A short note, since it’s been a few days since I last posted anything here. I’ve been up to my eyebrows at the day job, teaching a course on risk management and cybersecurity. After a full day on the platform I’m rarely in good condition to get a lot of creative work done in the evening. Still, my brain has been percolating along on the Curse of Steel project.

I’m currently beginning work on some maps, to give the story some structure. The overall plot of the novel is very much in the “heroic quest” vein, with Kráva and a few companions going on a long journey across unexplored and dangerous countryside to reach an objective. So I need to at least sketch out the geography.

This, as usually happens with me, turns out to be more complicated than it might appear at first glance. Knowing too much about world-building often means you can’t be satisfied with the simple or naïve approach to any problem.

In this case, my brain got stuck on the question of how to draw regional and world maps on a sphere. I keep thinking back to the classic Baynes-Tolkien poster map of Middle-earth, which has been the inspiration for a hundred thousand fantasy-world maps since then. It’s a beautiful map, but the big unspoken problem with it is that it’s flat. The map legend indicates both constant directions and a constant distance scale, and that just cannot be done with any flat projection of a spherical surface. That’s a subtle flaw in the world-building for Middle-earth, especially if (as I suspect) Tolkien did his meticulous measurements of distance and travel times on a similarly flat map.

So, since this piece at least of my world-building is decidedly in the same mold, I want to draw a similar map – but I want to envision my world as a sphere and do my regional map-making on that basis. Which means I need to expand my cartographic tool set.

I usually do map-building with Photoshop, but it’s a challenge to draw on a sphere with that tool, and there’s no way to easily do the standard map projections. However, I’ve recently come across one of the superb world-building YouTube videos produced by Artifexian, in which he discusses a work-flow he’s developed to do just this kind of thing. Here’s a link to the specific video I’m talking about.

So I’ve gotten started on this piece of the project by downloading a couple of freeware tools (GPlates and G.Projector), and will be sketching out global and regional maps over the next few days. I’ll post some of the interim results here.