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When I last posted here over a year ago, I had a map that looks like this:
At that point, I was planning on mapping out the rest of the world and adding new nations and cultures, cool landmarkes, and all that jazz. IÂ looked at some articles of weird natural wonders and stuff to try to get some ideas. During World Anvil’s writing challenges, I came up with some cultures besides the Khezvarans, Empire, Horse Lords, and those crazy Guy Ritchie Russian gangsters withe the mines and the goats. Even with those ideas, I’d need to come up with a lot more stuff before having enough info to create a typical fantasy world map.
Since I’m waiting for editors to finish up The Blasphemous Temple of Yargolith, I decided to use the brief break from the project to get back to the map. For a minute, I considered how much I’d need to fill out the map and almost put it back down again. Then I realized something: Trying to map out the whole world is the kind of Tolkien shit thats’ so ingrained into the hobby that even gamers who are as ambivalent about Tolkien as me default to that way of thinking. I’m a goddamn American! I’m not building some fancy Oxford-educated diorama, I’m building a place to tell stories.
So here’s the plan: I’m going to follow the lead of American pulp greats like Howard and Leiber and stick to detailing what I need for what I’m doing right now and saving the rest for when it’s useful. That means the map is finished (for now) as soon as the relevant stuff I’ve already written about (and maybe a few things I’m confident I will write about) have a home on it. Everything else will get added later as I think of it.
With my “Just finish the damned thing” plan in place, I looked at the map and immediately realized that some of those greens were a little bit tricky to tell apart, so the first thing I did was play around with the colors a bit. While I was at it, I decided that the cold desert north of the empire seemd like it should be on a plateau, so I added some cliff icons and effects to raise it up. Then I added some hills to show a more gentle increase of altitude between the desert and the coast. Finally, I added a couple of fog layers to give the thing a little texture.
Once that was done, it was just a matter of adding the cities, regions, and names. After testing a couple of cartography brushes and map assets that look like little drawings of cities, I decided that good old-fashioned dots worked better for this particular map. I might use the fancier symbols later if I do layers showing political borders or roads or something. Except for on spot (The Kingdom in the Clouds), everything named on the map appears somewhere in the information on the [url:https://www.worldanvil.com/w/city-of-ten-thousand-daggers-kingyak|tab]C10KD World Anvil page[/url].
At this point I thought I was done, and even posted the map thinking it was finished. Then I remembered that the forests and stuff on the map are based on the original Fantasy Map Maker maps–so more or less what the world would look like if humans hadn’t gotten their paws on it. Even though the various craters and stuff from the cataclysm were going to wait, I needed to at least deforest the place a bit. In keeping with the “only worry about what’s important right now” philosophy, I decided to only worry with the areas around Khezvaros and the imperial capital. I needed some open plains West of Khezvaros to give the Horse Lords some more space, it made sense that the Tarsans would clear cut the forest in the central river valley for crops, and the empire would also need to clear out some forests to make farmland. Everything else will get terraformed as I figure out what’s there.
That finishes up the map, at least for now. I’ll definitley add to it and make changes as I develop the world, but I doubt there will be much to say about those changes since they’re just repeating what I’ve already done. I do have plans to rework the Khezvaros city map at some point, but I’m not sure when I’ll get to it.
