Category: Map Creation and Considerations

Saturday Setups – Global Mapping: Terrain Features Pt. 2

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

As a quick announcement, the worldbuilding posts will be moving to Saturdays to be a part of the blog section Saturday Setup, which will deal with different aspects of setting up your story world. The posts will, for now, be up every other week, just as they have been so far. With that out of the way, let’s get started!

Last time we took a look at global mapping, we looked at some of the main terrain features of a map. If you haven’t read Saturday Setups Global Mapping – Terrain Features Pt. 1, you should start there since the features you lay down based on that post will affect what ends up happening here. If you’ve already read it, you should be well on your way to creating a working map for your world, and you’re ready for this step.

With your mountains, rivers, and forests in place, it’s time to consider the last part of your terrain. What type of land are you working with? Tundra, foothills, deserts, or rainforests?

Deciding What Terrain Should Be Placed Where

When considering an area of land, one of the more important decisions is what kind of terrain it will be. Should it be a desert wasteland, a swamp, or a sunny lakeside oasis? Much of this will depend on the land features you already placed. If you have a mountain range nearby, the terrain right below the mountain range is considerably more likely to be hilly than it is to be a flat grassland or frozen tundra.

So, how do you decide what terrain goes where? Let’s take a look at the main kinds of terrains and where they’re most likely to occur. Then, you can put these principles into practice and start marking them in on your map. In the resources section, there will be some links to map-making sites to give you ideas for how to mark different types of terrain as you work.

Deserts

Typically, deserts are areas of terrain without much vegetation due to a lack of water. However, they can also form due to salt poisoning or exhaustion of the soil. They can be sandy or stretches of hard-baked ground, bare rock, or even snow.

Deserts are often located on the equator line because, on an Earth-like planet, the flow of warm and cool air causes the dry, arid climate conducive to a desert that’s incredibly hot. These are the subtropical deserts. For frozen deserts, they’re more often located near the poles or in areas of extreme cold (Siberia in Russia is one example of this on Earth).

There’s another factor in the creation of deserts. Mountains. Those ranges of peaks you placed? Yes, those have an impact on where your deserts may be located. While the air pressure caused by warm and cool air at the equator is one cause for those massive stretches of barren wasteland, mountains are another common cause.

But not every mountain range has a desert on one side of it, so how do you decide if yours should? This has to do with the moisture available in the air and the wind flow. Deserts formed by mountains occur due to the flow of wind over the mountains. As air flows up over the peaks, it leaves much of the moisture in it on the mountain peaks in the form of snow.

This leaves the air coming down from the mountain with much less moisture than it initially had, so as it moves further inland from the mountain range, it can end up creating deserts. This is considered the rain shadow of the mountain. If you choose to create this sort of mountain (and it’s likely you’ll have at least a few), keep in mind that it should always be on leeward side of the mountain.

The third kind of desert is a coastal desert. This one is formed when cold ocean currents contact the warmer air to create a dense layer of fog. These deserts may not get any rain, but they’re usually still wet because of the fog that has caused them to be unable to grow vegetation.

Finally, you have interior deserts. These occur far inland in places where moisture-laden wind simply can’t reach. This kind of desert may also lay in a rain shadow in part or whole. The Gobi desert in Asia is one example of an interior desert. It’s hundreds of kilometers from the sea, making it too far away to gain a moisture-laden wind. The Gobi desert is also in the rain shadow of the Himalayas.

Plains

Plains are flat ranges of land that can be grassland, forest, desert, or tundra. There are also flood plains and volcanic plains. I’ve already covered deserts above, and tundra is just frozen expanses of land that could also classify as polar deserts depending on the vegetation level. (Surprisingly, tundra can support a variety of mosses and small shrubs.) However, let’s take a look at the grassland, forested, flood, and volcanic plains.

To begin, let’s look at the most common type seen on Earth. Grassland plains. These plains are identified by the main type of vegetation: grass. Depending on the region and climate, grassland plains can go by a few different names. For instance, the temperate plains in the US are considered just grassland or prairie. These have warm summers and cold winters. But the temperate plains in Asia are considered steppes, since they don’t receive enough rain to grow any tall trees or bushes. Lastly, the subtropic plains in Africa or other regions are called savannas because they’re warm and have scattered trees.

