Emirates of Narwan

+Bruce Heard is posting a series of articles on the +World of Calidar's Emirates of Narwan.  This arid nation in the southeast of the Great Caldera is one of two former colonies which  exclusively worship Soltan, the sun god, forbidding all other faiths within their borders.

If you've read CAL1, you may remember that Meryath's easternmost major island, Kamearea, is also claimed by Narwan.  Up until now this is pretty much all we know about Narwan.

The new articles preview material from the upcoming CC1 Beyond the Skies.  Although CC1 primarily covers the gods and pantheons of the Great Caldera nations, in so doing it also provides significant back story and other details, making it a real treasure trove of information on the Caldera.

For the second article in the series, I created a 3D view of Narwan upon which Bruce overlaid migration data, resulting in a historical map of Narwan.  I wouldn't want to do this with regular maps, because the perspective makes any kind of measurement pretty much impossible, but for thematic maps like this, it seems rather nice.  The mountains and hills really stand out when viewed at an angle.

Here are some full resolution views of the map.

Would you like to see more of this kind of thing?  Let me know what you think.

Soltan Ephemeris Tour

Earlier in the year, I posted previews of the Soltan Ephemeris, the solar system of the +World of Calidar.  Since then, on Facebook and Google+ I've posted various pieces of concept art — renders of each planet, set against beautiful NASA space imagery.  All of these come together in an illustration on page 119 of Calidar: In Stranger Skies, which shows the Soltan Ephemeris in all its glory.

You can see how to go about making things like this in the tutorials on my Cartography Links page, accessible from the menu bar at the top of this page.  (I watched them all and then took the bits I liked best.)

But today I thought it would be fun to gather them all up together here in one place.  At the same time, I've put together another video tour showcasing all of these images.

The Mighty Soltan

I had a lot of fun making this image.  I actually created a full equirectangular projection map of Soltan's "surface".  I'm not sure it will ever be needed aside from in making this image, but you never know with fantasy settings.

Soltan is utterly vast: 110 times the size of its largest orbiting planet, Calidar.  It's really very similar to our sun in most respects.

Narrated tour of the Soltan Ephemeris at YouTube

Guided Tour of Meryath

Welcome to the Kingdom of Meryath!  As promised, I have created another video tour to preview and explore +World of Calidar's second poster map, the Kingdom of Meryath hex map.

This map was the result of a stretch goal in the Kickstarter campaign, in which it was available as an add-on.  Very soon now it will also go on sale on eBay.

It was a pleasure working on this map with +Bruce Heard, who has always been a master at this style.  We developed a new set of hex art, including settlement symbols by Bruce as well as terrain by myself.

The video also explores the topographical style of map, which we used for Meryath's map in the book itself.

Enjoy!

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.

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.