's eye view of the map.