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Welcome to the guild Marscaleb. You rmap is a good start. Nice and clean. Its obviously a wobbly flipped Europe though which I assume is deliberate for your story. Keep going and post the work in progress.
Working on the map for my fantasy novel, Blood and Amber
I decided to try drawing the world map for a story I'm writing called Blood and Amber.
Or at least, the Northeast continent where most of the story takes place. I'll probably work on the Southern continent next.
Right now I've only got the coastlines drawn, and even that is just a rough draft without much detail.
I would really appreciate feedback, especially before I start drawing in the national borders and cities and stuff.
Just go ahead and be frank about what you like and don't like about this. Anything that bugs you would probably bug my readers, so now's the time to get this fixed.
Welcome to the guild Marscaleb. You rmap is a good start. Nice and clean. Its obviously a wobbly flipped Europe though which I assume is deliberate for your story. Keep going and post the work in progress.
Yes, the world is intended to bear a strong resemblance to a mirrored version of our world, but I also don't want it to be exact.
Similar enough for the reader to pick up certain similarities, but different enough that they don't complain about elements that don't fit that allegory.
To that end, what looks too much like our world? What looks cheap and lazy, versus what looks reasonable?
Also, are there any spots that look like they need more detail?
Here's a new version.
I've revised a little bit of Not-Norway and enhanced some detail in the Black Sea. I've also included some labels even though I don't have the borders ready yet.
Have you consiered things like where this continent lies, longitude/latitude-wise? If it sits in the same place as our Eurasia but flipped, 'Europe' would be where Japan and China are. How would this affect their climate?
I would say the Iberian peninsula, Greece, Turkey and the Black Sea are instantly recognisable if that helps, and Fennoscandia as well to a lesser degree.
Actually that wouldn't impact the climate at all. The world keeps spinning, so locations in the East-West axis are effectively arbitrary.Originally Posted by Diamond
However, what WOULD effect the climate is the Coriolis effect. Assuming an Earth with an identical size, tilt, and rotation speed (which it is) the Coriolis effect would result in ocean currents moving the same direction they do here, which would mean they would not be mirrored to match the change in continents.
As a result, you'd still have deserts on the Eastward side of North-to-South mountain ranges, and an abundance of tropical storms on the East coasts of Northern-hemisphere continents. This means that Not-Spain is going to get a climate like Florida. This is also producing a lot of lush farmlands on the Eastern half of Not-Africa where the Sahara desert would be. However, since Hadley Cells would still be a thing, there's still a lot of baking going on north of the equator, so that land would steadily grow dryer as you move inland. I imagine it looks a bit like moving West across the US; dense forests near the East coast, which turns to rich farmlands, which steadily dry out until you got Nevada-like deserts, and eventually Sahara-like deserts.
That said I'm not certain how much distance it would take for this to happen; I'm not sure just how much rainfall they would really get. Real-Africa has almost no mountains, so I could imagine storms get pretty far inland. But it's also far enough south that I don't think it would get as many tropical storms as would be found in Not-Spain.
I figure the change in climate would impact the particulars of the coastline, but I'm not really certain how much it would impact things. If anyone has any good sources or models to follow, I would be interested.
I already figured the British Isles would look pretty different because of the reversal of currents, but I wound up just drawing a new shape entirely, one which I don't feel actually reflects what a change in currents would do.
I also turned the Denmark peninsula into an Isthmus, but this was for story purposes, so the Argus Empire and Norles could have an actual land war.
I made a third version, and I'm really starting to question what I'm doing here. Just how much should this look like a mirror-Europe, and how original should it look?
I don't think anyone can truly answer this, but I appreciate thoughts on the matter. If you were reading a fantasy novel and saw the map looked like this, what would you find favorable about it, and what is disfavorable? Do any of these changes look like too much, or too little? Does this look weird to have England be radically different when Spain is just slightly more rounded? Should I be making England look more like England, or making Spain look less like Spain? I don't have the answers to that yet, but I'd appreciate thoughts on the subject.
On the creation side of things, I'm building this as a vector image within Inkscape. I started off using a map of Europe with a projection I liked, tracing most of the same coasts with a few adjustments here and there.
For the latest version, I've been redrawing the coastlines by snapping images of various coasts on Google Maps, tracing portions of them, and then laying these lines over my map, scaling, rotating, flipping, trimming, etc, until I have something that kind-of matches the shape/area, and then replacing the existing lines with the new line. The Not-British-Isles were formed as a frankenstein creation of coasts from another Island nation.
I was about to replace the coasts of Not-Norway with a bunch of fjords from Alaska when I finally started thinking... Is this even worth it? Does anyone really even notice how different these coastlines are? Am I going to keep up this same effort when I start on Africa? I'm copying real-world coasts but does it really look like that?
So after I drew up some national borders, I tried sharing my map in a couple other places and my map was received very poorly.
Honestly I think this was mostly because I handled the context about as well as the Soviet Union handled capitalism.
But I still got some valuable feedback, and it's helped me to figure out what I want out of the map I'm using for my story. And now that I know that, I want to lay that out to (hopefully) get some clearer feedback of what works and what doesn't.
First of all, some context for my story:
The main character is from our world, and gets reborn in this fantasy world. After living there for a few years he manages to go to a library and sees a map of the world. This is that map (or will be when its finished.) He comes to realize that this world is going to enter into its own World War One, and probably repeat the rest of our post-WWI history.
These are the rules I want to govern my map's design:
1) It need to be similar enough to real-world pre-WW1 that the protagonist would see the connection to our history and gain additional motivation to try to turn the tide of the upcoming war.
2) It should be different enough that the reader could accept when something is different from our history/culture/etc.
3) It should be clear to both the reader and the protagonist that this world is a different world, not some time-travel or alt-history
4) It needs to not too-closely resemble a certain other story about a fantasy/alt-history World War 1 that others have brought up.
5) Avoid any weird similarities (eg, resemblance to areas not nearby)
I did the mirrored geometry to hit rule #3, but for feedback purposes, everything is available to put on the chopping block. If there's anything in this design that bothers you, please be vocal about it.
Now as for this specific incarnation of the map... There are some things I like, and some things that I feel I could have done better. There are some parts that I put real thought into, and some parts that are less-so.
I would really appreciate any thoughts on the design. With the context and rules I have described, what do you feel is working, and not working? Is there anything that stands out and bugs you? What seems inconsistent? What should I change, and what should I keep? Everything is up for grabs; borders, coastlines, names, what-have-you.
I'm also up for feedback on the map creation/artistry, if that's your thing.
Last edited by Marscaleb; 05-10-2023 at 12:00 AM.
From a purely cultural point of view - I feel like the names and 'feel' of the nations too closely mirror the real world. If Eurasia is flipped, did the Huns and Magyars and Goths etc immigrate west to east? It would seem so, just based purely on the names. Was there a 'Roman' Empire? It seems so - again based on names and general distribution of nations.
Where is Australia? Same place as our world? Where are the Americas? Same place, same orientation as our world? Greenland? Greenland isn't shown on your map, but if it is east of Iceland (and it seems that it must be, just based on the name Iceland), it's far enough north that it might actually be part of the North American landmass, or at least within a short sailing distance of it. How did that effect the course of colonization, and everything that came after? I guess what I'm trying to say is that if it was me, I'd have an easier time believing in this map if there were no cultural allegories at all OR if you had just come up with a completely new world OR if you'd just made it a straight-up alternate history.
Considering the mirrored position of the continents the climate would be different, you wouldn't have a mediterranean basin there but probably a more subtropical climate due to the warm currents that would happen in place of the cold ones of the atlantic .
I am not sure I follow why that would be the case.
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