Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2014-12-21 07:16 pm
edenfalling) wrote2014-12-21 07:16 pm
December Talking Meme, Day 21: mapping original worlds, part 2 - Firsthome
December 21: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]
More maps, yay!
So okay, Firsthome. Firsthome is another world I dreamed up around age thirteen, but in this case my initial terrible notes (which included, IIRC, a legendary pirate and a mermaid??? I dunno, it was forever ago and the notes in question were, at best, one sentence summaries of concepts that need at least a thousand words to make any sense) were extremely minimal and I didn't get around to making maps until much later.
(Except for Yanomy, but Yanomy is a weird case I will explain in a bit.)
I first 'mapped' Firsthome verbally, and since then have been engaged in an off-and-on struggle to make those verbal descriptions of geography and climate into functional images. Like, there are seven continents in this world. Three in the northern hemisphere (Arina, Yanomy, and Tirith Ansam), three in the southern hemisphere (Nivenos, Kerabada, and Chida), and one that pretty much straddles the equator (Ohiyesa). Some of these names are, um, approximations in Common (aka the language of the Estarin Empire, which is still the common speech of Estaria, a big region of Arina) for names in the language of whatever people the Estarins happened to conquer first on a given continent. So Yanomy comes from the Sirinese (or Umestai) Yan hu'Komi, Chida is short for Chidantl, and Kerabada is an expanded version of Khrabda.
I have little verbal geographic sketches of the entirety of Arina, Yanomy, and Kerabada. I have about 80% of Nivenos verbally mapped, and maybe 20% of Tirith Ansam. Ohiyesa and Chida are very vague -- though I've actually written one ficlet each set on those continents. (Seduction is set in the city-state of Vinaeo, which is on the northern coast of Ohiyesa, and Clockwork is set in Besmodu, an as-yet-unmapped region of Chida.)
At one point I started a project to map the whole world by hemispheres, but I only finished the east; west, south, and north are all sadly blank. And the map itself is pretty sketchy and subject to future revision, particularly Chida and Ohiyesa. But here it is. (The scribbly bits are mountain ranges.)
There you go; that's your point of reference for Arina and Yanomy, which I am now going to talk about in turn.
Arina was my proper point of entry into Firsthome, via the character Ekanu Thousandbirds. She is born in the far north (the Land of the Midnight Sun, though she'd divide her people's territory into Chupu, the Ice, and Abamvechalach, the Summerlands), and travels south to the city of Estara, former capital of the Estarin Empire and still the cultural center of Estaria's disparate nations. Estaria, FYI, is the region between the Gulf of Baramendra and the southwestern peninsula, stretching all the way east to the mountain range(s) that forms the continent's spine. Estara itself is on the western coast at roughly 40 degrees north. The rest of the continent slowly coalesced around those seed ideas, and sprouted several thousand years of history that led me, in fits and starts, to the rest of the world.
Here is a really old stab at visualizing Arina. Note that the focus is actually on a volcanic archipelago in the middle of the Western Sea. That is Gwynorae, which you can learn more about by reading Harvest, a sadly unfinished story about a job Ekanu takes as a young adult. The posted version and the little snippets are out of date in various ways, but the world-building is still fairly accurate. (It's certainly more accurate than the files I was using to draw this map. I am never letting anyone read my first take on Gwynorae. It's awful.)
Here is a slightly later sketch, still dreadfully messy. The proportions are all wrong -- the northern parts are too big and the southern parts too small -- but it's moving toward the image in the hemispherical map... which I am still not quite happy with, btw. Someday I will try again and hopefully get even closer to matching my verbal geography. (I'm not sure what the eyes at the lower left are about. I think I might have been trying out a new form of stylization for doodles?)
I am skipping my two attempts to make a city map of Estara, because the first is hilariously inaccurate, and the second is nothing but a river with some islands and somehow manages to be even more inaccurate. I need a better verbal description before I can make a third attempt. And because I don't have a continental map I'm completely happy with, I have yet to try visually mapping any of Arina's internal political divisions, though I have them pretty well pinned down in words.
Okay, so that's Arina.
Now let's talk about Yanomy. Unlike the other six continents, Yanomy was created independently from Firsthome, which is why it's the most explicitly magical place in that entire world. I had a vague dream about werewolves and inheritance disputes in a region called the Free Lands, surrounded by an ominous magical forest, and made a little diagram with some notes after I woke up. At some point, it occurred to me that the Free Lands were called 'free' not just because of their hostile relationship to the inhabitants of the forest, but because of their struggle against the Estarin Empire, and really this place belonged in Firsthome.
Here is that initial diagram:
The basic countries have remained the same throughout, barring two name changes (the Plains=Kengush, the Mountains=Matar) and the elimination of Lesser Merin. But the layout and the relative sizes of the Free Lands and the Haunted Forest have changed a lot.
