Guided Tour of Calidar's Great Caldera

A good friend suggested I do a Lord of the Rings movies-style map flyover video to showcase the maps from In Stranger Skies.  It seemed like a good idea, so I put together this slideshow.

Shortly after posting it, my friend persuaded me to add a voiceover, so it is now narrated.  That's right — you get to hear my strange accent.  Note that the pronunciations of place names are not necessarily accurate to +Bruce's vision, but that in itself seems very much in the tradition of Mystara and other old settings.

If this proves popular, I will definitely consider making preview movies for some of the other maps, too.

Thanks for watching!

Great Caldera Poster Map Finished

Close to a year of work on the Great Caldera's overview map came to a head last weekend, and the map is finally complete, and entering the pre-print stage.

The area around Belledor's capital.

Exciting times for me, as this will be the first map I've ever had printed.  

Meanwhile, Bruce has posted two articles previewing the maps.  Part one covers the southern realms of the Great Caldera, while part two deals with the northern half.   He mostly concentrates on giving some background to the labels he devised for each nation.  It's a great read, with some tantalising hints of what is to come, as well as some classic Heardian humour.

I'd like to add a few comments about the creation of the art featured on these maps.

First up is the Belledor fragment at the top right, which depicts the area around Belledor's capital, Seahollow, in the province of Seafolk.

Grimsvik, capital of Nordheim.

The map is composed of numerous layers, which all come together to produce the terrain you see here.  At the base of everything is the height map, which I have posted about extensively already.  Suffice it to say that this map took about six months to design and erode at full resolution.  It is a 3D model, with sculpted mountains and valleys, rolling hills, and rivers meandering through the plains.  On top of this is a gradient map, colouring the terrain based on elevation, so that the plains and lowlands are light green, the hills are tan, and the mountains are grey-brown.  There are actually five or six of these gradient maps, allowing the painting of other terrain types such as grasslands, desert, swamp, and taiga on top of the plains.

What this means is that you can tell the elevation of any particular spot just by looking at the colours, and on the height model I can measure the exact height of any point on the map if necessary.  Mountains named on the larger scale maps (such as the hex map) refer to actual peaks visible on this map.

Central Caldwen.

Next come the sea and lake masks, and the rivers.  The sea is a simple mask derived from the base height map, coloured blue.  The rivers are also generated from the height map.  We decided on the general locations during the design process, and then let erosion create the exact shapes in a natural way.  For some areas — Alfdaín comes to mind — this took multiple attempts, and was a bit of a headache, but I'm very pleased with the final results.  Lakes were added to the height map after erosion; Bruce designed logical shapes that fit in with the river systems, and I dug them into the height map.

At this point, we haven't done any work on lake or sea beds.  That may come at some point in the future, but for now it's all just flat surfaces.

With the land and sea all done, the last three layer groups add lighting, texture, and overlays.  Lighting consists of a 3D render of the height model, which with transparency effects gives shape to the underlying terrain.  Texture is predominantly visible in the sea areas, and to a lesser extent on the land.  It is a parchment texture, designed to bring consistency to the map.  I chose not to also incorporate the colour of the parchment this time.

Alfdaín's capital, Mythuín.

Finally overlays refers to the graticule (the grid of latitude and longitude lines over the map), borders, roads, icons, scale, legend, and of course all the labels.  This layer sits on top of everything else.

I will post more about all of these things after the release.

For now, I am now putting all my efforts into the second poster map, the hex map of Meryath, which is also mostly done.  The finishing touches should be done by the end of the week.  After that, it's back to the internal maps.  These, too, are at an advanced stage of design.  Everything should come together within the next few weeks.  It will not be long now before you can hold the book and the maps in your hands.

Araldûr, home of the dwarves on Calidar.  This image shows almost exactly what the final map will look like.

Calidar Kickstarter Has Begun!

+Bruce Heard just hit the big green button, signalling the start of the Kickstarter.

This is it, folks.  This is what we've been working so hard over the past six or seven months to bring to you.  You can make it possible.

