World Building Pt. 2 – Maps

February 3rd, 2010 by Lucas J.W. Johnson

I find this philosophy takes root even more when I almost set myself up for it. I placed a bunch of towns and cities and fortresses across my map, and found myself stuck with the task of naming them all. As I did, I first of all had to think of naming conventions — if this country is like English, it’s going to have -shires and -boroughs and things, whereas the one that borrows from mesoamerican culture is going to have names with tl and z and other specific letter combinations.

But second of all, I would name things with words. “Storm Keep,” on an island in the middle of the sea. Why is it called Storm Keep? At present, I have no answer. Maybe it’s surrounded by a perpetual storm, brought on by terrible magics. Maybe it’s home to a powerful storm wizard. Maybe it was conquered by orckish fleets during a major storm, or by a fleet called the Storm Fleet. Whatever I end up going with, the random name I came up with will have added something to the history of the world.

(I even do this with stories themselves sometimes; I’ll put in some note the characters find and I’ll include references to things that mean nothing to me. Then later in the writing process, it’ll come back and suddenly those things will have importance and meaning. Sometimes those random meaningless additions have actually helped solve plot problems for me in the future — this has actually happened multiple times. Randomness seems to favour me.)

Putting it all together

So I sketch, and I make stuff up, and suddenly I have a fairly vibrant, full world. And of course it’s nowhere near done — all I really have is some land and some countries and cities and names of things that don’t mean a lot and some vague ideas about culture and national histories and conflicts. But with this opening sketch, I can see what else I have to fill in — and more importantly, I have a lot of room to play in. With a world this big, I can have a place for anything I might need, and any random idea I come up with can have a home.

And so I went from a basic sketch:

(note how I ran out of space in the bottom right corner and did an inset sketch of the rest; note too how I realized I wanted to move things after sketching them, and drew little arrows)