Lately I’ve been working on back-history and geography for The Curse of Steel, and for the EIDOLON-based world-pack I’m writing for parallel publication. This has caused me to experience greater and greater frustration with the world map I built last fall . . . so yesterday I bit the bullet and got to work revising that.
Fortunately, the Wonderdraft tool makes this kind of work very easy. As of this evening, here’s the result – a full Version 2.0 of the Great Lands map:
This is a big step forward! Next I’m going to be using this map as the basis for a kind of “historical atlas,” a series of schematic images that will help me nail down the historical timeline. Some of those may end up going in the world-pack too, but we’ll see how well they turn out. If this does nothing more than help me visualize how Krava’s world evolved, mission accomplished.
Having produced the continent-scale overview map for Kráva’s world. my next step was to produce a narrow-focus map for the region in which (most of) the story of The Curse of Steel takes place. After a fair amount of tinkering – and a remarkably timely suggestion from my wife – I’ve developed a workflow to do that.
As a reminder, here’s the overview map:
It’s important to note the projection this map is in. It’s in an equirectangular projection, with the standard parallels both on the equator. That means the scale only works along lines of latitude and longitude, and it only consistently represents degrees of arc. What you cannot do with this map is to assume that it has any kind of consistent distance scale.
That’s a problem for any local map, where I might want to conveniently measure off distances to estimate travel times, or the size of occupied territories, or some such thing. What I want to do is “zoom in” on a much smaller region, then change the map projection so that a flat map with a constant distance scale can at least approximate the real situation.
I spent a few hours on Saturday messing with Photoshop, trying to approximate the coordinate transform that would take me from an equirectangular projection to (say) a gnomonic projection. Much frustration followed, with several pages of trigonometric scratchings and a great deal of button-punching on my calculator (hooray for my reliable old Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus, which has been a standby for twenty years now).
At which point my wife, bless her, looked over my shoulder, listened to my explanation of what I was trying to do, and said, “Why are you messing with all of that? Hasn’t someone developed a tool to do it?”
At which point I (figuratively) facepalmed hard enough to give myself a concussion. Because, indeed, someone has developed a tool to do that.
Witness G.Projector, a Java-based application developed by NASA at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), available for free to the public, which is all about making quick seamless transformations from one map projection to another.
Turns out that it’s trivial to load any map or image that’s in equirectangular projection into G.Projector, after which it will begin by showing you, by default, an orthographic projection of the same image – as if you were off at a distance and looking at the image spread across a globe:
Now, that much I already knew how to do – G.Projector has been in my toolkit for quite a while. What my wife’s suggestion drove me to do was to see whether the tool could do the rest of the job – move in on a specific region, and then change the projection to one more suited for making a flat map of a small region.
Turned out, that wasn’t all that difficult. A very few minutes of directed tinkering, and I was first able to zoom in on the region I wanted, and then change to a gnomonic projection instead:
From there, it was just a matter of saving that result as a JPEG image, then importing the JPEG into Wonderdraft as an overlay. A few hours of work later, and I had a very fine map to track Kráva’s progress on:
I took a few liberties in the translation, of course – added a few rivers and a terrain feature or two that weren’t on the continent-scale map. Hey, this is my world, I can fiddle with it if I want to. I suppose I might go back to the large-scale map and add in a few details, but that’s not going to become necessary unless – by some miracle – the novel actually finds a substantial audience.
More importantly, I now have a workflow I can use to produce useful, consistent maps for the expanding story, with just a few hours of work and no painstaking mathematics. Thanks, sweetheart!
Stayed home today with some kind of ick, which let me catch up on sleep . . . and also gave me a chance to play with Wonderdraft a bit more. Lo and behold, with a little work, I’ve been able to finish the top-level reference map for The Curse of Steel. Here it is:
This will be my primary reference map from now on, while I work on the story. I plan to produce some regional maps too, so I can keep locations and distances straight in my head. With Wonderdraft that should be a snap. The only trick will be converting from the plate carrée projection here, to a more conformal projection for the little local maps. I think I’ll be able to do the requisite transformation, or at least approximate it, in Photoshop.
In the meantime, I’m very pleased with the results. This map took a lot less time to produce than similar efforts using only Photoshop, and the result looks better. Wonderdraft is an excellent tool for this kind of work!
