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edenfallingDecember 30: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]
These last maps are for worlds that have no accompanying story of any sort... or at least, not yet. Let's jump right in!
The above map is of a continent I call Gramarye. The basic premise behind this world is that long ago -- by which I mean somewhere between five centuries and a millennium -- there was a great war in which the two strongest magicians then alive fought on opposite sides. (The proximate cause was a king trying to unite the continent; one magician thought this was a way to create peace, particularly once the king's heir would eventually inherit, while the other thought peace imposed by force was impossible and also that the king in question was a tyrant and the heir had no reason to be any better.) The fighting ground on for years. Finally the conqueror king and his magician were defeated, but not before the majority of the continent was devastated, the land and seas poisoned for generations.
The king's magician had tried to contain the damage by twisting the entire continent and its coastal waters out of phase with the surrounding world. The other magician tried to raise new land from the ocean floor to give refugees a new home. Unfortunately their spells interacted badly, to put it mildly, and any further details would be massive plot spoilers if I ever get around to writing the story.
In the present day, a mysterious wanderer comes to the eastern edge of the Old Country (which is beset by mutated beasts) and takes a boy and a girl on a quest through the Waste. Meanwhile a traveling storyteller arrives in a small village in the New Country (which is beset by magical echoes of the great war) and strikes up a friendship with a local woman who works in a magician's household. These stories are related, and ultimately end with the breaking of the spell that has kept Gramarye locked away since the war, prevented its wounds from healing, and largely drained magic from the rest of the world.
The world-building I've done for Gramarye is mostly linguistic and genealogical, oddly enough. You can tell from the notes and corrections thereof above that I originally started with a gimmick idea of using Anglicized versions of Biblical names for people in the Old Country and Anglicized versions of Celtic names for people in the New Country, but later decided that was stupid. As for the plot, I am still quite vague on vast swathes of events and motives, and have never written even a tiny exploratory noodling snippet of actual narrative. But I'd like to get back to this world someday.
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Moving on! I have mentioned, at various points in these map posts, that I occasionally draw stuff for Vicky (my sister). This can be as simple as a sketch on a piece of scrap paper when she wants a layout for three countries with a particular set of borders and relative isolation levels (which I am not going to show you because I gave her the paper in question years ago), or as complicated as the following two images:
As you can see, Vicky gave me a few basic parameters -- things that were involved in a story idea she had -- and asked me to make a map to support them. I got a little carried away and drew her nearly a third of a continent.
(Note: the city in the lower right corner that got cut off by my scanner -- which has been really weird and temperamental since I got my new computer this spring -- is named Zeharra. Also, the city of Nemora and its surrounding lands have been traded back and forth between Alaria and Espiola for centuries. I'm not sure which country currently rules that region.)
This world has no name, so far as I know, and Vicky never did anything about the story. In fact, I'd forgotten about it myself until I went looking through my file folders for maps. I don't know much about the countries in this world, though I suspect the latitudes on this map are roughly comparable to Europe and northern Africa.
I took the hard copy down to D.C. last week and gave the map to Vicky as a little additional Christmas gift. I have no idea what she'll do with it, but it was always meant for her and now it's in her hands. :-)
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December Talking Meme: All Days
joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]These last maps are for worlds that have no accompanying story of any sort... or at least, not yet. Let's jump right in!
The above map is of a continent I call Gramarye. The basic premise behind this world is that long ago -- by which I mean somewhere between five centuries and a millennium -- there was a great war in which the two strongest magicians then alive fought on opposite sides. (The proximate cause was a king trying to unite the continent; one magician thought this was a way to create peace, particularly once the king's heir would eventually inherit, while the other thought peace imposed by force was impossible and also that the king in question was a tyrant and the heir had no reason to be any better.) The fighting ground on for years. Finally the conqueror king and his magician were defeated, but not before the majority of the continent was devastated, the land and seas poisoned for generations.
The king's magician had tried to contain the damage by twisting the entire continent and its coastal waters out of phase with the surrounding world. The other magician tried to raise new land from the ocean floor to give refugees a new home. Unfortunately their spells interacted badly, to put it mildly, and any further details would be massive plot spoilers if I ever get around to writing the story.
In the present day, a mysterious wanderer comes to the eastern edge of the Old Country (which is beset by mutated beasts) and takes a boy and a girl on a quest through the Waste. Meanwhile a traveling storyteller arrives in a small village in the New Country (which is beset by magical echoes of the great war) and strikes up a friendship with a local woman who works in a magician's household. These stories are related, and ultimately end with the breaking of the spell that has kept Gramarye locked away since the war, prevented its wounds from healing, and largely drained magic from the rest of the world.
The world-building I've done for Gramarye is mostly linguistic and genealogical, oddly enough. You can tell from the notes and corrections thereof above that I originally started with a gimmick idea of using Anglicized versions of Biblical names for people in the Old Country and Anglicized versions of Celtic names for people in the New Country, but later decided that was stupid. As for the plot, I am still quite vague on vast swathes of events and motives, and have never written even a tiny exploratory noodling snippet of actual narrative. But I'd like to get back to this world someday.
-----
Moving on! I have mentioned, at various points in these map posts, that I occasionally draw stuff for Vicky (my sister). This can be as simple as a sketch on a piece of scrap paper when she wants a layout for three countries with a particular set of borders and relative isolation levels (which I am not going to show you because I gave her the paper in question years ago), or as complicated as the following two images:
As you can see, Vicky gave me a few basic parameters -- things that were involved in a story idea she had -- and asked me to make a map to support them. I got a little carried away and drew her nearly a third of a continent.
(Note: the city in the lower right corner that got cut off by my scanner -- which has been really weird and temperamental since I got my new computer this spring -- is named Zeharra. Also, the city of Nemora and its surrounding lands have been traded back and forth between Alaria and Espiola for centuries. I'm not sure which country currently rules that region.)
This world has no name, so far as I know, and Vicky never did anything about the story. In fact, I'd forgotten about it myself until I went looking through my file folders for maps. I don't know much about the countries in this world, though I suspect the latitudes on this map are roughly comparable to Europe and northern Africa.
I took the hard copy down to D.C. last week and gave the map to Vicky as a little additional Christmas gift. I have no idea what she'll do with it, but it was always meant for her and now it's in her hands. :-)
-----
December Talking Meme: All Days
