Design

Stage 1.1 : Guided Creativity

The goal here is to create a fantasy world that is usable in some way. Whether it’s the setting for a story (or series), or a backdrop for an RPG campaign, or some other purpose, there should be some reason to it. I suppose you could design it for fun, but I imagine it would be even more fun to use it. I already knew I wanted Ergaia to be the setting for my stories, that part was out of the way. The next part of this stage would be to guide my creativity with some simple direction.

Now, before I explain, you could very easily just draw some wavy lines on a piece of paper, some upside-down V’s for mountains, add a couple stars for capitals and maybe some dots for towns and call it a day. There isn’t anything wrong with that if that gets you going. I prefer to upload some guidelines to my brain so that when I start the freehand, I know I’m getting something I want. If I don’t, I find that I’ll have fifteen outlines before I start to see the things I want manifest themselves in the map. This is the “brainstorming” step.

I wanted two things: An east/west oriented map with an “old world” and a “new world,” and a “Mediterranean” style inner ocean that was strategically vital. These two guidelines become the foundation of the stories I want to tell. So with those two principles in mind, I drew some wavy lines. Unfortunately I have lost the early pages with the simple wavy line outline, but I can assure you it looked like something a toddler would draw. That’s fine. It gets revised as I go. I do, however, have an early concept drawing (that I didn’t use).

Eventually I would get a draft that was nearly exactly my world outline as it stands now. I actually got very far with the creation of the world before I realized I wanted to make some small changes to the landmasses. But because of the way I had used those landmasses to build up everything else (we’ll get to that), changing even a small part would require vast changes to everything I had done, much like changing a part of a foundation would cause everything built on top of it to crumble. I finally found a mistake in how I had done a crucial part of the world building that gave me the excuse to start over (and start this walkthrough!).

Step 1.2 : The Outline

Here’s a side by side comparison of how Ergaia looked before my “restart” and how it looks now.

It’s hard to explain why I made the changes I did. Part of the reason was aesthetics, part of it was how I felt the world needed to be changed in order to foster more conflict and more areas of interest. Basically, though, it was too “clean.” The map will always suffer from “drawn on a page” syndrome, where the world will be distorted if ever projected properly. That’s fine. I’m shooting for as much depth as to add realism without becoming a burden or an annoyance. At the end of the day, I’m still making this all up. So while I want everything to have a foundation in reality, I don’t want to add any more depth than is necessary. And I reserve the right to change things in an unscientific way in order to fit the needs of the stories.

The major changes were on the eastern hemisphere, allowing for a more contiguous and interesting shape. I wanted that southern island continent to matter more in the scope of the world’s history, and I wanted to lose the resemblance to Australia. I removed the fjords on the eastern equatorial coast of the western continent, because it was slightly unrealistic, and added fjords in places where they would more likely occur if Ergaia were real. I also changed the shape of the islands in the far southwest, which follow a more logical path of the fault there.

I originally had a tectonic map drawn out for the first version of Ergaia, but I have since lost it. It was basically just drawn to suit where the continents and mountain ranges already were, so it wasn’t much of a loss. The Tectonic map would represent step two in the world development for me, giving me an indication of where and how the mountains would look, but also where the island chains and volcanoes would be. It’s not a completely necessary step, but if you’re following along, that’s where Step 1.3 happened. I did some very basic research on the different types of fault lines and how their movement affects the topography in order to complete the tectonic map. Wikipedia and a quick Google search was enough there.

Now that the design of the world is (for now!) finalized, I can move on to weather.