But let's not stop there: let's make it a massive success!  I want to still be reading new Calidar stories from Bruce ten years from now.

Vote with your feet, and opt in to the World of Calidar now.  We're counting on you.

Here's a freebie for you to enjoy - my latest test map of the Great Caldera.  You can see it on the Kickstarter page, too.  The final format has yet to be decided, but these one of the possibilities for the Great Caldera poster map.

The Great Caldera Topographic Map, Stereographic Projection

And here's a crop at 2/3 resolution...

Close-up of Araldûr from the map above

 The full size file has so much detail.  It's going to be a gorgeous poster map.

Close-up of Meryath from the map above

Thanks for supporting Calidar!

Thorf's World-building Techniques: Introduction

The Making of the World of Calidar

by Thorfinn Tait

For the past six months or so, I have been working on +Bruce Heard’s new project, the +World of Calidar.  Bruce brought me on board early on, first in an advisory role, then as Calidar’s official cartographer.  Working with Bruce is tremendous fun – in fact it’s nothing less than a dream come true, really.

Mystara Hex Map of Karameikos

You see, I grew up on the Known World and Mystara, and I was an avid reader of Bruce’s Voyages of the Princess Ark articles in Dragon magazine – not just the stories, but the specific combination of fiction with gazetteer info, and the all-important hex map that accompanied it.  Inspired by Mystara’s maps, I went on to create my own system for hex mapping, using Adobe Illustrator, and I have since recreated and updated almost all of Mystara’s published maps.  It’s through my Mystara Atlas project that I learned most of my cartographic skills and knowledge.

Remake of Bruce's Floating Ar Hex Map

The Mystara community is friendly, civil, and just generally pretty wonderful, but the setting has been out of print for almost twenty years now.  For years, I have longed to work on a living and breathing setting.  With Bruce’s return to the industry last year, for a while it seemed like this may indeed come to pass, as he produced new articles and maps detailing Mystara’s continent of Alphatia.  However, the current rights-holders turned down Bruce’s licensing proposals, and the possibility faded.






However, in its place, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the World of Calidar project was born.  For a Mystara fan, Bruce’s announcement was a bittersweet moment, but since then there has been no looking back.  I think it’s no secret that I am a huge fan of Calidar already.


So, getting back to the topic at hand, Bruce started sharing drafts of Calidar’s world map with me back in May.  Then in July, he tasked me with making maps of Calidar.  Since then, I have been working on all aspects of Calidar’s geography, in close collaboration with Bruce.

Calidar World Map, Equirectangular Projection

Great Caldera Climate-Shading Test

Mapping out the new World of Calidar has meant building a fantasy world from the ground up – or perhaps rather from space down.  Starting with the world map, then zooming in on one major continent, and finally zooming in one step further to deal with individual countries in that region, this project demands a number of different styles at various scales.  I’m most well-known for my hex maps, and while Calidar will of course have its own hex maps, these will be just one of a number of mapping styles – I have been expanding my cartographer’s toolkit greatly for this project.

Calidar with Kragdûr, one of its moons

I will be documenting all of these techniques in this series of “making of” tutorial articles.  I hope that the “making of” parts will be of interest to Calidar fans in general, while the tutorial parts should be of use to my fellow fantasy cartographers, from whom I have learned a great deal during my work on this project.





Planned sections include:

• Continental Outlines
• Base Height Field
• Erosion
• Climate Shading
• Planetary Models
• World Maps
• Continental Maps
• Hex Maps

The order may change, depending on which sections become ready for posting first.

Click here for the series index.

Map of the Day 17: The Western Hemisphere

You've all been very patient.  It's the weekend, so here it is, as promised: Calidar's western hemisphere.

Calidar's Western Hemisphere, Equirectangular Projection

I included the Great Caldera, which bisects the two hemispheres.  Its central location means it's difficult to split the world map in two without cutting it in half.  Note where the prime meridian runs through the Great Caldera: in Ellyrium, the Byzantine-like country to the west of Meryath.

