Worldbuilding: Geography

The late David Eddings, a New York Times bestseller of epic fantasy, once told a story of the day he scrawled a random continent on a bit of brown paper, divided it into little countries, began developing the cultures that lived in each one, and eventually wrote the Belgariad, one of the most enduring series in the genre since Tolkien.

A lot can spring from a simple map, because a map is a setting, and a setting begs its creator for a story. I drew the map above in MS Paint. It took about three minutes and absolutely no forethought, but as soon as I began to build mountain chains I started to think, "humans will definitely live on this side, and elves on that side. And they'll hate each other. And the humans will send an army into the elvenland, and the army will be sent back, literally and morally castrated. Because my elves are graceful in a savage way.

But that's just an example for its own sake. For your big bestselling fantasy debut novel, you're going to want to put a lot more thought into it. So grab a pen and paper. We're about to get started.

The first thing you'll want to do is set the borders for your world. Usually this means where the land meets the sea, but that's obviously not the only kind of border imaginable. You could have impassable mountain ranges surrounding your theater of operations, or maybe you're designing a flat world that simply ends. But for the sake of this hub, I'm going to assume standard geography. Personally, I like to draw whole continents, but you can do this however you like. Tolkien had the entire planet Arda mapped out, but the most iconic map in his legendarium is of the region (not the world) called Middle Earth, which is only the easternmost part of a much larger continent.

When drawing geological borders, don't use a ruler. Tectonic plates crack in random zigzags and lava cools in organic swooshes without the slightest hint of intelligent design. Unless the gods of your fantasy world took a direct interest in the shape of islands and continents, it's best to keep geology devoid of geometry. What's ugly and wrong in the latter is natural and right in the former.

So draw your continent, or part of one, and just let the pen jitter as you go. Be random. Zig in and zag out. Make bays and peninsulas wherever you feel. Sharp turns and narrow connections are fine; just look at the Isthmus of Panama or the straits of gibraltar. The only way to go wrong at this stage is to think too much about what looks good and what doesn't.

The next big part of geology is mountain ranges. These will prove quite fun going forward. They divide mighty nations and provide interesting obstacles for adventurers and armies alike. You can put them almost wherever you want, especially if you have a theological or magical explanation. Just keep one thing in mind: mountains do tend to form in chains. Earth's crust (and presumably the crusts of other Earthlike worlds) is made of tectonic plates, and mountain ranges tend to form where two plates collide. Millions of years ago, the Indian plate slammed into the Eurasian plate. It slid underneath it, pushing up the Himalayas. (That process is actually still continuing very, very slowly.)

On a final note, it may sometimes help to consider continental drift. I know this will contradict my artistic advice about coastlines looking random, but continents do tend to break apart over time, so it adds a touch of realism to give neighbouring landmasses complementary puzzle piece shapes. We can clearly see how Africa and South America once fit together, and when things separate less neatly, you get the mess of pacific islands that Australia left in its wake as it drifted away from Eurasia.

If you want life (as we know it) to flourish in your world, you're going to need water other than the ocean. Even if your world has freshwater oceans, they're only useful to people and ecosystems near the coast.

Lakes make for nice scenery, and your world can be absolutely packed with them, but they probably won't show up on this map. I'm assuming we're all working at or around the scale of Middle Earth right now, which means we're standing so far back that lakes are too small to see. If you look at a map of Earth, the only lakes you can see are the Great Lakes in North America. The only other bodies of water that equal their size are inland seas in Europe. Generally the difference between a lake and a sea is that lakes have freshwater and seas have saltwater, but there's a lot of overlap and ambiguity. In theory you can put as many of these huge things in your world as you want. But if you're going for realism, keep in mind that the great lakes were formed when a massive glacier melted. Landlocked seas need a big basin to form in, so an area surrounded by mountains works well.

Next you'll need to add rivers. Those squiggly lines add a touch of realism to any map, I think. And they play into stories quite well. A broad violent river can stop a hero in his tracks, and even a tame fordable one can slow down an army. Rivers can provide rapid transit between inland cities, and carry important rings into the hands of obscure hobbits. The only hard and fast rule for rivers is that they flow downhill. If you break that rule, you'd better have some magic to explain it. Since I assume you're not illustrating your land's precise topography, you can put rivers pretty much anywhere you want. Just keep in mind that major rivers will probably flow to the ocean or to one of your big inland seas. And big rivers have big sources. It might look good to have one start in a mountain range, as all the rain that falls on that range is carried into that river by a vast network of streams. Rivers coming from the extreme north (or south, depending on your location) might be fed by the constant melting of an enormous glacier -- or maybe that river only flows in the summer because the melting stops in the winter.

Rivers can also have all kinds of little peculiarities. A particularly curvy one might produce a lot of oxbow lakes, and if you happen to outline topological features like ridges and gorges, those are great places for rivers to become waterfalls. If a river's wide enough, it can have islands right in the middle of it, and what better place to build a castle than on an island with a river rushing all around? It's a free moat, and maybe even a siege-proof shipping lane from the nearest metropolis.