The second type of plain is the forested plain. These ones can occur in many places but are characterized by their variety of trees, shrubs, and vegetation.

Rivers create the third type of plain. Floodplains occur when a river overflows its banks and begins depositing nutrient-rich soil as it does. If the river floods often enough, the sediment can build up to create a floodplain. The Nile River is one notable example of this.

Volcanic plains, the last kind of plain I’ll discuss here, occur because lava has shoved its way up from underground to flow out over the land. This creates land that’s darker than the rest of the land around it, due to the basalt, a mineral found in lava that breaks down into the earth. The soil can be very nutrient-rich and is capable of sustaining vegetation.

Marshes and Swamps

Marshes are wetlands formed on the edges of bodies of water like rivers or lakes. They often help to transition from aquatic to land life. Generally, marshes can grow reeds, low-lying bushes, rushes, and grasses. They’re divided into three categories based on salinity. Salt marshes are the only marshes that are usually only located at mid-to-high altitudes. The other two types are freshwater marshes and tidal marshes, which are affected by the tides.

Swamps, on the other hand, are regions with a mixture of shallow bodies of water and land masses. They move slowly and sustain plenty of bugs and leeches. Many other animals also call the swamp home, and the vegetation that grows there varies widely. Generally, swamps are dangerous areas that should be admired from a distance. Not only are there many dangerous animals, but swamps also contain quicksand or similar features that lead to drowning. Swamps are also considered wetlands and may also be called bogs or, in some cases, salt marshes.

Conclusion

Using this as a guide, you should be able to map out most of the main features needed for your world. Of course, there will always be more you can learn about different types of terrain, but this should be enough to give you a good start. The other features are often found within these main biomes or terrains, making it simple to add them later on the map or on a localized map.

Further Reading

Photoshop Map Tutorial (A good place to start learning to map digitally if you enjoy digital art.)

Mapping trees (Helpful for marking out those wooded plains.)

Fantastic Maps Tutorials (A bunch of random map-making tutorials to help you get started.)

Examples of Map Symbols

Saturday Setups – GLobal Mapping: Terrain Features Pt. 1

Ariel Paiement1 Comment

Introduction to Terrains

Hey, everyone! I’m back this week with a post on world-building. Today’s post is the first to delve into the global side of mapping, and we’re looking at terrain considerations first. Terrain affects a lot of your world-building. After all, if your characters are living in a desert, their lifestyle will be far different from a character living in the jungle.

Not only that, the distance between various points and the terrain lying between those points will greatly affect things like travel time and how characters choose to travel. What you do with the terrain determines whether it’s easy to find water or difficult to find much needed resources.

With the importance of terrain established, let’s take a look at some of the things you need to put onto your map and work through. Keep in mind as you think about all this that the map you’re building doesn’t have to end up in the front of your novel. It doesn’t even have to be pretty. It just has to be functional so that you can use it for your own reference.

So, on that note, let’s get started.

Mountains

There are plenty of places you could start with mapping, but I recommend you start with your mountains. These majestic features will form the backbone of your world. Where they are placed will determine a great deal about the kind of land (lush and green or barren and sandy), the places where certain kinds of plants and trees can grow, and what types of animals will be found where.

Without being too technical, air flow is changed a great deal when it runs into mountain ranges, and that air current affects everything around it. It even affects how often it rains and how much rainfall an area might get, particularly if the land is close to the mountain range.

So place these first. You can worry about coastlines, forests, and cities later. Those are all important, but not this important.

As you’re placing those mountains, here are a few guidelines you should keep in mind.

First of all, mountain ranges occur mostly where tectonic plates have crashed into each other because land masses were closer than they should’ve been. Some of the mountains in these ranges may be volcanic, but you can have entire mountain ranges with no volcanic activity.

On the other hand, if you have single mountains with no ranges around them, they’re almost guaranteed to be volcanic. This means you shouldn’t place single mountains all over the place. The volcanic activity will have a big affect on everything around it, as you can imagine. Place these types of mountains carefully and with an awareness of what it does to the surrounding terrain and natural habitat.

