What’s your world look like? Part 2 of the Fantasy World Building Series

Introduction:

Welcome to Part 2 of the Fantasy World Building section of my Fantasy Novel Writing series. I’m excited to see you back. Today I want to discuss map making, why it is important, and why this junction in story creation is, in my opinion, the right time to start creating your map. Before we begin I just want to say don’t worry about fully fleshing out your map before moving on. That isn’t required. Spending more time than what you need to get oriented before setting the rest of the world down in stone will only serve to slow you down. You can add things later as you need them.

Why are we starting the map making now instead of later? I mean there is plenty of time to create a map after you know who the kingdoms are and how they evolved right? The answer isn’t an easy one. In some senses it is just a matter of taste. Some of us want to make a map and decide how locations effect where political borders and environments have effected the evolution of the cultures there, and some of us want to make the map based around how we want the cultures and political borders to have been drawn. Neither of those stances is wrong, and depending on the kind of story you are writing one can lend itself better than the other. For our purposes making the map first simply makes the last three steps easier on us. This map will gives us a shape and structure to use to infer a lot about how our cultures have gotten to how they are.

There are several ways to draw maps. You can drawn them by hand on paper, use computer programs like Photoshop, Campaign Cartographer, or Fractal Mapper, or use a mix of computer and free hand. I’ve done all three and what I have found works best for me is a stylus and a tablet. I use a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with an Apple Pen with the Procreate program. There are dozens of programs you can use to create your map depending on what platform you are using. I won’t get into how to decide what is best for you to use because that would take up an entire article all on its own. I do advise using a program that allows for you to create and edit images by layers. Layers allow you to select a section of your drawings, say just the mountains, and edit those without risk of harming other elements. They also allow you to hide elements you don’t need so you can focus on exactly what you need.

Land:

We’ll start here with simple fractal lines. In cartography fractal just means that the lines are jagged and pseudo random. This allows us to get the feeling of a natural coastline. It is important to not attempt to draw a world map. Keeping it down to a small region like Westeros and the surrounding islands or the Seven Satrapies is good for defining where the major players of the story exist while not allowing us to become so overly ambitious we need a thirty book series to simply address all the major powers. For this example I started off with a bit more than I needed but as you will see later I solved that problem by ignoring it.

Depending on your story you may wish to stick with only islands or a small continent and its surrounding islands, or you may want a subsection of a large continent. There are no wrong answers here. In my opinion you should have fun and test out unique shapes and strange inlets and bays, but you’d be just as right to model it off small subsections of the Earth. The sky is the limit here. Just make sure to close all of your land masses or trail them off screen to they look complete and to make your lines as fractally as possible to simulate those majestic shorelines.

Land Color:

For land color the best advice I have been given is to use water colors or a water bleed effect. For my map I chose the water bleed effect. Most standard fantasy maps that have the Lord of the Rings kind of vibe to them use water colors. Depending on the effect you want you can use other styles. I honestly don’t know enough about visual art to help more with that though.

For your reference you can make the more arctic parts of your map an icy blue, deserts sandy browns, plains varying shades of gold, green, and brown, etc. You may wish to extend this kind of terrain coloring to everything from marshlands to peat bogs to forests or you may want to use symbols for those smaller terrain elements. Neither choice is wrong. I think the symbols look better if you have the talent to draw them. I’m nowhere near that talented and so I use color to code it for me.

For this map I only have tundra and plains elements. There aren’t forests in this region because the environment is still recovering enough to them. This decision has major implications upon the world I’m building and effects a lot of what we will cover in the next three articles.

Mountains:

Mountains are the bane of many amateur cartographer. They give us the problem of trying to know where the tectonic plates are in the world and figuring out how they change weather patterns. It’s all really a mess. I’m not perfectly knowledgeable on this subject so I always go into this understanding that while I may get how some of this stuff is understood to function on Earth wrong that I need to stick with whatever I decide as if that is the law of the land, and so should you. None of us here are master geologists and meteorologists. None of us or your readers expect you to be.

