Splat | WiseTome.com

I had been involved with some world building activities for the Chaos And Order realm, when I started working on a map for the known world of Pipurim. Indeed, there has not been much work at that repository or at the role playing forums, but I have been working on the world nevertheless. Earlier, I had worked on a constructed langauge, Pasen, and now I thought I should work a bit on the actual world by making maps.

I had been making crude maps earlier, and the extent was only with respect to demarcation of the different countries and the areas occupied by the different races of the planet Pipurim. I thought, there would be some maps drawn by the inhabitants of a group of continents, at least to the extent how much they were aware off - if not at the full planetary scale. That made me look out for resources that would help be build the map.

Some of the search results, did land me on the Wikipedia page on Constructed Worlds, and that gave me some information on maps with respect to world building. Some of the things that we can depict in a map are as follows:

• Continents - Now these shapes were already decided earlier, and there was not much to work about. The shapes of the continents were kind of ‘reverse-engineered’ by the plans we had for histories of different races and nations.
• Mountains - These could be used as a border for nations. It is hard for nations to maintain control over areas across mountain ranges.

• Rivers - These deside basically on the type of vegetation that would be around. Along with the location of a particular piece of land on a latitude, one can decided if the lands are filled with jungles or forests or grasslands. Of course, there are other factors like mountains and the resulting weather pattern.
• Swamps and deserts - these do give nice mood along with the culture of the people that inhabit such areas, and could be used to further enrich the world.

As I said, we had decided on the shape of the continents way back and hence that ruled out the use of fractal generators for creating maps. Instead, I used Inkscape to create the basic line art and then overlay it with different features to create the above map.