If you've opened up Pawn of Prophecy or Return of the King to review the professionals' maps for some stylistic inspiration, you've probably noticed that there's only one main feature of those maps that we haven't put on ours yet: Forest.

Most fantasy worlds draw inspiration from medieval Europe, and medieval Europe was dominated by huge sprawling forests. They're great places for a dramatic boar hunt, an encounter with elves and dryads, or even a hermit magician to make his home. I find that forests are the most annoying feature to draw by hand because the basic method is to draw tons and tons of little trees. That's how it is in Tolkien and Eddings. And if you feel like it going to all that trouble, it really does look good when you're done. If you're feeling lazy or your hand is starting to cramp, I suggest denoting the border of a forest with a fluffy, cloud-like fringe. This works well because most of the forest's area remains free for labelling.

So where do you put your forests? This is another area with only one real rule: forests need water. A forest is almost always realistic when it straddles one of your big major rivers or springs up around a big lake. But those aren't the only sources of water, of course. Any region that gets regular rain could theoretically have a forest. The quality and type of a region's soil also affect whether a forest is possible, but fantasy maps seldom denote such things. Just know that deserts and grasslands aren't likely to become forests overnight..

One of the fun things about forests is that they're much less permanent than mountains. Agricultural societies tend to destroy them so they can use all that fertile soil for farming, and forest fires can devastate them at any time. On the other hand, when the great agrarian empire falls, long dead forests might spring back, as their remnants expand to reclaim the territory. Diverting a river can allow a forest to claim a new region just as effectively as druidic magic.

Deserts work well in fantasy because they're so alien compared to the forests and fields of medieval Europe. During the Crusades, knights in shining armor marched from England and France to attack Islam in the Middle East, canonizing the generic "eastern desert" as a place where dark forces gather to invade the free world. Mordor fits this model, as do the Angaraks in Eddings's works.

We tend to think of deserts as hot sandy places, but the actual definition of desert is a very dry place. Water has what high school science teachers like to call a high specific heat capacity. That means that if a wet area and a dry area are subjected to the same amount of sunlight for the same duration, the wet area will heat up slowly and the dry area will heat up very quickly, which is why dry deserts tend to be perceived as hot. But water's high specific heat capacity also has the reverse effect: it cools very slowly when the sun sets, whereas that searing desert will cool rapidly. That's life in the desert: hot days and cold nights.

So deserts don't necessarily have to be equatorial. They just have to be somewhere that doesn't get much rain. And we can identify the rainless areas on the map by understanding where rain really comes from. Clouds and storms form out at sea, where the water to make them is abundant. Then they drift toward land, giving coastal regions plenty of precipitation. It never rains in California, it pours.

But just east of rain-soaked California is the desert state of Nevada. And the reason for that is the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Mountain ranges are like enormous walls that even weather finds it difficult to scale. All the storms and rainclouds that roll into California from the Pacific stop at the mountains, never reaching Nevada.

That being said, no region has to be a desert. Even if your map does happen to have one of these mountain barriers, the area behind it can still be moistened by rivers and glacial flows. Or you could just say the mountains are low and unobtrusive, freely admitting rainclouds into the land beyond. And, of course, there's always the magical option. Maybe after the desert demons were defeated by Proth the Paladin, the life goddess Thoria entered the region and blessed it with an immortal enchanted forest. Or something like that.

For a long time I would instinctively begin my maps by drawing a line across the top of the page and another across the bottom. "This one's the arctic circle," I'd declare, "and that one's the equator." And all the land between would graduate from cold to hot accordingly, with a temperate zone in the middle.

How foolish I was! The fact is, no writer should ever feel limited by latitude. Even without magic and divine intervention, you can put almost any climate at any latitude using simple real-world geography.

The key is currents. Basically, the equator gets a lot of sun and the poles get considerably less, and since it's the tendency of things to seek balance, big looped convection currents form in the air and in the sea. They carry warm water from the equator to the poles, and cold water back the other way. But how does this help you? Well, the ultimate real-world example is England. Based on their latitude, the British Isles should really have a Boreal climate, meaning harsher winters and shorter summers, and a lot more coniferous trees. But one of those warm currents carrying equatorial heat to the north pole passes right by Ireland, warming the Isles all year round. They still get winter, of course, but it's the winter of temperate zones like New York.

For a fictional example, look at Northrend in World of Warcraft. On the western edge of this frigid arctic continent, there's a tropical jungle called the Sholazar Basin. This is an extreme example, of course, and it's handwaved by a little godly technology, but in principle it could work for you.

In my own unpublished fantasy novel, I have a continent stretching from the arctic circle to the equator with a long mountain range right down the middle. The realm east of the range is almost entirely boreal, except for a desert peninsula in the extreme south. The lands to the west are predominantly savanna, with jungles to the south and brisk highlands in the north. Crossing that mountain range feels like traveling to another planet because the climates on either side are so different.

But that's just me. Your world should suit your story. Or inspire it, as sometimes happens. But building the world itself is only half the battle of fantasy worldbuilding. Next you've got to populate the lands you've drawn. It's time to develop cultures and nations, races and tongues, history and war. Stay tuned for part II, Worldbuilding: Anthropology.