Here's my second map:
Note that the whole continent is now visible! Also note that most of it is swallowed by evil magical forest.
(Around this time I had the stupid idea of trying to make the forest's inhabitants into normal human people with a comprehensible culture. That was a mistake. I've relocated the people in question to either Ohiyesa or Chida -- look, I told you those continents are vague! The forest inhabitants are now explicitly non-human, and will never appear directly on-page, ever. Some mysteries should remain mysterious.)
My third and final map of Yanomy is, so far as I am currently concerned, accurate, albeit somewhat incomplete. I'll show you the full version, then the major cities section and the countries sections separately.
The Haunted Forest occupies only a quarter of the landmass, Kengush, Merin, and Sirion are much larger, and we have achieved actual mountain ranges to start defining the local geology! Yanomy sits between two oceanic subduction zones; the one to the west is in the process of throwing up some fairly high mountains. The one to the northeast only directly affects Matar, but does produce occasional tidal waves from undersea earthquakes. The eastern mountain range is mostly an eroding leftover from a previous geologic era.
The western seaboard has been partially colonized by people from Tirith Ansam, within the five centuries that separate the fall of the Estarin Empire and the 'present day' of Ekanu's life. The countries along the much broader, gentler eastern seaboard were also colonized, but much longer ago, by people from Chida. The people of Merin, Kengush, Sirion, and Matar are the original inhabitants of the continent, and probably most closely related to people from northern Arina. And as for the people of Andark, they're isolationist, they're weird, they have no known ethnic or linguistic connection to any other people in the world, and rumor has it that they trade and occasionally even interbreed with whoever -- or whatever -- lives in the Haunted Forest. The rest of Yanomy is quite happy to stay away and let the Andarkin do their own thing in their own country.
(Nobody lands along the northern coast of Yanomy unless they are desperate, and even then they just stop to grab water and make what repairs they can with any deadfall wood they can scavenge. If you follow those rules, you might get lucky and escape. If you cut down any trees or hunt any game, you die and your empty ship rots as a warning to anyone else sailing past. There are a few other highly uncanny places in Firsthome, but none are as large or as inimical to humans.)
And that's all I have to say about Firsthome today, since the topic is maps rather than history or linguistics or children's games or religion or epic poetry traditions or any of the other things I have created and written down over the past twenty years. :-)
-----
December Talking Meme: All Days
joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]More maps, yay!
So okay, Firsthome. Firsthome is another world I dreamed up around age thirteen, but in this case my initial terrible notes (which included, IIRC, a legendary pirate and a mermaid??? I dunno, it was forever ago and the notes in question were, at best, one sentence summaries of concepts that need at least a thousand words to make any sense) were extremely minimal and I didn't get around to making maps until much later.
(Except for Yanomy, but Yanomy is a weird case I will explain in a bit.)
I first 'mapped' Firsthome verbally, and since then have been engaged in an off-and-on struggle to make those verbal descriptions of geography and climate into functional images. Like, there are seven continents in this world. Three in the northern hemisphere (Arina, Yanomy, and Tirith Ansam), three in the southern hemisphere (Nivenos, Kerabada, and Chida), and one that pretty much straddles the equator (Ohiyesa). Some of these names are, um, approximations in Common (aka the language of the Estarin Empire, which is still the common speech of Estaria, a big region of Arina) for names in the language of whatever people the Estarins happened to conquer first on a given continent. So Yanomy comes from the Sirinese (or Umestai) Yan hu'Komi, Chida is short for Chidantl, and Kerabada is an expanded version of Khrabda.
I have little verbal geographic sketches of the entirety of Arina, Yanomy, and Kerabada. I have about 80% of Nivenos verbally mapped, and maybe 20% of Tirith Ansam. Ohiyesa and Chida are very vague -- though I've actually written one ficlet each set on those continents. (Seduction is set in the city-state of Vinaeo, which is on the northern coast of Ohiyesa, and Clockwork is set in Besmodu, an as-yet-unmapped region of Chida.)
At one point I started a project to map the whole world by hemispheres, but I only finished the east; west, south, and north are all sadly blank. And the map itself is pretty sketchy and subject to future revision, particularly Chida and Ohiyesa. But here it is. (The scribbly bits are mountain ranges.)
There you go; that's your point of reference for Arina and Yanomy, which I am now going to talk about in turn.
