How to Build a World, Part Two: THE MAP

Welcome back to Inciting Event’s four-part series on: WORLDBUILDING. If you missed part one, go check it out now! Today’s topic: the map!

Before we launch into it, a note on what to expect. This entry is going to be a mix of writing tips and a practical how to guide for two map creation tools: Inkarnate and Wonderdraft. If you’re just here to see what kind of maps these programs can generate, hop down to the headings for each and look at the pretty. If you’re here for craft, let’s chat!

“Making up maps of imaginary lands is a kind of storytelling.”

Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, pg. 29

For me, this quote rings true. Maps of every kind have always inspired wonder and a sense of possibility. Look at all these places you could go. Imagine all the people living their lives there, imagine the stories they could tell. For science fiction and fantasy, the map will help you generate the physical setting for your story.

Map making is, essentially, a visual way of using the tried and true improv method “yes, and; no, but” to build a world. To illustrate:

Here is an empty map. Full of ocean.

Yes, and… it has one huge island. And that island has one huge lake.

But the island is filled with dangerous animals. (If you think unicorns aren’t dangerous, clearly you’ve never read Meredith Ann Pierce’s Firebringer Trilogy) And so all the humans live entirely on ships.

But they’ve over fished the lake, and there’s no food left. And so, our heroes will set off to find undiscovered islands and save their starving community. If they can even make their way to the ocean, that is!

In this exercise, my map helped generate my initial idea: huge known island in the middle of the ocean, and that fueled the rest of my ideas. The map is also a visual aid to deciding on the physical characteristics of my setting. A quick reminder of how to delineate physical from cultural characteristics of worldbuilding from Brandon Sanderson: “if you removed sentient beings from the planet, these things would still exist.”

Here are a few examples. I’m sure you can think of dozens more:

• Weather patterns
• Flora and fauna
• Terrain
• Climate
• Tectonic activity

Maps can help you think about some cultural elements of your setting as well. Cultural elements are the ones defined by the beings you populate your world with. Here are a few maps can help us depict:

• Political borders
• City placement
• Technology
• Population density

A note on process (again)

I mentioned this last time, and I’ll mention it again I’m sure. Everyone’s process is different. There is no one way to do any of this. For me: I start with the land masses. Do I want several large continents to play with? A more Mediterranean set up with many islands? A mix of both? Then I decide what kind of general terrain I want to start with. Is it an icy tundra? Rolling greenery? I’ll naturally start to think of other physical features that communities would grow around. Rivers, mountains, forests, lakes, etc.

Depending on how much I already know about the story, I might know certain terrain features need to exist. In my current work, I knew one capital city was going to be in lightly forested plains, and the other would be in an expansive desert. But in other cases I’ve built the map completely by feel, and story ideas came from this process. Naming generally comes last, and I don’t sweat it if I can’t think of names at first.

Map making is, to me, essentially visual brainstorming. It’s more engaging to create a map for me than it is to list elements of the world in an outline or write a few descriptive paragraphs about the world. If you’ve never tried your hand at making a map, I’d encourage you to give it a try. It can help you think of concrete details for your story that you might never have thought of otherwise. Like how the shape of some districts in my city maps helped me name them and imagine who might live there.

Sooo you want to make a map; but how?

“I’m not an artist! I can’t make map.”

Me, always

Well, I didn’t say it had to be a pretty map…but you don’t need to be Picaso to get your map down on paper. Still feeling shy? This is the oldest map I could find of my own. I’m not exactly when (or why) I drew it. I never wrote a story to go along with it as far as I know; it’s probably from the early 2000s. I bet you can’t catch all the references to books I was obsessed with at the time…

And this, I think, was the first digital concept of an early version of the world my current work-in-progress takes place in. I have no recollection of how I made this one.

If the idea of pen and paper or Microsoft paint is daunting to you, technology has advanced from 2001 and is here to help! If you don’t know where to start and you want to jog your imagination with a procedurally generated map, there are TONs of options. (You can thank Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop gaming communities for this.) A few examples:

• Fantasy Map Generator by Azgaar
• Procedural city generator by Oskar Stalberg
• Fantasy City Generator by Watabou
• Volcanic island style maps from Red Blob Games

If you want a more hands on approach to designing your maps, I will be discussing two programs today: Inkarnate and Wonderdraft.

