Thursday, September 22, 2016

Day 22: Geography

Today we go back to Social Studies and the geography of my world, at least according to Bryant. In my case it's a return to the stellar map of The Garden.

Redraw the map if you need to. It doesn’t need to be exact—when they put the map at the front of your beautiful book, the publisher will hire an artist to re-do it anyway. If you have no idea how to re-draw your map, get out a black marker and go over any pencil marks from your original that you will be keeping (like contours of the coast)-- leave out any lettering, as they won't show through well anyway. Put a second piece of paper over the first and trace over the black lines in pencil. Write in place names and any additional map key icons (little trees for forests, upside-down V's for mountains, etc.). Draw in your roads and rivers (remember: blue is always water on a map), and your cities, towns, and settlements.

I've got a map, and it's a decent map, but it does need work.  I'm sure some systems are going to shift around based on the limitations of Jump Gates and Jump Drive distances.  I want some planets to be accessible easily, and others that are just outside of traditional jump distance, requiring a circular arc to reach.  Doing so could allow for some adventurous and risk-taking captains to set their ship for 40 light-years instead of 30, and "go for the win".

Remember that the Arrival Point within a system could be millions or even billions of miles from the system's jump gate.  A ship that gets kicked into jump-space at Kel that emerges in the Fathosi system might still have to travel for 12 hours through that system to reach the Fathosi jump gate, which can then send them to D'kran where they face another 6 hour trip from the Fathosi/D'Kran arrival point to the D'Kran jump gate. Another jump to Kez, and then to Danal, and finally to Barm.  That ship could have spent 4-5 days just navigating to gates, meanwhile someone reckless enough to try a jump from Kel to Barm from the start would arrive in the Barm system instantly, albeit at the chance of damaging or destroying their Jump Drive (or their entire ship).

I can see a few worlds that need to be mapped out in full; worlds that will be focal enough (at the beginning of the game at least) to warrant the detail.  Kel, Danal, possibly Loros, one or two of the Clan worlds; they should have land masses and a couple points of interest mapped out.  I just need to figure out how I want to map these out.  The map I have currently doesn't translate well; or maybe it's just the methods that I've saved the map image as a JPEG don't carry the details well. I'll need to spend more time than 15 minutes allows to refine it.

Tomorrow marks the start of my final week of this project (the 30 Days of WorldBuilding, not the campaign setting). It's looking to be more refinement, nailing down of details, and final proparation for using the world in making the novel (or setting, in my case). I'm pretty excited and looking forward to finishing strong.


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