A Few Notes on Maps
Shares this week: S. H. Steele, Dreamers Destiny
Alyssa has been in love with Marco since the first time he guided her into her dreams at the age of fourteen. Now, six years later she must face the reality that he may not be real. Marco is part of a mythical race known as Dreamers. His job as a Dream Walker is to guide mortals to their dreams and Alyssa is one of his charges. He is torn between his love for her and his duty as a Walker.
Their love is threatened when a Dream Runner - those who push mortals into nightmares - finds them together in the Dream Realm. When Marco returns to Mount Tempos he must face the Walker's Council.
What will be his punishment? Will love conquer all?
Find out in this first installment of the Dreamers Saga.
Join Marco in the dream realm and Alyssa in the mortal world as they navigate dreams, nightmares, and the love that brought them together.
This week I’d like to talk about maps.
NOTE: a discussion of fantasy maps is obviously something that needs a lot of pictures, but I don’t want to overload your mailbox. I’ve included some maps on the website, so you can check them out there.
I think that maps in fantasy books are often overused, essentially little more than decorations, though I admit that a decent map can lend a certain “professional” look to a fantasy book. I note that The Onion had a piece about fantasy maps and their silliness. Nevertheless I have included a map with Chapterhouse, which (as you know) is due out this Saturday.
The point is, Chapterhouse is sufficiently concerned with and embedded in the political situation of its time and place that several readers thought a map would be helpful.
Now if you want to add a map to your book (or website, adventure module, etc.), there are several ways to go about it.
You can hire a fantasy cartographer, which can be expensive but is likely to net you a professional-looking map.
You can draw it yourself on paper, which requires skills I don’t have.
You can generate it with a dedicated piece of software like Campaign Cartographer, which will cost you a little money and isn’t easy to set up for this kind of output.
You can draw it with a full-bore art program like GIMP or Photoshop, which is insanely complicated and may involve a lot of skill and talent that I don’t possess.
So what to do?
Shoutout: go to Cartographers’ Guild, your one-stop shop for all things fantasy cartography.
Now once you go there, find the Tutorials section and, at the top, find the Sticky with PDF versions of a huge range of tutorials. Depending on what art software you’re using, you’ll find some step-by-step walkthrough tutorials to teach you how to produce a particular kind of map. Some of these will require artistic skill; many of them don’t.
I warn you: it’s a rabbit-hole. You can easily while away days or weeks fooling around with this stuff. But it’ll be fun!
For my purposes, the crucial point was that the map has to be black-and-white, because I’m not paying for color inserts. (Frankly, I’m not even sure how you’d arrange that with Amazon self-publishing, or whether it’s possible.) I have GIMP, and through my wife’s workplace I have access to Photoshop, so I could take my pick.
My first step was to make a simple sketch drawing of what the general outline should look like. I have no drawing skills whatever, but that doesn’t matter: all that matters is that I could give a very rough notion of how the coastlines and such ought to go.
Next, I spent a lot of time with an antique atlas style tutorial, and created a draft map that I thought was rather nice. So I uploaded that into the file, uploaded that to Amazon, and checked the PDF proofs.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t readable. The enormous compression required to bring the map down to the size of a book page made it so that the place-names are just tiny little foggy bits. I spent some time trying larger fonts and such, but that made the whole map look weird, so I dropped it.
Next up, I tried a different map style, a “sketch” map intended for B&W. This tutorial is exclusively Photoshop, making it impossible for a lot of people, and unfortunately I don’t have enough skill with Photoshop and GIMP to figure out how to reproduce the layer styles and such (Photoshop has layer styles, but GIMP doesn’t, and while you can get the same effects by other means, you have to understand pretty well how the different processes work—and I don’t). Anyway, I used that style and, with a little tinkering, got a workable map.
The end-result is fine, I think. I’m not thrilled with the national borders, but I found that if I did them with sharper, straighter lines (as on an atlas), it gave the impression that zillions of 19th-century surveyors had been out mapping these lines precisely in order to fight about them in international courts, and I didn’t want that implication. So I left it.
What I really do like about the map is the clean, clear coastlines and simple, high-contrast titles.
I will note, however, that the majority of cartography tutorials on the Guild site are focused on color maps. I’m no artist, as I hope I’ve made clear, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that a color map style probably isn’t going to work at all in B&W. It’s not just a case of a color map looking washed-out or something, which might be bad enough; rather, a full-color map is about achieving a kind of “realism” that B&W maps don’t have. There are other approaches—the atlas style I’ve mentioned is an example—but if you look at the beautiful maps in the Guild’s gallery, you’ll see what I mean about color.
Maybe at some later date, with a different book or series, I’ll try creating a full-color “realistic” map to put on the cover. It’d be a worthy experiment. But of course the Everdark, Cagtlan’s home, isn’t mappable in this way, and so that effort will have to wait for some other project. I did make a rough version of the entire Hollow as a color map, but ultimately there’s no real use for it; it was just fun to do for its own sake.
In any case, I do think that if you like maps and are interested in fantasy at all, you really ought to check out the Cartographers’ Guild. The Gallery is worth the (nonexistent) price of admission all by itself.
As always, thanks for reading!