When it comes to picking where your mountains and ranges will be I try to place them where I want them to impede the flow of traffic, create a desert, or create rivers and lakes. If I place them in areas where it doesn’t feel makes sense that a tectonic plate only effects those spots I extend the range or make it spotty. A lot of people have problem with the spotty mountain range concept because they don’t think they exists. Lucky for us they do. Oklahoma has one or two. The key thing to about them is that the areas between them will be hilly. There may be spots of relatively flat land as well but the dominate characteristic should be hills.

For purposes of deciding whether a mountain range is likely to result in a desert on the other side I have simple advice. If one side is close to a major body of water then it likely blocks rain from getting to the other side. If the other side is quite distant from water it will likely have some desert regions along the spots where the rivers don’t flow. The further away this dry side of the mountain is from a main body of water the dryer its climate will be. Rivers and lakes that flow through these regions should also be considered when deciding how dry a region will be.

Bodies of Water:

Rivers: Rivers tend to spawn from melting ice on mountain tops and flow into the sea. Some of the time they may spawn from underground springs. In Either case they always flow toward the sea.

Lakes: Lakes tend to form in areas where there are either hills or natural depressions in the land, like where a meteor struck the planet. Sometimes rivers will stop at a lake and sometimes a lake or pond is just a pit stop for the water on the way to the ocean.

In both of these situations I simply draw the bodies with a shade of blue. Rivers and lakes are important for social construction and should be placed with care. If you want a society to be trade deprived, for example, then you shouldn’t put them on a river that leads to a bustling trade port. Similarly if you don’t want them to have a lot of agriculture you shouldn’t have a large number of rivers flow through their territory. You are the master of your world, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take placing these items seriously. They have profound effects on civilizations and how they develop.

Water Color:

In this stage I just fill in the lakes and use the darker blue colors to show that certain sections are deeper than others.

Political Borders:

Creating political borders is where everything gets fun. These borders help you show where nations set the boundaries they will defend as their own and what resources they have to empower themselves. When drawing your borders you should take the surrounding landscape, the resources the landscape has, and how willing the nation in question is to defend resources that are in difficult to defend positions.

For my map there are additional bad lands where powerful monsters and zombies live. This adds another layer to my borders because some of the land is labeled as uninhabitable by the governments. This creates large swaths of land where people will not travel outside of a caravan, and where no government will claim as their own. This results in nations being less than willing expand beyond certain sizes that their land can sustain. In any other setting this would be unrealistic and tribes, governments, etc would claim as much land as they can to their people. In the case of the world I’m using as an example only outlaws and social exiles even attempt such feats and none of those are powerful enough to warrant a political border.

Cities:

When it comes to placing cities I only place the ones where I plan to have useful activities occur at first. Later I come through and will decide which one is the capital based on what each nation prioritizes in their government structure.

To denote a city I place a simple dot wherever I want it to be and write a name or placeholder nearby it.

For naming cities, and sometimes countries, I look online for cities in countries I want to model aspects from and either combine parts of names or identify patterns in the naming schemes and use those. This allows me to set up an expectation for the people in a region to behave like something we see in the real world without every having to directly state it.

Notes:

I’ve save the notes section for last, but you should probably be making these throughout your map making process. Every time you think of a place where something useful might be for your story, or where you have a thought about what a kingdom is like, or where monsters should be, or anything that you think is relevant it’s safe to jot it down on your map. The map is your tool and you should use it like one. My maps vary in the detail of the notes I embed in them. Often times when I make a map it is for a one shot adventure in Dungeons and Dragons and I will riddle it with notes about things I want to happen in specific spots on the story or important elements I need my players to know. That same kind of thought process transfers nicely to making a map for a fantasy story. No detail is too small unless you deem it so. Have fun with it. This will come in more handy than any other step as we progress through creating our setting.

Further reading:

For more detailed information on how to make beautiful maps for your stories or just for fun I advise continuing on with the book pictured above. It is the best resource I have been able to find on the subject and can answer questions on this topic more reliably than I can.

I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful. If you have any further questions about map making feel free to leave me a comment or send me a message. I will try to answer these as quickly and efficiently as I can.

Stay tuned for the next post where I will address how to create a magic system from scratch that fits your world, and to share your progress with #fantasynovel2018 if you want to participate and build a world alongside us.

Stay safe and keep writing.