Inkarnate is an online browser-based map making website. They have a free version and a pro-version. The pro-version is a monthly subscription service.

Wonderdraft is map creation software, it is not free, but it is a one-time purchase. There is a large community of artists who make additional symbols and art for Wonderdraft, the large majority of which are free; though there are some packs available for purchase.

These are my favorite map creation resources so far. You can’t go wrong with either. Please let me know in the comments below if you’ve come across others! Both Inkarnate and Wonderdraft have their quirks: let’s examine them.

At a glance: Inkarnate & Wonderdraft

Inkarnate

Inkarnate has grown enormously. They’ve recently changed their interface; it is now much more intuitive than the beta version I originally used a few years ago. The pro-version has almost all the symbol packs you could ever want, and they add new art items monthly. You do need an internet connection to use Inkarnate, as they are a web-based service.

I’d encourage you to check out the Inkarnate community on Reddit to see more examples of the range of maps you can create. But I’ll give you a basic example here, and a walk-through of the essential features.

This is Inkarnate’s basic interface.

There are a variety of map themes available; but only with the pro version. Symbols and land textures are also limited in the free version. Below, the icons marked with a star require the pro version.

Inkarnate gives you the option to procedurally generate land masses to aid you in creating your continents, or you can sculpt them by hand. To generate your land mass, you can specify what percentage of the map you want to be land versus water. Here’s an example:

You could then edit the generated land mass to subtract or add land and sculpt as you see fit!

To give you a taste, I created the following map with elements available in the free version. It took me 45 minutes, maximum, to make this. Excuse the derivative town names…

Looking at this map, I’m curious to explore several ideas already. Who’s living in the outskirts? Why were they exiled? What’s going with the Dark Wood? There’s a ship in harbor at King’s Reach; are there other continents to explore? And what is the fortress in the desert guarding against?

Wonderdraft

Wonderdraft is a powerful piece of map-making software. It does not have a free version; it requires a one-time purchase of 30$. Like with Inkarnate, there is an active community on Reddit with stunning examples of the possibilities.

Wonderdraft is incredibly versatile. It does have a steeper learning curve than Inkarnate, so it might take you longer to get up and running. I was drawn towards Wonderdraft because of the community behind it. There are hundreds of symbols available for free at a website called Cartography Assets that is created and maintained by the user base.

Here is the basic screen when you start up Wonderdraft.

When you make a new map, you have a range of settings for the resolution you want your map to be, all the way up to 4k (though, higher resolutions will be a burden on the computer you’re using.)

You also get a variety of themes. In the image above, all come with basic installation with the exception of Pastel PRO; that was an extra I installed. Here is our giant island from earlier in each of the basic styles so you have an idea of what they look like.

Like with Inkarnate, you can have the software generate land masses for you to get you started. Here’s what I went with:

Using the basic symbol set that Wonderdraft comes with after installation, I created the following map, using the pastel theme since it seemed closest to Inkarnate’s style. This one did take me several hours as opposed to Inkarnate’s breezy 45 minutes:

Again, I’m intrigued by this map. A temperate resource rich continent juxtaposed with an large icy landmass? What kind of tension would exist between those nations? Who cursed the cursed wood? Are the ruins at Hope’s Crescent sacred? What religion are they part of?

Both Inkarnate and Wonderdraft are great tools to assist you in making a map that will become fuel for the creation of enthralling worlds for your stories to take place in. Maps are, for me, and maybe for you, windows into my character’s worlds. It gives me an atmosphere to write to and is a launching off point to create concrete details that will ground my story in a place that feels complex and real. But maps are not the only thing that give atmosphere, that help the reader understand the way the world on the page built works. For this, we need to layer our setting with consistent SYSTEMS.

Join me next week to break down what kind of systems you may want to consider including in your world!

Until then: get back to creating!

-M

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Resources Cited in this Entry:

• Card, Scott Orson, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Cincinnati, Ohio, Writer’s Digest Books, 1990.
• Sanderson, Brandon, Youtube video, “Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lecture #6: Worldbuilding Part Two”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2KpWOLTXx8, 6 March 2020.