Category: Worldbuilding

So I’ve been spending an awful lot of time lately building a world, and it turns out building a whole world is a pretty ginormous job. Who knew?

I entered into this project, as I always do, bright-eyed and bushy-faced, and full of grand and grandiose ideas, and almost immediately (as I also always do) got bogged down by the reality of it all. Progress has been slow. Steady, but slow. At the moment I’ve got the shape of the thing sketched in, but I’m still nowhere near where I thought I needed to be to start actually writing stories in the thing.

Which brings me to the big thing I’ve learned about worldbuilding – I can’t do it in a vaccuum.

You see, my idea was that I would build out this world, flesh out all the details of the people and the neighborhoods and the commerce and the culture and the everything and then, when I had a fully realized and vibrant world ready to go, I could begin with the stories.

Turns out that’s not how it works. Or at least, that’s not how I work.

What I’ve come to, through some trial and error, is what I think is a more workable process. I’ve sketched in the bones of the world, and will set up placeholders for where all the details will be( when there are details), and then I will write my stories – fleshing out the world as I go and filling in those details as my stories require them. Because it’s the stories that make the world and not the world that makes the stories. At least for me, anyway.

So expect to see some stories in the not so distant future, and a more organic approach to the building of my world (which you can see being built here). I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to it.

Just a quick update today on the progress of my little world building adventure – the one I mentioned in this post.

I have just finished setting up the initial structure of my world’s map, a job which I suspect will feel the most like work of all the worldbuilding things I have to do, and now all that’s left is to put all the things that go on the map on the map, and to start writing all the articles that will explain all those things.

Initially I’d decided to use a fairly basic (but pretty) map of London published in about 1815. This was, of course, 70 years before my world is set, but I was willing to accept the inaccuracies this caused. I couldn’t find a better map that I could use legally, and I felt I could explain it away with the idea that my world is an alternate version of the real one and is under no obligation to be historically accurate in any but the most passing of ways.

So that was the map I was using, and I’d gotten quite a ways along in the process. I’d laid out the Metropolitan Police districts, located and pinned most of the police stations, marked out several of the neighborhoods and gang territories (some authentically, and some.. creatively), and I had each section of the main map linked to a more detailed, higher resolution map of just that part of it.

It was pretty nifty.

And then I discovered that there actually were downloadable images of Charles Booth’s Poverty maps of London (1898-9) which were both far more detailed and informative than the map I’d been using, and also within a few years of when Lunden is set.

You see, dear reader, early on I’d found on online version of the poverty maps overlaid upon the very shiny Google map of the same area that allows one to phase back and forth between antiquity and modernity. It is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anywhere on the site to download the original map images. Not until, on a whim, I decided to Google for a downloadable version and found myself in a very odd section of the LSE website, behind a sign that read “Beware of Leopard”, where the original images were just sitting there, waiting for me to grab them. And grab them I did.

That’s where I encountered an even bigger problem with using the Booth maps. It’s maps. Plural.

So I spent the next three solid days in Krita, cropping, stretching, layering, adjusting, and attempting to get all 12 separate pieces of what I hoped I could turn into one map to line up nicely. I almost succeeded, and in the end I decided that almost was probably good enough. There are a few places on the map where you can see (if you zoom in closely enough) that things don’t quite line up, but on World Anvil I’ve used a lower resolution version of the whole map (the full res version is more than 360MB) where you can’t really zoom in that far anyway, and clicking on that map links you to the appropriate panel which, of course, looks perfectly fine.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, head to https://www.worldanvil.com/w/lunden-ophania/map/349848d9-cda8-49e4-8f71-fce2ad4957d1 and see what all the fuss is about. It’s been an enormous amount of work so far, but entirely worth it in my opinion. Oh, and if you want access to all the material this map represents for roleplaying , writing, or just reading purposes, pop by my Patreon and sign up. You’ll be supporting my work, and getting early (or exclusive) access to a whole plethora of awesome stuff.