I spent most of Grade Six drawing maps. The result is a knowledge of geography that serves me well to this day, except for a few newer states in Central Europe and Asia. Another result is that I fully agree with Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland that most fantasy maps lack any sense of geography, history, or economics.
Recently, I’ve been spending my free time refining the map that will be the background for my efforts at fiction. As I work, I’ve developed some basic rules for ensuring that, whatever else I might do wrongly, at least the geography in my fantasy world will be plausible:
- Remember continental drift. Your land masses should look as though they would roughly fit into each other. If you have trouble coming up with realistic land masses, try sketching the outlines of clouds or stains; you’ll be surprised how realistic the result will be.
- Rivers and streams don’t start and end just anywhere. They arise in the mountains or hills, and usually empty into a larger body of water, such as a lake or an ocean. A few may go underground instead. Almost all grow wider as they move away from their source.
- Mountain ranges are generally the result of the collision of tectonic plates. This means that they will rarely meet at convenient right angles to each other, the way that the mountains of Mordor do in Tolkien.
- Ecosystems follow set patterns. You don’t have a rain forest next to tundra or desert. Instead, you have prairie and scrubland inbetween. A half an hour’s research on climate zones should be enough for you to get the idea.
- Cities, towns, and farms don’t appear just anywhere. They are separated by however much land is needed for them to be self-sustaining, the only exceptions being large towns that are supported by a circle of small towns and farms that support them. In a primarily rural culture, they will be close to a water source. As population and trade develop, habitations may be positioned to service traffic on a road, or to take advantage of a certain trade. When you place a habitation, know why it’s there, even if the reason never gets into the story.
- Consider how people get around. If water is the main transport, you need either a lot of coast line or else large rivers that can be navigated for much of their length. If roads are used more than water, then you’ll have several grades of road, probably ranging from highways like the Roman roads to half over-grown foot paths. All these decisions will affect how far anyone can travel in a day.
- Forests and wilderness areas are much larger in pre-industrial cultures than they are today.
- Most lands have a history that involves a succession of different cultures passing through them. Your names should reflect that, suggesting borrowings or corruptions from several different languages mingling together. A particular region might have a concentration of names from one language, and you should know why.
- Be prepared for your landscape to evolve as you write. However, if changes are necessary, try to make them follow the rest of the guidelines given here.
Put this way, many of these points may sound obvious. But open the frontspiece of your typical fantasy paperback, and the chances are that the map will suffer from one or more of the faults I mention. Some have nearly all of them.
But take the time to create a believable map, and you’ll know more about your story’s background. You might even find story details or plot elements that wouldn’t have occurred to you if you map didn’t have at least a toehold in reality.
A couple amendments for your rules…
We already know that continental drift doesn’t happen on all planets. It not only requires a liquid core/mantle, but the crust has to have a certain viscosity as well (currently theorized to come from water in the rock, but take that explanation with a grain of salt). So even quite large and otherwise earth-like planets (like Venus, for example) can have fairly random topography (although square mountain ranges are still unlikely).
The amount of atmosphere a planet has is also not strongly related to its size or gravity. For example, Titan has 14% of our gravity but more atmosphere with higher surface pressure than earth. So a planet could have a tenth of Earth’s surface area and random features, and still be perfectly realistic!
Those are just two of several interesting lessons I picked up on this subject while writing code to generate planet surfaces automatically for Imperial Realms. Another big lesson was that most of our theories of solar system formation are wrong; the last five years’ worth of exoplanet studies have shown one example after another of planets with orbits that would have been thought impossible even in the year 2000. That lesson is perhaps not as useful for fantasy-writing purposes, though.
Thanks, Steve.
I should probably point out that I was talking about fantasy, which is generally set on a very Earth-like planet. Your comments are well-taken, however, for science fiction world creation, which is much more scientifically rigorous.
But coastlines that don’t fit together are no less _realistic_ than those that do; they’re just more _familiar._ For that matter, a planet could have lots of small, separated seas instead of large expanses of ocean and it would still be very Earth-like; people could live their entire lives on it without ever realizing they weren’t on Earth itself… as long as they didn’t circumnavigate their globe. 🙂
I accept that familiarity is more important than realism for fantasy, and wouldn’t bother to nitpick about it except for the thought that we should be clear about familiarity being the standard rather than reality because it might suggest further rules.
For example, one thing that leaps out at me as being implausible in most fantasy is the way it tends to divide up “people” into different ethnic groups with rigid boundaries. The people of the plains always seem to be red, and the people in the forest blue, and they never meet and nobody is ever a shade of purple… except maybe to produce the occasional lonely hero who doesn’t fit in anywhere. Much more plausible would be mixtures of people and populations of mixed origin. On a map that would mean disputed border areas and entire states like Belgium and Luxembourg where mixed populations choose to stick together rather than join their parents.
There’s no real logical reason why this should be so – it’s easy to imagine populations that never mix (obviously, since many fantast writers do just that :P). However, if familiarity is the goal rather than realism, then it’s a significant point to mind.
It’s definitely the impression of realism that matters, not complete realism, which is why familiarity matters. Unlike SF writers, fantasy writers are usually not as interested in exploring the background of their worlds as they are in simply telling stories.
I agree with you about the handling of different ethnic groups, which is why I suggest that maps have several layers of names to suggest that different cultures have occupied it over the centuries. I think the rigidly divided boundaries reflect the modern world, where you usually don’t have mass movements of people. Also, the rigid divisions allow individual races to be portrayed as good or evil in Tolkien’s fashion, which not only seems racist today, but overlooks of some some interesting story possibilities.
Which brings up another point: in fantasy, the movements of nomads usually results in their defeat. Historically, of course, that only happens when the nomads’ supply lines are stretched too far (which is a main reason the Mongols didn’t conqueror Europe; the other reasons were Mongol politics). Often, of course,the nomads can’t turn back, because they’re being pushed forward by other nomads who have taken their territories.
It’s not only a matter of portraying good and evil, but also a matter of many authors mimicking Tolkien in general and not going to the trouble of creating something unique. This was especially true when the genre was younger and much less mainstream (is it even considered mainstream now?). They weren’t necessarily concerned with the story’s familiarity to the real world, but rather the reader’s familiarity with Middle Earth as the definition of “fantasy.”
Plenty of modern authors (e.g. Steven Erikson’s Malazan novels) bring a more realistic view of race, religion, politics, conquest, ethnic migration and evolution, etc.
[…] http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm Excellent Article with More Pointers on Geography: https://brucebyfield.com/2011/10/27/drawing-realistic-fantasy-maps/ How Deserts Form: […]
Thanks for the things to think about. I’m currently world-building for another series. In this case, the series has been founded on the geography of the planet. I’m not sure if it’ll be fantasy or sci-fi or a blend of both. It may depend on where we are in the history of the planet. Makes for some fun research and for interesting discussions to say the least.