What Does My World Look Like?

Maps.  You can love them or hate them.  They can show what you want or never enough.

Fantasy stories, and role playing games, love maps.  Sure, you say the party travels southwest, but what does it look like?  Where are they really going?  Give me some scale here!

For my companion book I most definitely want a map of my world, (and some regional and city maps as well).  But how to best go about that?  There are several options for this.

The first is the good old hand drawn stand by.  My husband is a wiz at making area maps on graph paper. They aren't super detailed, but they are to scale, (engineers are like that), and you have a good idea where you are going.  For a book, they probably won't work, but for roleplaying games they most certainly would.

Another option is semi-prepared maps that you fill in.  A little above the old graph paper, but still in the hand drawn realm.  When we were rolplaying a lot I liked to use AD&D World Builder's Guidbook by Richard Baker.  I'm not sure if you can find it anymore, but I liked it over the graph paper, mostly because the sheets came with a key already in place.

Now there is also a lot of choices for online map makers, such as Inkarnate, Worldspinner, Wonderdraft, and many more.  I would Google those and see which one might suit you.  Some you can do very detailed maps, others look more Tolkien esk in nature.  The one thing to watch if you want to use these for your books and sell said books is to see if you need to pay for such uses instead of just using the free version.  On Inkarnate's website they do mention you have to have a subscription to use their maps in a published work.  So check carefully before using this method, even if they the maps are super cool.  A lot of these sites also allow you to make regions, cities or even building maps.  So check them out!

Keep on writing!