There are lots of new names here to digest.  Eerien was introduced last weekend, and revisited in my summary post yesterday.  Omfall we visited this week, but it's worth going back and comparing its shape to the shape featured on this map – the Equirectangular Projection world map here significantly deforms the true shape of the continent, whereas the Stereographic Projection used in the Omfall post largely preserves its true shape.

The two as-yet unmentioned small island continents are the Isle of Obb in Calidar's far west, separated from Eerien by a narrow channel; and Lanmarroth, which is the largest island in a chain known as the Furyan Archipelago, curving from Omfall down to Mormoroth in the extreme south.  Lanmarroth is a mountainous land which separates the Sea of Aelghin from the vast Vengrim Ocean.

Going back to Omfall, the Taslan Peninsula straddling the equator points to the east, towards the Arm of Ule, which is the westernmost promontory of a super-continent in Calidar's eastern hemisphere.  In fact, Ule is one of three major regions/subcontinents in this one huge landmass.  Like earth, Calidar has more land in its northern hemisphere than in its southern.

This brings us to the end of this part of the Calidar World Tour, as well as the third week of Map of the Day.  It has been a fun ride for me, and I have really enjoyed sharing some of the things I've been working on so hard for the past six months.  Thanks for reading!

What started out as posting one map each day has grown to become a full article with multiple images each day, which is not really sustainable, especially while at the same time working on the most important and most enjoyable cartography project of my life so far.  I really need to give it my all, and there is an awful lot still to do.  I'm going to continue posting new maps to this blog – there is lots still to share on the journey to the publication and poster maps.   But I have decided to slow down a little, to allow me more time to concentrate once more on what matters most: making beautiful maps for you all to enjoy.

I promise to post at least one new article each week, and when I have time I will post more.

Map of the Day 16: Meryath – the First Hex Map

Today we take a slight detour from our Calidar world tour to present something special: the first work-in-progress hex map for Calidar.

This is Bruce's original first draft of Palatine Island, the main island of the Kingdom of Meryath.  It was revealed today on the Kickstarter draft page.  (The project is not live yet, but you can now see the page and check it out.)

In terms of art, it's bare bones stuff - it's pretty much just the default hexes that come with Hexographer.  I am hard at work on a new set of hexes for Calidar, which will eventually replace these.

But in terms of development, everything you have come to expect from Bruce's hex maps is right there.

By the way, the projection this map is based on is called Albers Equal Area.  I chose this projection because it accurately depicts the area of the region.  This will make Bruce's demographic calculations all the more accurate, since they are based on hexes.

Another policy note about hex maps: you won't be able to join up all Calidar's hex maps into one massive trail map, I'm afraid.  The reason for this is simple: hex maps were never intended to cover large areas.  By definition they imply constant shape, direction, area and distance – which is an impossibility for any map of a sphere or ellipsoid.  At larger scales (i.e. showing things up close or zoomed in) the distortion is manageable, if not insignificant.  But at smaller scales (zoomed out), the distortion becomes so extreme as to make the hexes meaningless.

But don't despair!  That's where other cool map styles come in.  If you're a fan of hex maps, you can rest assured that Calidar will have many wonderful hex maps – Bruce is after all pretty much the king of hexes.  The only thing that will change is that there will be more other styles of maps in addition to the hex maps.  It's the best of both worlds, really.

An expanded version of this hex map, including the other islands of Meryath as well as some other things, is one of the stretch goals in the Kickstarter.  If we get that far, you and I will all be able to hold this map in our hands.  Let's make it a reality!

While we're on the subject of hex maps, if there's anything in particular that you would like to see in Calidar's hex maps – a new kind of hex, a certain way to use a symbol, or anything like that – please let me know.  Now is the time to make such changes, while I'm working on setting the style.

Tomorrow we will get back to looking at Calidar's western hemisphere.

Maps of the Day 4-8: Building the Mountains of the Great Caldera

After the coastlines, the mountains are probably the second most distinctive feature of most fantasy worlds.  Let's take a look at the development of the Great Caldera's mountains.