Using these guidelines, you can end up with chains, ridges, long plateaus, and even circles of mountains.

Wherever there are mountain ranges, there should also be foothills and rugged terrain from where the ranges were worn down and weathered. Make sure you include these in your map for any planning in the later stages. It will change how cities and civilizations in those areas are built.

The last major thing you should consider is the extension of mountain ranges past the places where the coastlines may end up. Mountain ranges often form little islands or peninsulas, so this adds a more realistic feel to your fantasy world. You can use this and sprinkle those features here and there on the coastlines to help add to the believability of the world’s terrain.

Coastlines

The second place to fill in is your coastline. Before you can start mapping out major locations and country borders, you have to know how much space you’re working with. Drawing in the coastlines will help you to do this and will give you a framework to work within.

While working on this step, you should also decide the mileage on your map. In other words, decide how much space your world covers. This will help when you’re working on the global borders between countries, filling in the major cities, and even mapping those cities out on a more localized scale.

As a general rule of them, coastlines are fractal in nature when viewed from a distance. The continents are formed through the sorting of rock and soil by the plate tectonics. The heavier materials are on the bottom and the lighter on the top, which gives the coastlines the fractal appearance you see when looking at the contours of both the coast of a small territory and the coast of an entire continent.

However, there are things that can mess this up. Regions won’t look the same zoomed in or far away when you start including tidal flats or beaches, river deltas, mountains and glaciers (or a combination of the two), flat regions that include shifting barrier islands, or continents that haven’t had sea-level ice in a long time. To better understand how to map these features, if you want to include them in your world, you should study maps of these features on Earth. Understanding what it looks like in the real world and why it works the way it does will help you to develop a system that works for your own world.

However you end up choosing to shape your continents, make sure that the coastlines are–as a general rule of thumb–rough and ragged. They shouldn’t be smooth and pristine because that isn’t true to geographical features or to science. Fantasy may break rules, but even a fantasy world has some sort of plate movement and continental shaping that will be somewhat like ours.

Rivers

Rivers are next up. This is going to play a large part in defining the climate of your world. Plus, water sources are a must for life, and with your mountains and coastlines in place, you’re ready to start placing those rivers where civilizations often spring up.

This might be one of the simpler steps on your map since rivers follow some fairly simple, straightforward rules. And they don’t deviate from these rules unless you get a ton of magic involved. So, here are the rules you need to follow for your rivers:

  1. Rivers flow along the easiest path of least resistance: high elevation to low elevation. Never the other way around.
  2. As your rivers travel toward the coastlines, they will merge. They will never separate.
  3. Rivers going across flat land may change course by creating ever-wider loops. Eventually, however, the loops will pinch off and straighten the river back out.
  4. Rivers in mountainous regions may change course due to blockages or changes in elevation. But they will always find the path of least resistance and follow that.
  5. Rivers provide life to small towns and beginning cities. Wherever you have a river mouth, you’ll probably have some sort of civilization. So, if you know you want a city in a specific location, make sure there’s a fair-sized river close by.
  6. Lakes should only have one river flowing out of it toward the sea, never two. There’s only one lowest point, and that’s where the water will flow. The river may split off later, but it won’t with the lake.
  7. Deltas form when a river carrying sediment hits: a body of water (ie: lakes, oceans, reservoirs), another river that cannot carry away enough of the sediment quickly enough to stop buildup, or inland regions where water can spread out and deposit sediments. Keep in mind that the tidal currents can’t be too strong, or they’ll wash away the sediment.

Finally, the source of the river is important. Most rivers start in a mountain region somewhere since mountains catch a lot of water. However, they may also begin at lakes or in marshy regions. Some may also be fed by heavy rainfall for part of the year and be completely dry for the other part. The key is that wherever the source may be, the river won’t empty into the source as well. It will start at one point and end somewhere completely different.

Lakes

This section is fairly simple as well. Lakes usually form because rivers hit a basin of some sort or were dammed up by something. They may also form as a result of water collection in craters left by meteor impacts, but these sorts of lakes are fairly rare. The largest lakes usually occur because pieces of a continent pulled apart or glaciers carved them.

In cold, rocky regions, there are often many small lakes connected by rivers because the water is unable to carve through the ground and must simply filter from one pool to the next. This causes a tangle of rivers and streams connecting all the little lakes.