Arina was my proper point of entry into Firsthome, via the character Ekanu Thousandbirds. She is born in the far north (the Land of the Midnight Sun, though she'd divide her people's territory into Chupu, the Ice, and Abamvechalach, the Summerlands), and travels south to the city of Estara, former capital of the Estarin Empire and still the cultural center of Estaria's disparate nations. Estaria, FYI, is the region between the Gulf of Baramendra and the southwestern peninsula, stretching all the way east to the mountain range(s) that forms the continent's spine. Estara itself is on the western coast at roughly 40 degrees north. The rest of the continent slowly coalesced around those seed ideas, and sprouted several thousand years of history that led me, in fits and starts, to the rest of the world.
Here is a really old stab at visualizing Arina. Note that the focus is actually on a volcanic archipelago in the middle of the Western Sea. That is Gwynorae, which you can learn more about by reading Harvest, a sadly unfinished story about a job Ekanu takes as a young adult. The posted version and the little snippets are out of date in various ways, but the world-building is still fairly accurate. (It's certainly more accurate than the files I was using to draw this map. I am never letting anyone read my first take on Gwynorae. It's awful.)
Here is a slightly later sketch, still dreadfully messy. The proportions are all wrong -- the northern parts are too big and the southern parts too small -- but it's moving toward the image in the hemispherical map... which I am still not quite happy with, btw. Someday I will try again and hopefully get even closer to matching my verbal geography. (I'm not sure what the eyes at the lower left are about. I think I might have been trying out a new form of stylization for doodles?)
I am skipping my two attempts to make a city map of Estara, because the first is hilariously inaccurate, and the second is nothing but a river with some islands and somehow manages to be even more inaccurate. I need a better verbal description before I can make a third attempt. And because I don't have a continental map I'm completely happy with, I have yet to try visually mapping any of Arina's internal political divisions, though I have them pretty well pinned down in words.
Okay, so that's Arina.
Now let's talk about Yanomy. Unlike the other six continents, Yanomy was created independently from Firsthome, which is why it's the most explicitly magical place in that entire world. I had a vague dream about werewolves and inheritance disputes in a region called the Free Lands, surrounded by an ominous magical forest, and made a little diagram with some notes after I woke up. At some point, it occurred to me that the Free Lands were called 'free' not just because of their hostile relationship to the inhabitants of the forest, but because of their struggle against the Estarin Empire, and really this place belonged in Firsthome.
Here is that initial diagram:
The basic countries have remained the same throughout, barring two name changes (the Plains=Kengush, the Mountains=Matar) and the elimination of Lesser Merin. But the layout and the relative sizes of the Free Lands and the Haunted Forest have changed a lot.
Here's my second map:
Note that the whole continent is now visible! Also note that most of it is swallowed by evil magical forest.
(Around this time I had the stupid idea of trying to make the forest's inhabitants into normal human people with a comprehensible culture. That was a mistake. I've relocated the people in question to either Ohiyesa or Chida -- look, I told you those continents are vague! The forest inhabitants are now explicitly non-human, and will never appear directly on-page, ever. Some mysteries should remain mysterious.)
My third and final map of Yanomy is, so far as I am currently concerned, accurate, albeit somewhat incomplete. I'll show you the full version, then the major cities section and the countries sections separately.
The Haunted Forest occupies only a quarter of the landmass, Kengush, Merin, and Sirion are much larger, and we have achieved actual mountain ranges to start defining the local geology! Yanomy sits between two oceanic subduction zones; the one to the west is in the process of throwing up some fairly high mountains. The one to the northeast only directly affects Matar, but does produce occasional tidal waves from undersea earthquakes. The eastern mountain range is mostly an eroding leftover from a previous geologic era.
The western seaboard has been partially colonized by people from Tirith Ansam, within the five centuries that separate the fall of the Estarin Empire and the 'present day' of Ekanu's life. The countries along the much broader, gentler eastern seaboard were also colonized, but much longer ago, by people from Chida. The people of Merin, Kengush, Sirion, and Matar are the original inhabitants of the continent, and probably most closely related to people from northern Arina. And as for the people of Andark, they're isolationist, they're weird, they have no known ethnic or linguistic connection to any other people in the world, and rumor has it that they trade and occasionally even interbreed with whoever -- or whatever -- lives in the Haunted Forest. The rest of Yanomy is quite happy to stay away and let the Andarkin do their own thing in their own country.
(Nobody lands along the northern coast of Yanomy unless they are desperate, and even then they just stop to grab water and make what repairs they can with any deadfall wood they can scavenge. If you follow those rules, you might get lucky and escape. If you cut down any trees or hunt any game, you die and your empty ship rots as a warning to anyone else sailing past. There are a few other highly uncanny places in Firsthome, but none are as large or as inimical to humans.)
And that's all I have to say about Firsthome today, since the topic is maps rather than history or linguistics or children's games or religion or epic poetry traditions or any of the other things I have created and written down over the past twenty years. :-)
-----
December Talking Meme: All Days