The Great Caldera Mountain Design, Stereographic Projection

The first image is +Bruce's design for the mountains of the Great Caldera, painted onto the Stereographic Projection from last time.  You can see how the mountain ranges generally follow the outside of the circle, forming a gigantic rim around the ancient impact crater.  Time has worn it down, and it is broken in a number of places.

Bruce drew these lines as guides for constructing a full height map (also known as a bump map, elevation map, or digital elevation model) of the area.  I took the lines, blurred them, messed them up a bit, and converted them into uneroded mountains.

Next, I took the same lines and expanded them out, then messing them up in a similar way to create hills.  The second image is the resulting fully-detailed height map.

The Great Caldera Uneroded Height Map (First Draft)
Stereographic Projection

A word about height maps: this map shows elevations, with black being the lowest point – in this case, sea level – and white being the highest.  It takes some imagination to understand what's going on, but basically speaking the white points are mountain peaks, while the grey lines in between them are valleys, and the darker grey to almost black areas are hills and plains.

You may be wondering why such a map is necessary or even desirable.  The answer is that this map can be loaded into terrain viewer programs, which show it as a 3D model of the terrain.  Many computer games use these models to construct their worlds, and just as in those games, it's possible to move around and explore the landscape.Height maps form the basis of all of Calidar's maps, and they open up exciting new possibilities for Calidar's cartography and art.  Their altitude data can be used in conjunction with latitude to calculate a simulated climate model, which in turn can even be used to texture the world according to each area's biome.  All of this is made possible by the height map, which is why I have spent more than four months so far building, eroding and refining Calidar's geography.

The Great Caldera Uneroded Height Map (First Draft - Shaded)
Stereographic Projection

The third map, on the left, is exactly the same map, but instead of displaying low-to-high elevations as black-to-white, it uses a colour scheme to shade each height, making it a little easier to visualise what exactly is being depicted, but you have to bear in mind that the colours represent height variations, not terrain types.

Blue is sea level, light green-to-darker green is lowlands, light brown-to-dark brown is progressively higher areas, and dark brown-to-white is highlands.

Generally speaking, the lowlands are flatter than higher areas, so it's relatively safe to assume that green areas are lowland plains, or at most rolling hills.  But there could also be some lonely mountains in the green areas, too.
Now, you probably noticed that this height map (in both colour palettes) is labelled as being "uneroded".  That is to say, it has not undergone simulated erosion to carve mountains and valleys into those mounds.  This is a multi-stage process which takes anything from a few hours to a few days, depending on the size of the area and the resolution it needs to be done at.  This model is roughly 0.5 km per pixel at full resolution, and the full image is 9,999 x 9,998 pixels.  This provides a good level of detail for continental mapping, though perhaps not enough for country-level maps.

The fully eroded version of this map is the Great Caldera map with borders and labels which Bruce revealed in the initial announcement of the +World of Calidar, which you can see below.

The Great Caldera Eroded Height Map (First Draft - Shaded), Stereographic Projection

Here it is: the first completed draft of the Great Caldera's fully eroded height map.  Compare it with yesterday's pre-erosion map, and you can plainly see how the white blobs have been carved into majestic white peaks.  What was previously a landscape of blobs has become a proper landscape of plains, hills, mountains and valleys.  A lot of land has disappeared during the erosion process, carried down to the lowlands and into the sea by simulated rain and water courses, which is why everything looks so much lower.

Taking a look at the geography of the Great Caldera, at this point it becomes very clear why its borders are located where they are: the political divisions follow natural divisions in the terrain, which split the land of the Caldera into numerous smaller areas.

Note that this is the first draft; there are various problems with this map, and in fact there have been another three passes since this map was completed.  I'm quite happy with the fourth draft, so it may well become the final one.

I'm sure many will be impressed with this, but I'm equally sure that some may be thinking: so what?  Why is this useful?  Why don't you stop talking about things and just show us the finished maps?

Don't worry, we'll get to some major reveals very soon.

In the meantime, here are some 3D views of the terrain for your enjoyment.

These very simple 3D views of the Great Caldera demonstrate the huge benefit of height maps, which is to say that they are really 3D models.  Using these very same height maps, it is possible to generate photorealistic-looking landscape views.