After a week of reading other people’s work and providing feedback on the Chapterbuzz site, I’ve swung back to working on The Curse of Steel. The feedback I got was a little thin, although three or four people did offer at least a few suggestions apiece. I’ve already gone through and done revisions in accordance with those, and now I’m back to writing new material. As of today, I’ve reached the projected half-way point in the draft – over 60k words!
Meanwhile, over the weekend I picked up a new map-making application, called Wonderdraft. This is an indie production, designed as far as I can tell by a single coder. It doesn’t have nearly the feature list of my usual toolset (Photoshop), but it’s geared almost entirely toward drawing fantasy maps, and for that purpose, it’s pretty slick. The fact that you can “paint” areas of the map with things like mountain or forest icons, and the tool will automatically change up the current icon and make sure there aren’t any collisions with other symbols? Good Lord, that’s useful. I can’t begin to count how many hours I’ve spent in Photoshop, laboriously clicking through mountain or tree icons and placing them one . . . at . . . a . . . time.
Here’s an example – this is the current partial draft of the main continental map for The Curse of Steel, which I’m using to plan out the back story and plot on the largest scales.
Not nearly finished, obviously – I’ve got a ton of layers to paint onto this yet. But the above took a lot less time than it would have in Photoshop, and the tool is doing a nice job of freeing me from drudgery so I can concentrate on being creative. Those mountain ranges, for example, took only 15-20 minutes to plan and paint onto the map. Looks like a hard recommend from me.
Meanwhile, I think I’ve done enough work on constructed language, development of names for tribes and places, and filling in details on my overview map. At least for the moment. Now I can get back to the story and write . . . probably about half of the planned length for The Curse of Steel.
Here’s the result: a clipped piece of the overview map, still missing some details around the edges but more than enough to help me keep all the pertinent features in mind.
Ravatheni tribal lands, and their neighbors
The first part of the plot has Kráva and her companions traveling from Taimar Velkari (“hill-fort of the wolves”) across Ravatheni territory, into and through the Silent Forest, and over a mountain pass into the western lands by the sea. With plenty of detours and adventures along the way, of course. As the raven flies, it’s a distance of about 220 miles, maybe eight or nine days’ journey if everything goes well. Everything is not going to go well.
I’ve got a weekend more or less to myself here – no need to go into the office, and my wife and our daughter are out-of-state visiting family, so it’s just me and my son doing the bachelor thing. Good time to get some work done on The Curse of Steel.
The major project right now is a map of the main area of action for this first novel. Decent progress thus far:
Work in progress . . .
Still need to finish marking in terrain features, although the main line of the Blue Mountains is in place. Then it will be time to put down forest icons to mark wilderness areas. I think I’m going to be sparing with that, since almost the entire map is wilderness to some degree! Then a few settlements and place names, and I’ll have enough to push forward with the novel. I imagine the map will get filled in further as I write this (and hopefully future) stories.
Meanwhile, I’ve posted the first chapter of the draft novel – a short story titled “Kráva and the Skátoi” – to the “Free Articles and Fiction” section in the sidebar. Here’s a link to the page as well.
I think tomorrow I’ll continue to work on the map, and I might start looking for art assets I can use to create images of Kráva and her world.
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.
Just a quick post today, to share a piece of world-building I did a few years back. I was in the process of teaching myself map-making techniques in Photoshop and Inkscape, and dipped into my old notes on the Danassos setting to produce a map. Here’s a copy of the result:
(Yes, if you look closely at the map, you’ll see Atlantis. Thera, of course.)
The idea here is to trace the origins and eventual destiny of the so-called “Minoan” civilization, in the Danassos alternate history.
I’m assuming that the Minoans were originally Luwian people from southwestern Asia Minor, related to the Karian and Lykian peoples who lived there in historical times. About 3000 BCE some of them migrated into the Aegean and settled on Crete, forming the basis for Minoan culture. That would make the Minoan civilization an early outpost of the Indo-European language group, since the Luwian languages were part of the (very archaic) Anatolian branch of that family.
