Building a world from the Map up ...

Of the many ways to start building a world, my favourite is to crank out the graph paper (or it's more modern incarnation, the mapping program), and cranking out a few maps. My approach is definitely top down: I like to start with the big picture, and then focus down. As a bonus, when I need to add quick background, I have a feeling for the general history, even if not the specific. In this series, I'm going to apply that approach and eventually build a new world. Step 1 is to create a new world from scratch.

So I cranked up the map making apparatus, and fooled around until I had a map with a lot of potential. I used Fractal Terrains for this; in part because Fractal Terrains creates random maps that you can then modify as you will, and in part because it stores the map as a sphere, which can be projected using one of a variety of projections including the basic cylindrical projection used here.

And when I had the map I liked, I ported it over to Campaign Cartographer, a computer based mapping program, so that I could fool around with it.

At this point I haven't named the continents yet, nor have I really narrowed down any of the kingdoms. All of those are mutable. Instead I consider the age of the world at the current time: did intelligent life only recently appear (through evolution or perhap space settlement), or has it been around for a while. Or is the world, in fact, dying under it's own weight? For this world, I decide that it is reasonably old. There is perhaps ten millennia of recorded history, although there may be ancient artifacts much older than that. This runs somewhat equal to our own experience on this earth: we have a few records that are many millennia old, but they are very rare. But starting about six to eight thousand years ago the amount of records we have has exploded. So ten thousand years is a nice roundish number. We can always increase the amount of history later, to accomodate the lifespans of longer lived races.

Which brings us to a second point: what races live on this world? If we have elves or dwarves, who live for many centuries, we probably have a far longer history. If we have only short lived creatures, we can pare the history down in length, if not richness. So in this world, we're going with a fairly standard fantasy distribution: we will have long lived elves, insular but long lived dwarves, humans as we've known to come (and possibly love) them, as well as halflings and gnomes, which will be fairly similar, and differ mostly in temperament. There may be other races, but these will be the ones available for the players, and so I will concentrate on them first.

In standard fantasy, the various races tend to separate, given half a chance, with the exception of the human mongrels, who will try to live everywhere. (Perhaps because, of all the races, the human's life is the shortest.) So at this point I sketch in roughly where the various races are the most concentrated in the present day. The dwarves ... well, they prefer to dwell underground, being archetypal miners who quaff a lot of beer and sing about gold a lot. Or something like that. Arbitrarily, I put them in the central continent: it contains the largest mountain range, and is separated by water from the other landmass, allowing them a little of the isolation they treasure. With several mountain ranges I can already see ways to split up clans along geographical lines. And then there's going to be a little migration, that happened in the distant past, over the narrow waterway on the top right. In short, since I'm going to start the adventure on the main continent, dwarves are probably going to be somewhat rare and mythical.

The other races all proliferate on the larger continent (the one that spans both sides of the maps). Halflings being mostly sedentary, and not inclined to mass migrations instigated by feuds, get a single are of influence in the flat lands. The gnomes surround them, in the nearby mountains, but have some far flung areas of interest. The elves, in contrast, are haughty snooty critters who argue on a regular basis about the quality of various elven clans. They get flung all over the map. And the humans? The humans, good old johnny come latelies, fill in the niches.

At this point I have a map with some interesting geographical features, and overlaid on it some current spheres of interest. Already the plot ideas begin to percolate: why did the halflings prosper here? Did they ever move en masse? And why are the elves here, and here, but not there? And how did the humans spread? Where did they start?

So next month I'll begin with the current spheres of interest, and work out some of the possible mass migrations that might have happened in the past. All of this is fairly arbitrary; we're making things up from scratch, after all.

There are exceptions, of course, to my approach; when I have a specific setting in mind, I skip the map making. But generally, I find that the maps evoke history. Once you see the physical barriers to trade it is easy to rationalize why these peoples over here are at war over local resources (such as good farmland?) and those people over there are fairly standoffish. Or why some groups travel expansively while others are stick in the muds who never leave their own village. Typically, the former have access to easy protohighways, such as calm placid rivers, long lakes, or easily traveled flatlands, while the latter live in isolated regions where travel is far harder to accomplish, let alone accomplish on a regular basis.