A newbie with an aim

[panmaya]

Hello all, I am fascinated by the fantasy novels and love pondering over the maps provided. But during the story when a city is mentioned, sometimes it's a pain to find it on the maps provided. I realize many people would love the joy of finding a small village among a number of places mentioned on the map, but I feel it breaks the flow of my reading. So, I have been planning to build my own maps which develop with the story (I realize the idea may not be brand new, but I haven't seen anything like it yet).

I have a few ideas and some experience on how to do this using the available technologies, but unfortunately such step by step maps are not available. So, I am going to draw them. With that intention, I searched for a good resource on maps, and got suggested this forum. From the little I have looked around, it looks like an excellent collection of ideas and works with helpful people. Hopefully, I will be able to share my work with you all and gather feedback to achieve my goal.

Thanks for reading.
Panmaya.

[J.Edward]

Hey Panmaya and welcome to the Guild
Yes, this would be the place for you.
Much helpful info and many friendly helpful people.
When you're ready to post a map, I'm sure you can get the info and help you're after.
Cheer, J

[panmaya]

Thanks J.Edward

[Josiah VE]

Welcome to the guild! I'm looking forward to seeing some of your maps.

[SleepSigil]

That sounds like a really cool idea. Would you post maps before/after the chapters where they are relevant? or would they be posted before long story arcs?

[swivelnut]

yeah, sounds like a great idea. I know sometimes i think the city is north of the capital, but when i find it, it's actually southeast.

[panmaya]

Welcome to the guild! I'm looking forward to seeing some of your maps.

Thanks Josiah.

That sounds like a really cool idea. Would you post maps before/after the chapters where they are relevant? or would they be posted before long story arcs?

Thanks SleepSigil. My current plan is to do the following (note that it will be a webpage based interactive function):

I plan to create a black and white outline of the continent, rivers and mountains included, and possibly showing the locations of main cities. But nothing will be named. Then at the beginning of each chapter, a reader would be able to select the chapter he is about to start and see a version of the map filled in with all the names discovered in the previous chapters, and those he is going to discover in the next one. It sounds like a lot of work, but actually would involve drawing at max two maps per continent - one with no names, another with all names. All the other permutations will be handled through layers & visibility.

I appreciate that this might be slightly spoiler-ish for certain readers, or display too much information during the last chapters. So I plan to build in toggles which user can use to either see the whole map in one go (like at the beginning of the book), or see only the places to be covered in the chapter he is going to read. If my coding works out well, a search feature allowing user to locate a place on the map would also be implemented.

yeah, sounds like a great idea. I know sometimes i think the city is north of the capital, but when i find it, it's actually southeast.

Exactly. Specially when someone's trail is described as going towards town X, but you have no clue whether to look north, or south, or east, or west, and how far from the city you know the location of.