🎓 On the Difficulty of Fantasy Cartography

What making fantasy maps can teach us about complexity

Étienne Fortier-Dubois

recently wrote a really insightful article about the relative complexity (or lack thereof) of fantasy worlds, even those touted as world building masterpieces — like Tolkien’s Middle Earth. I generally prefer series with complex, real-feeling worlds that have multiple cultures and stories that span time and space. Think L. E. Modesitt’s Recluse or the enormous land underpinning the enormous saga of The Wandering Inn.

Back in the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, when it was still firmly the province of obscure nerds, pulling this off in a credible way meant either riffing off of real-world geography or having a deep, deep understanding of geography and culture. These days, though, if a realistically complex world for characters to inhabit is the goal (and it isn’t always!) — well, computers have our backs.

In a 2018 interview with Worldbuilding Magazine for the Cartography & Navigation edition, Dylan Shad mentioned using a world generator to create his map, although he did add:

...worldbuilding through generative programs feels like I'm not creating, but rather trying to visit someplace that I already know exists. I have to get all of the logic and the variables right in order for it to work and create what I want. I can't just throw any old thing together and exclaim “EUREKA!”

That was basically forever in programming terms. Back in 2018, the map-making landscape was pretty sparse. There were some nice tools that would let you draw or paint a map that looked nice, but everything had to be done manually — which could get unwieldy if you were trying to create a large world. If you wanted the world to be realistic, with the ramifications of mountain ranges and islands considered for the climate? If you wanted to layer biome data over top of a political map? Prepare to do a ton of research followed by a lot of manual artistic work, which is great if you're into that kind of thing and kind of horrible if you're trying to create a working tool to help you as a storyteller.

The generative tools would save you some work, but then you were stuck with whatever the program spit out. You could try map seed after map seed hoping you'd get something close to what you envisioned, but you basically had the opposite problem as doing everything by hand.

What fantasy map generation looks like today

Enter Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator, which left beta in late 2019. It's a free tool which produces procedurally generated and highly customizable fantasy maps. You can use auto-generated maps or create your own world from scratch.

Want to have climate data, political boundaries, biomes, trade routes, population density, and elevation all stored in the same map file? Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator will do that for you!

Want to differentiate between governments that share a culture or track the spread of a particular religion? This tool will not only do that for you — it'll make assumptions based on the cultures, religions, populations, city locations, and geography you input... and if the results aren't quite right for what you're trying to do, you can tweak that too. You can even rate how expansionist different groups are, to help with generation of their influence map.

Struggle to figure out the most logical places for roads across your world? This map generator will account for rivers, landmass elevation, and let you label ports and capitals before indicating the most logical trade routes, making it easy to tell who is more likely to trade with who based on all the factors you indicate.

The only real weakness I've found is that, while you can tweak a procedurally generated map to get it closer to what you want, Agzaar's map generator has limits to how fine-grain you can get. If you want to have really incredible detail, you'll need to export it into another program.

Conveniently, that's easy.

This youtube tutorial series covers how to use the features of a map to enhance worldbuilding and storytelling. It starts with a map generated from Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator and then imports it into Wonderdraft, which is paid map customization software. The video covers how these compare to map creation software like Inkarnate, if you’re into that sort of thing.

There’s more to an accurate map than colors and lines, tho

When creating a map to use as a storytelling reference, one of the hardest things for me personally to bear in mind is that border zones are murky and the bright lines and start color differences are a handy trick, not a truth. I have to consciously remind myself to consider how cultural touchstones, like religion and language, spread and blend despite political boundaries drawn on a map. Trade is hard to stop, and taking it into account can make for a significantly richer world.

When designing a series of cities, I try to remember that cities come to be for a variety of reasons, be it trade, religion, mutual defense or something else. This can impact the makeup of the city, how it's organized, and the problems they will likely face.

The irony is that cultural diffusion was one of the major themes of the Africa unit back when I taught World History — think Bantu migration, Muslim mosques spreading to West Africa, and Punic religious iconography along the northern coast. Culture is a spectrum, but although Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator does a good job of showing cultural influence, games like Civilization and encyclopedia articles outlining dress codes and food preferences like they’re evenly spread throughout a region have really skewed my mental habits even when I know perfectly well that the popularity prevalence of Old Bay seasoning in the Mid-Atlantic region is a spectrum¹.

It’s not just cultures, though — I also try to remember that categories are useful, fuzzy models, a convenient shorthand used by scientists. They're labels, not truisms, and just as the Sahara has many regions within it, and many deserts are very unlike like the Sahara in important ways — we can afford to be flexible with how we delineate biomes. Set them up however works for the story, even if the desert of your creation is wildly lacking in realistic levels of diversity — lookin’ at you, Dune².

Accuracy and Realism is not always the goal, though

The thing about fantasy map making, though, is that most stories do not have particularly complex maps because they do not need particularly complex maps. One of the things that always annoys me about intercontinental discourse on the internet is when people complain about how bad Americans are at geography. I’ll be the first to admit that my 7th grade geography test was the first test I ever failed — although in my defense I have a very hard time visualizing anything, much less maps. Aphantasia is a thing, even if my spellchecker doesn’t know it yet! But realistically, most of us do not benefit from a firm understanding of the borders of Wyoming and Colorado — which are not technically truly 100% rectangular if you look closely… much less a far-away country like Uzbekistan. Discussions of what to do about any given conflict on the other side of the world are rarely meaningfully helped by super-detailed, fine-grained statistics.

Coarse-grained models are useful, most of us benefit from generalizations even if we’re taught over and over that stereotypes are bad, and in fantasy maps as well as tech jobs, I think there’s a lot to be said for the value of reducing complexity in order to increase legibility — even when the most visible examples in a field tend to be quite complex.

After all, Brandon Sanderson and the truly excellent Adrian Tchaikovsky get a lot of press for complex and imaginative world-building, but at the end of the day, the In Death series by J. D. Robb (aka romance grandmistress Nora Roberts) is probably the best-selling science fiction series of all time if you ignore the ‘official’ categories, with near-future dystopia The Hunger Games a distant second.

In fiction as well as in life, sometimes complexity is overrated.

1. Although a good rule of thumb is that if you’re traveling west from the Chesapeake Bay region, Ohio is roughly where Subway stops stocking Old Bay as a topping for subs.

2. That said, I really enjoyed this analysis out of the University of Utah of why the real problem with sandworms is their size.