First Sketch Map: Talmoi Móran
Now that I’ve got a solid foundation for my constructed languages for The Curse of Steel, I’ve rewritten about the first 10 kilowords of the novel, and I’m pretty happy with how that much has turned out. Now, though, Kráva and her friends are about to leave their starting point and set out cross-country, and I need to have a good picture of their surroundings. So now it’s time to do some map work.
Over the past couple of evenings I’ve laid out a very rough sketch map of parts of the continent Kráva’s people call Talmoi Móran, or “the Great Lands.” This is roughly equivalent to Europe (or western Middle-Earth), stretching from about 30 to 65 degrees North latitude, and across about sixty degrees of east-west longitude.
Kráva begins her adventure in the region labeled the Tremára Lands, an area roughly the size of France, bounded by the major Black River on the east, the Blue Mountains on the west, and a series of large inland seas (the “Great Lakes”) on the south. The Tremára (“Mighty Folk”) are one branch of the so-called “Chariot People,” this universe’s equivalent of the Indo-Europeans. The Chariot People have been spreading out from their eastern homeland for a few millennia at this point, and most countries around the edges of the Great Plains at the center of the map are inhabited by their offshoots.
I don’t think I’m going to go to great lengths to fill in this map in fine detail, not yet and possibly not ever. All that’s important for now is that I get a general idea of where everything is. I also got a reality check: I used an application called G.Projector to overlay this map on a map of Earth, just to be sure the layout and scale were at all plausible. So far, so good.
I might use this sketch map to work through some of the climate zones, just to be sure I know how that will fall out. But the most likely next step is to focus on the Tremára Lands area, and possibly the coastal regions adjacent to it, which is where about three-quarters of The Curse of Steel will be set. That map, I’ll probably take some time with.
2 thoughts on “First Sketch Map: Talmoi Móran”
So far, it’s a very promising rough map. I am eager to see if it evolves further.
By the way, if the “chariot people” are modeled after early Indo-Europeans, who are the followers of the “Evil God” to the far southeast based on? I am guessing something like the Mesopotamians, Phoenicians, or possibly even Egyptians or Kushites.
My apologies for missing this note – for some reason, my site’s security classified it as spam without informing me about it! Going to have to check those settings when I get the chance.
Yep, the peoples of the far southeast are going to resemble some of the people of our ancient Near East – right now I’m thinking the “Evil God” is working through a growing empire rather like that of the Achaemenids, which has already subjugated a lot of the cultures in that warm semi-arid zone. How much these resemble the real-world Canaanite or Egyptian cultures, I haven’t decided yet, but there will probably be parallels. (I’m thinking in terms of a vaguely Semitic-like constructed language for a different culture entirely, but we’ll see how things shake out.)