In hot and dry regions, you shouldn’t be including any significant lakes unless there’s a large river to feed them. Instead, you’re more likely to end up with salt flats or tiny lakes at the bottom of a dry basin. The lakes are likely to be very salty since they can’t drain off into the ocean. If you do have the river to feed it, the lakes are highly likely to overflow their shores and cause a larger drainage area, so keep that in mind when drawing your rivers in desert regions.

Lakes also shift their boundaries, but when they do so, it’s much more cataclysmic. If they fill or drain too much, they can destroy entire civilizations, so if they shift their boundaries, be ready to include the catastrophes it caused in your world’s history. The historical trauma is fairly common in the earlier stages of a world’s history, but as things stabilize, it becomes less common on a level that would be civilization-shattering.

Forests

The last thing we’ll cover in this post is forest placement. In a following post, I’ll discuss how you can determine where to place hot and dry regions, deserts, swamps, and hilly regions. But for now, this is a lot of information to digest, so I’ll stick to the prominent land features that you need to have a basic map.

That said, what do you need to consider for forests? First of all, forests usually spring up in areas with a temperate climate and ample rain. This means you could have massive forests covering large portions of your map so long as the climate isn’t too cold or dry. You won’t, therefore, see forests in prairie land or areas with a sub-arctic type of climate.

What kinds of trees are growing in your forest depends largely on the region. On Earth, mountains can house fir trees, pine, cedar, oak, dogwood, and a variety of other trees depending on what section of the mountain is being examined and the area the mountain is located.

Of course, on a fantasy world, there are likely species of trees that don’t exist on Earth, so the main goal with those species of trees would be to make sure they have features that will allow them to survive in the climate you’re placing them in. This means you’ll need to do some research on the types of trees and the features that make them suited for one climate or another.

Conclusion

Okay, that’s it for this post! There are a lot of considerations to think about when mapping out your world. As you work, don’t worry about being perfect. The map will be messy. And since it isn’t meant for anyone else’s reference, it doesn’t need to be pretty. If the map is pretty, it will only make it harder for you to trash it and try something different if you aren’t satisfied with it.

So, experiment and feel free to be loose, messy, and spontaneous. Try to be realistic about where you place things, but feel free to try different things, make different layouts, and change things up until you find something that you’re truly satisfied with.

Next time I post about world-building, we’ll take a look at global mapping and some other important aspects of terrain. We’ll also briefly go over the placement of cities and civilizations since you’ll likely want to show the more important locations on your map for your reference. However, I’ll leave the details of mapping the cities themselves for the section on local-scale mapping.

Feel free to share any techniques you like to use for mapping in the comments if you have them. We can all benefit from learning new ways to do things!

Saturday Setup: Local Mapping – City Layouts

Ariel Paiement

We’re finally to the local mapping! I know this is all a lot of groundwork and information, but I promise it does help to think about these things. But there’s only one more post on mapping before we turn our attention to other aspects of world-building and setting up the story elements.

So, let’s dive right in!

This post won’t be as long, but I’ll go over locations for cities and some ways they might be arranged.

Location

Cities are usually located near a large river or port of some sort. This makes sense if you think about it because cities are hubs of commerce, and this means they need a way to transport goods. Doing so via water makes this much easier than it is for land-locked places, especially if the infrastructure of your world is more medieval or hasn’t developed tech like trains or planes.

More importantly still, cities need a water supply. They have a lot of people who need that water too, so they have to have a large source nearby. And it can’t be saltwater, so having water from a large river, mountain streams, or unpolluted ground water means the difference between survival and extinction.

Other places cities might be located are in places along established trade routes, mineral-deposit rich land, places with lots of natural resources, or mines for precious stones and commodities. Water might be the most important resource a city’s founders look for, but they’re looking for the ways they’ll make money in the future too.

A final point to consider is defendability. Particularly for cities where warfare was or still is a major threat to their livelihoods, locating on the high ground or in a place that’s difficult to attack is a must. This includes building on top of high hills, building with two rivers or large bodies of water surrounding one or more sides of the city, and building in places where mountain ranges provide a solid defense against invasion.

