Having finished the “historical atlas” series for the Great Lands, now I’m starting to focus on maps that will help me keep track of the environment in which my characters will be moving around. This is a map of the territory inhabited by Krava’s home culture and the surrounding region.

The Tremara inhabit the region between the Blue Mountains in the west, the Black River valley in the east, the great pine forests of the Northmen, and the Lake Country to the south. It’s an area of roughly 200,000 square miles, supporting a total population of about 2.4 million. The Tremara are at an early Iron Age level of development – mostly peasant villages, ruled by a warrior aristocracy who fight from chariots with bow and spear. They have some contact with Korsanari and Sea Kingdom merchants who bring in luxury goods and new ideas – these mostly come up the rivers from the Lake Country, or across the Blue Mountains at the Trader’s Pass.

This map is a reasonably finished project, although I expect I’ll continue to tweak and add to it in the future as I develop more details of the setting.

Next project will be to focus on a small area of this map, producing a local map that should cover all the territory that plays a part in The Curse of Steel. Once that’s done, I’m probably going to have everything I need to sit down and produce a second draft of the novel.

Technical Notes: My continent-wide map was put in an orthographic projection and narrowed down to this region using GProjector (Windows version 2.1.8). An image from there was imported as a tracing overlay, and the basic map here was produced, using Wonderdraft (version 1.1) with standard symbol libraries. The final Wonderdraft product was imported into Adobe Photoshop CC, where I added the latitude-longitude grid and all the place names. I have another overlay (not visible here) with national and tribal names.