On Mapping the World

Early on in the creation of Starfall, I found I needed a map, so I could begin fleshing out potential campaign locations. I am not much of a cartographer, but I knew that I wanted something realistic that denoted height and terrain changes. From that, thanks to the Climate Cookbook, I could derive current, seasonal weather patterns, and climate zones.

As I said, I am not much of a cartographer, but I knew that I wanted something realistic that denoted height and terrain changes. From that, thanks to the Climate Cookbook, I could derive current, seasonal weather patterns, and climate zones.

As I said, I am not much of a cartographer, so I began by scouring Google Images for some topographical maps. Thankfully, NASA has quite a few wonderful maps of other worlds. I eventually settled on one of Venus because it showed a good deal of variation, has a lot of interesting geographic characteristics, and is not nearly as instantly recognizable as Mars.

From there, I used GIMP and some techniques from RobA's tutorial, How to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map, up through the point where he creates the seas.  To create the land mask, I used color selection to grab all of the colors below a given elevation and paint bucket them white. After finishing up the steps to create the seas, I spent at least two months going pixel by pixel along the coasts in the land mask, tidying up what the color selection left messy. Then it was on to get some temporary labels (I just used the actual Venusian names) and work through the cookbook.

By now, I'm sure people are wondering why I would go through all of this trouble. For me, all of these little details have widespread ramifications. Trade winds determine sailing seasons and trade routes, and climates dictate weather patterns, which dictate flora and fauna. Want to know what lives and grows in a region, you need its climate. Want to know its trade partners, you need currents and wind patterns. All of these are interrelated, so for me, this is a huge part of laying the groundwork for later worldbuilding.

The Maps

What follows are a handful of maps of Starfall.  These are cylindrical projects, so scales grow increasingly distorted as locations leave the equator. The scale is 4 miles per pixel at the equator. This is an entire planet, so it is kind of large.

The World of Starfall

Temperature Maps

 January Temperatures: Summer in the North

 July Temperatures: Summer in the South

 

Trade Winds Maps

January Trade Winds

 July Trade Winds

Annual Precipitation Changes

This map uses 50% gray to represent no change between January and July, while darker grays represent increasingly high precipitation in January and lighter grays have increasing precipitation in July.

Oceanic Surface Currents

This map displays warm currents in red and cool ones in blue. Such currents add a nominal boost to the speed of any sailing vessel, a couple of miles per hour or so. Still, winds play a far more important role in driving sailing ships.

So What Comes Next?

The next step I need to take is to map out climate zones. Ideally, I would have far more programming skill than I do and write software to interpolate the temperature and precipitation maps according to a table and output a pixel by pixel climate map for me.  Unfortunately, I do not have this capability, so I will have to eyeball things. The downside is that I will likely miss out on many interesting microclimates, but on the upside, I'll have a climate map long before I learned how to program.