Centuries later, another branch of the Indo-European family made an appearance to the north, proto-Greeks migrating down into what we now think of as Thessaly. These people began as warlike nomads, using horses and primitive chariots to achieve military superiority over the pre-Greek peoples of the region. Eventually, they filtered further south, took over the small palace-states of the southern peninsula, and came into contact with the more sophisticated Minoans. The result was the Mycenaean culture, the first iteration of Greek civilization and the basis for all the later heroic myths.
All of that is entirely historical, of course. The first big divergence from our familiar history comes about 1450 BCE, when Mycenaean adventurers and warlords began to take over the Minoan palace-states on Crete. That sets up several decades of conflict, at the end of which the mainland Greeks invade and sack Crete, bringing Minoan culture to a bloody end. I’m assuming that the Minoans had long known about the existence of Italy and Sicily to the west; the major point of divergence is that some Minoan survivors escape the sack and set up the refugee colony in Sicily that later becomes the city of Danassos.
A note on dates: the calendar system I’m using is called Etos Kosmou or “era of the world.” (The Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church once used similar nomenclature for their calendars.) The epoch is the vernal equinox in the year 3058 BCE by our reckoning. Dates BCE can therefore be roughly determined by subtracting the EK date from 3058, and vice versa.
The idea here is that the ancient Minoans were aware of the procession of the equinoxes, and had the mathematical sophistication needed to estimate the position of the sun at the vernal equinox at various points in the past. This is all rampant speculation, of course – we have not a scrap of solid evidence for Minoan astronomy. However, it’s an interesting coincidence that right about the time the Minoan culture was established (circa 3000 BCE) the position of the equinox was in the constellation of Taurus (the Bull), not far from the bright star Aldebaran (the Bull’s “heart”).
We have evidence that the constellation of Taurus has been seen as a Bull since very ancient times. In fact, the Minoans were among the ancient cultures who maintained bull-cults and saw bulls as sacred creatures. I have to wonder if there wasn’t a certain amount of astronomical lore behind those cults. Maybe, maybe not – it’s not as if bulls aren’t impressive and dangerous creatures that any ancient culture might find worthy of worship.
Regardless, it struck me as a neat idea that the Minoans might have believed that at the moment of the world’s creation, the sun was at the vernal equinox and in the heart of the constellation of the Bull. I applied some astronomical software to estimate the point at which the sun would have been closest to Aldebaran at the vernal equinox, and that gave me an epoch of 3058 BCE. All of the notes I’ve gathered about the Danassos setting in the last few years, therefore, have used this version of the Etos Kosmou reckoning.
Well, this map stretched my technique a little further than before, but after quite a bit of research and development, and a couple dozen hours of painstaking Photoshop work, it’s done. I now have a reference map for the galactic neighborhood of the Khedai Hegemony, covering a decent chunk of the Orion Spur in the process.
This was world-building with a purpose! Not only did this exercise give me a new reference map for our galactic neighborhood, on a larger scale than I had ever done before, but it drove me to build a definitive model for interstellar cultures that I can continue to use later. I also came up with at least a high-concept description for over a dozen alien civilizations that I can now use in my stories.
In fact, once I get my notes collated and write down all the conceptual material that’s floating around in my head, I may have the basis for a fairly complete world-book for GURPS or some similar tabletop game. Between this map and the previous one, I have capsule descriptions for dozens of star systems, and by the time I’ve fleshed out all sixteen or so cultures I’ll have plenty of alien character templates. I may need to confer with the folks at Steve Jackson Games and see what the current limits are for publishing anything using GURPS language. It’s been a while since I was on their editorial staff, so their policies may have changed. At the very least, I ought to be able to post all of the pertinent material to the web for free.
Short term goal, though, is to buckle down and produce a publishable version of the novella In the House of War. With this map, I now have a much better idea where everything is, and what sort of aliens Aminata is likely to encounter during her first ventures out into the galaxy.
Very good progress, over the last few days, on a draft map of Khedai Hegemony space. Rather than post the unfinished map here, I’ll give you a link to the item in my Scraps folder on Deviant Art. I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in this project to have a look.
Probably a few more days to work on the map itself, and then I may also be able to put together a gazetteer for Hegemony space. I’m beginning to think this may work as a high-space-opera GURPS setting, among other things. Most importantly, of course, the exercise of finally mapping all of this out is giving me lots of ideas for Human Destiny stories . . .
