My First World

Several years ago I got an idea for a story that took me away from poetry, which had been my literary form of choice. The story, never written, was of a transgender person born into a medieval Icelandic setting. Would her family protect her? What form would that protection take? What challenges would she face in the dominant culture?

My first step was what is commonly called worldbuilding. I wanted it to be like Iceland, but not be the actual place. I started with a map generated with Inkwell Ideas’ Hexographer map. I ended up with a series of small islands that I treated as having the overall geography of Iceland. I looked into the geological history of Iceland, developed an analogue to its “pagan” religion, and also developed an analogue of Christianity. There’s nothing new in this approach, certainly.

A few years passed and I got interested in the story again. I wanted to go back and do more maps, which I find really fun. At first I was determined to stay cheap, but eventually I went and researched a whole bunch of different mapping programs. My approach was simple: I looked at maps generated using those programs and chose the program which produced the maps I liked the most. I figured that I would be able to do similar maps.

I tried a lot of different programs that had trials for them, but eventually I happened upon the Fractal Terrains 3 demo version over on Profantasy’s site. I had already decided that I wanted to use their Campaign Cartographer 3+ program, but wasn’t sure what to buy.

Fractal Terrains seemed to me amazing. You could choose the parameters of a given world, and then have the program generate thousands of worlds. I have a file full of these kinds of worlds, and every so often I open another of them and play around with it. The first world I made was one continent:

I abandoned this world after buying the Pro version of the program (the Campaign Cartographer program followed after a couple months of playing around with FT3). I developed a different world, called Aiyedjembe, which you will see a lot of if you follow this blog. For now, I’d like to show you what Fractaldo eventually became after I played with it in a couple of other programs:

I’m curious if readers have any favorite mapping programs they’d like to share. I’d certainly love to hear about them. I’d also appreciate if people would like to see how they can take the first form to the last.