Welcome to our Worldbuilding Wednesday! On the first Wednesday of the month, we will discuss the creative process behind different facets of the Twinverse, from as lofty a concept as the entire cosmology, to specific characters and their role in the setting. Worldbuilding Wednesday is meant as a behind-the-scenes column to give insight into how the setting itself changes and evolves, beyond just the events of the books.
After our series of posts about creating pantheons, we need to discuss another critical aspect of creating a world: its geography.
In one of my first worldbuilding posts, I mentioned the top-down and bottom-up approaches to worldbuilding, but in both approaches, you will eventually have to define at the very least the geographical region where your story takes place. In the Twin Worlds, the first geographical region I created - which is the setting where much of Crown of Fates took place - was the northeastern quadrant of the continent called Teidar. Since then, I have detailed several other regions: for example, the Shadows of Kings campaign took place in the continent of Malgaria, while the Hands of Darkness campaign took place in a province of the continent of Y'aquande. But northeastern Teidar has probably seen the most development, simply because it was the first.
The size of the geographical region to detail varies based on a number of factors, primarily linked to the needs of the story. You need to be able to trace the characters' movement through the map, so you know what terrain they'd encounter and how long it would take to get from point A to point B. You may also want to include lands they won't necessarily visit, but which they may have heard of, or which may have been their homelands. For this reason, giving a standard idea of the region's size is impossible to give, although my personal advice is to start at a macro level, detailing the general geography of a chunk of the continent, and then start drilling down with more and more detailed maps of kingdoms, and perhaps even provinces within the kingdom (if much of the action is local).
Now, this is fantasy, so you are not necessarily restricted to the biomes or the climates we know, but I believe keeping to a certain consistency (as long as your world is terrestrial in nature, and not - say - a group of islands floating in the void, or a flat-earth disk carried by elephants) grounds the world and makes it more believable. For this reason, the region of northeastern Teidar would have a temperate to cold climate, and the top part of the map would be a very cold climate, being roughly at the latitude of our world's Toronto.
Ailund and its neighbor, Argilin, would be particularly exposed to that cold, since they have only open plains to the north, leading into the Frozen Lands and (perhaps) Freyfthor. The region that would become Brightland had a more temperate climate, because I decided that Hethner - the Ledhrorn who ruled it - erected a mountain range to keep the arctic cold from blowing south, into those lands, ensuring their climate would be milder.
This leads us to another point: unlike our world, fantasy worlds can include features you wouldn't naturally expect in our world. The presence of magic and the gods may (depending on how your magic and your gods work) have physically shaped the landscape in all sorts of unusual ways. In northeastern Teidar, for example, the aforementioned mountain range is a good example. Another one is the Lake of Blood, a lake with blood-red waters nestled in the northwestern corner of the map I created, which was formed when the wyldervay of Crown of Fates defeated three ancient monsters and the monsters' blood pooled into a local lake, changing it forever.
You can, of course, also include very unusual biomes - floating islands, mushroom forests and so on - but dpeending on the tone of your story, you may choose to restrict those to noteworthy and legendary locations, rather than sprinkling them liberally across the landscape. The more unusual biomes you have, the less special they might feel - but then again, perhaps you are after that sense of exploratory wonder, and if well-executed, these biomes could help in that.
In Teidar, I decided against placing very unusual biomes on the map (although one could argue the Frozen Lands become an unusual biome further north). I decided the land had been inhabited for ages, and I wanted to give it that feeling of being old and worn. Furthermore, avoiding unusual landscapes was another way to drive home the concept of the Ledhrorn having taken away history and wonder from the world in order to consolidate their power.
Mountains
When I create my maps, I typically start them by mapping the mountain ranges. Mountains have a massive impact on the biomes around them - not just in terms of terrain structure and elevation, but also as a barrier to tradewinds and sources of rivers and streams. You want rivers to flow from higher elevation to lower elevation, so you first need to know where the mountains are.
Mountains are rarely standing by themselves unless they were once volcanoes (although in a fantasy land, they could have been created by magic or risen as a feat of power by a god), so typically, you want to create mountain ranges. Coincidentally, mountain ranges also help to "frame" the map by providing natural locations which are difficult to cross, and justify ending your map there.
In our world, mountains typically form when two tectonic plates meet, but your world may not use tectonic plates, so you may have more freedom to create mountain ranges wherever you think is best. Just remember how they will affect the landscape around them. You can use mountains not only to start rivers, or frame the map, but also as springboards for forests (which may cling to mountain sides and roots, at least in part), framers of deserts and wastelands (if they don't provide rivers and block moisture-heavy winds from flowing into the land), natural barriers (if you already know you want something that prevented kingdom X from invading the smaller kingdom Y until now, a mountain range with narrow passes guarded by forts is a good option) and more. Mountains are very versatile!
In northeastern Teidar, a north-to-south mountain range, the Craveth Elyar, separates the fertile lands of Brightland from the rocky desert of the Broken Lands. Another east-to-west mountain range separates Brightland, Erkanth and Meverne from the southern group of kingdoms known as the Kreylvos kingdoms (Mathklyr, where Ghostblood takes place, is one of these kingdoms). A third mountain range, partially made by Hethner, runs east-to-west from Ailund to the Craveth Elyar, protecting Brightland from a bitterly cold climate. Finally, a small, old mountain range called the Mist Divide separates the peninsula of Abreldin from the rest of the continent, though there are multiple passes allowing commerce to flow. But this mountain range explains why Abreldin focuses so much on naval commerce and exploration, and why its culture is a bit different from that of its neighbors.
Once you have your mountains in place, it's time to work on rivers! We'll discuss this in the next installment of Worldbuilding Wednesday. In the meantime, as always, thanks for reading!
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