Quick edit: To Finns, I know.

Making a realistic map is difficult, you need to take into account various factors and study a wide range of disciplines. The aim of this series is to record my process as I map Muna, a fictional worldbuilding setting.

For a long time I’ve been making maps without sketching and the result is almost invariably that I scrap whole projects because I feel dissatisfied, usually after sinking a lot of time on them. Having learned the lesson the hard way, the first step when making maps, or any kind of creative endeavor, is to make sure you know what you want to do before you commit to it.

Each person will probably develop their own way to do this, but what I like to do is to first define a set of guidelines for what I want. Muna is an old setting that I’ve been building on and off for about five years now (if you are wondering why I’m only making a map now, refer to the previous paragraph), so I’m pretty sure of how I want it to look like. Muna is to be a mountainous peninsula at the far end of a very large continent, it is not particularly large but it does span an ample range of latitudes, giving it a wide variety of climates from sub-tropical to cold continental.

I kinda wanted it to look as if Great Britain was attached to the continent by a land-bridge, sort of. And well, as luck would have it, that’s exactly what GB looked like about 10 thousand years ago during the last ice-age.

BJ Coles and SE Rouillard, 1998, “Doggerland: A speculative survey” William E. McNulty and Jerome N. Cookson, National Geographic Magazine

With Doggerland as a guide I began sketching until I had something I was happy with.

Rough drafts “Final” sketch

I flipped the land for climatic reasons. If you look at a world map, you’ll notice that even though Great Britain is much farther north than, say, Japan, it never gets quite as cold as it gets there, this is because of the side of the ocean they are in. The way climate works, GB gets winds coming from the Atlantic, and the warm Gulf stream, all year round, while Japan alternates between warm equatorial winds in July and cold Siberian winds in January. Additionally, polar cold and equatorial warm oceanic currents flow west where the converge, creating a steep temperature gradient in the east-facing coast, the now mild water flows east where it splits, equalizing temperature along the west-facing coast. Since I want a large variety of climates, placing Muna on the east coast of the continent was the sensible choice.

Having finished the sketch, I began the process of digitizing it and adding detail to the coastline. For this whole series of maps I have opted for an alternatehistory.com plain style. It may not be pretty, but it’s clean and easy to read which is what I need. The lakes and fjords up north are based on maps of Norway, New Zealand, southern Chile and The Alps. It’s a mountainous area in a latitude that likely had glaciers during the last ice age, so fjords are to be expected.

Now comes the difficult part, topography. Wilbur will generate realistic topography for you (though it is by no means an easy process), but I find that it doesn’t perform particularly well for the scales I usually work at and I like to have control over where things go, so I’ll do it by eye.

The first thing I do is to define a color palette or, at the very least, the steps and altitudes I’ll use. This is important because I’ll need to use it for reference material. In this case I’m using 0, 100, 200, 600, 1000, 2000m steps and coloring them according to this color scheme (you rarely use equal intervals for elevation because things tend to get steeper and steeper as they get higher).

The next step is to download DEMs (Digital Elevation Models) for geographic areas that are similar to what I want to make. The best way to make something look realistic is to base it off real things. Except for the fact that they are islands, both New Zealand and Japan are fairly similar topographically-speaking to what I want to make. Mountainous landmasses of roughly the same size I want in the same latitudes I’ll use.

I downloaded DEMs for these two regions, loaded them up in QGIS, an open source program for professional map-making and analysis of geographic data, and applied to them the palette I’m using.

Topographic map of New Zealand Topographic map of Japan

I then launched my graphics software of choice and began drawing layer by layer, making sure that the proportion, position and shape of each of them looked at the very least vaguely similar to the maps above.

While it looks really neat in the gif, the process is far from simple and involves a lot of planning, backtracking and cleaning. With each new layer I’d have to make sure that the previous ones were properly drawn and correct anything that looked out of place or that no longer works with the new layers.

Finally, I draw the rivers following the contours of the land. There is a rule of thumb to rivers, and that is “water flows down the steepest slope”, which in topographic maps translates to “rivers flow down perpendicular to the contour lines”. You can get away with a few creative twists and shapes in flat terrain, but if a river goes up or along a contour line you need to explain that somehow.

Next time I’ll write about placing settlements and making political borders.