But for now, this is not our goal; the first priority is of course to establish the terrain and its shapes by producing high quality maps of the area.  The height maps help in this, too – not only by allowing the correlation of altitude and latitude data for climate shading, but also in generating river maps; in providing shaded relief for political maps; in guiding the creation of hex maps; and other ways besides.  I hope you can see why I have chosen to develop Calidar's terrain in this way.

The shading you see here is the same simple, elevation-based shading as on the colour maps above.  Note how the flat map's colours have been adopted into the 3D view.  It's actually possible to load any image as a texture for the 3D model, so even without photorealistic rendering, you can expect to see more of these 3D views – and prettier ones, too.

More about all of this later.  This brings us to the end of our first week of Maps of the Day, exploring the Great Caldera, the heart of the World of Calidar.  Thanks for reading!  Join us again next week as we preview the shape of the Dread Lands which lie outside the relative safe haven of the Great Caldera.

Maps of the Day 1-3: Mapping the Great Caldera

Welcome to the Calidar Map of the Day series!  In this series of posts, I will be sharing a pre-production or work-in-progress map every day to preview my work on +Bruce Heard's upcoming setting, the +World of Calidar, which I am involved in as cartographer.

The Great Caldera, Equirectangular Projection

Our journey through Calidar begins with the Great Caldera – the heart of the setting, and the most settled region on the planet.

The result of a massive collision in Calidar's ancient history, the Great Caldera is a perfect circle with a mountainous rim.  This presents a unique mapping challenge: drawing a circle on a sphere is easy, but the rectangular map projections usually used to design worlds are another matter entirely.

The 2:1 latitude/longitude grid known as Equirectangular, Plate Carrée, or simply Geographic Projection is very useful because it is easily applied to 3D spherical models, such as Google Earth.  But the further north or south you go, the more stretched it becomes, until the entire top and bottom lines of the map represent the single points of the poles.

The Great Caldera stretches from 25º to 65ºN, putting the northern part of the Caldera in an area which is very susceptible to these distortions.

Look closely at the first map.  Does it look like a perfect circle to you?  Probably not.  But in fact it is a perfect circle when viewed on a globe.

The Great Caldera, Stereographic Projection

This companion map shows the exact same coastal outlines as the first map, but using a more suitable projection for a circular area.

The Stereographic Projection is particularly appropriate for the Great Caldera, because it shows any circle on the globe as a circle on the map.

If we had just drawn a circle on the Equirectangular Projection base map, it would have ended up being deformed when viewed on a globe.  These days, when it's very easy to set up Google Earth or a number of other programs to display interactive globes in the computer, it was a design priority to get these projection issues right from the start.

Getting back to the map, you can see how the perfect circle of the Great Caldera has collapsed and decayed at various points.  We'll take a look at the design phase for the mountains encircling the Caldera in the next post.

The Great Caldera (Uncorrected Version), Equirectangular and Stereographic Projections

The first two maps showed the final, corrected version of the Great Caldera.  It only looks circular in the Stereographic Projection, of course, but place the Equirectangular Projection on Google Earth and it will become circular again.

This last map predates the first two, showing the same design for the Great Caldera, this time as a political map showing borders and country names.  The inset shows Bruce's original design, which we did on an Equirectangular Projection (as many mappers do, since it allows the aforementioned use of Google Earth).  It looks fine – a perfect circle.  The problem with this is that when it is applied to a globe or other 3D spherical model, the Caldera's shape is deformed, appearing more like it looks in the Stereographic Projection.

So the first two maps above are the result of a proper implementation of this design, as Bruce originally intended it to look.  One last map to illustrate my point: this rendering of the globe of Calidar was made using an Equirectangular Projection world map.  Note how the Great Caldera looks nice and circular, as it is supposed to.

The World of Calidar, Orthographic Projection (also known as "View from Space")

We will continue to look at the effect map projections have on the shapes of Calidar's landforms over the next few weeks.  But before that, let's delve a little deeper into the terrain design, starting with the mountains, and then moving on to height maps.