Layout

Besides location, the city’s layout is also important. The way a city is organized determines a lot about the city. If you have it built with narrow streets and alleys, you may have people crowded in on top of each other, meaning more people can live there, but no one will be getting carts through those streets. But if you build it with larger spaces between houses and shops, you’ll have fewer people living in the city in exchange for more room to maneuver.

Beyond that, cities usually have some sort of divide between rich and poor. Every city, particular in a fantasy setting where it’s more medieval in nature, has its slums or poor districts and its rich districts. And when they’re all packed in on top of each other, the divide is that much clearer.

Then you have the castle, assuming the city is the capital or houses a major noble. Depending on the political structure, nobility might not live in a castle, but if it’s some sort of fief or a smaller city structure, perhaps they do. The castle would be the city-dwellers’ last line of defense if invaders broke through the outer and inner walls. So it would be located at a central point in many cases so that fleeing there would be equally convenient for everyone.

Besides building structure, you also have to consider how the city gets its water and the areas that might be weak points. These provide ways to get into the city during an attack, and if you plan on having the city under siege or assaulted, knowing these points will be important. You don’t have to know every hole in the wall and missing brick, but at least consider where the weakest points of defense are if you’re laying the city out. Things shouldn’t be easy for either side in a siege, right?

Conclusion

As promised, this is a short post. There isn’t as much to think about when mapping out a city as there is when mapping out a whole world. But the details here are just as vital because they’re going to alter and impact life just as much for characters living there.

So give it some careful thought if you know you’re going to have characters spending any significant amount of time there. It may be important to know these details later on. Solidifying them now gives you a headstart when you have to use the details later in the book.

What other things do you think about if you’re building cities for your world? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Saturday Setup: Global Mapping – Climate

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

This week marks the last post about global mapping. We’re going to take a look at climate and how that affects your map. This’ll be a shorter discussion because you’ve already done the majority of the work. At this point, you’re just going to spend a little time thinking about the climate involved in each area in your story and how that will affect your writing. Climate affects a lot of those little details that readers like to see so they can be immersed in the story. So let’s take a look at how.

Climate and Culture

You might be sitting at your computer or looking at your phone wondering what I’m talking about. You might be asking, Ariel, how on earth can climate affect culture? Isn’t it just a nice way to throw some obstacles in my hero’s path?

No. It’s not. Climate actually does affect quite a bit about how a culture develops. For instance, if your hero lives in a culture where the climate is tropical and the terrain tangled jungle, this is going to affect what they eat, what they wear, how they build their houses, and much more about how they live their lives. This culture is less likely to be agricultural because you can’t farm in a jungle without significant clearing of the land. Instead, they might be hunters and gatherers.

Let’s take a look at one more example. Say the climate is an arid, desert-like environment with one or two oases for water and a delta running through it. Well, now the situation is much different. These people will likely migrate to the river to plant crops and raise cattle because there’s no way they can sustain life in the desert conditions otherwise. They’re going to wear light-weight but concealing clothing when out in the desert sand because they have to protect themselves from the sun. But at the river or an oasis, they might wear little to nothing because the heat is stifling and it’s too muggy for comfort. Their food isn’t going to be the same as the jungle tribe’s either. They’re going to raise it themselves or grow it in the rich soil at the delta or floodplains created by the river.

Hopefully, if you weren’t convinced before that climate could affect culture, you are now. So, take some time to think over what types of climates your cultures will live in and think through all the ways that climate could shape their culture and way of life. The ways are many and varied, so have fun with it! Make it logical, but be creative.

Conclusion

I promised this would be a short post, and so it is. Really, climate is going to be determined mainly by what land features you chose to place where. The two go hand-in-hand. You can’t have snowy regions where you placed a steaming jungle or a jungle where you placed glaciers. So, the important thing you need to worry about with climate is how it affects the inhabitants of that biome, both human and otherwise. It has the biggest affect on the cultures of the lives there, and that’s what your focus should be on since you’re going to be writing about those people who have to deal with it every day, or for some chunk of time, at least.

Have any tips for what to consider when it comes to climate’s affect on culture? Drop it in the comments below! If you have any questions about the topic, feel free to leave that in the comments too!