Oh The Places I'll Go...

Though not as apparent to the importance of a story, places and locations are a vital cog to your story.  And, thus, they should be a very important part of your sourcebook!

You can make this section as detailed or not detailed as you feel necessary or want to work on.  For me, I like to give lots of details, so I will have to hold myself back if I don't want to have 300 pages of area descriptions!  For some people, it may be a little more difficult.  Here are some ideas of what might work for your sourcebook to get your creative juices flowing!

1) Name your area.  Are you going to do a small section of the world, a continent, or just the whole world and pick a few choice places to describe?  Myself, I'm going to break my areas up by ruling areas.  So, in my case, I have Western Taina, Eastern Taina, the Tsalagi Mountains, The Dwarven Islands, the Ariellen Empire, and the Southern Reaches.

2) What is the important features of this area?  I would describe the major terrain and weather patterns for your area you are working on.  For the Tsalagi Mountains I would say they are a mountain range from the north part of Taina to the southern part, effectively cutting Taina in half.  I might mention there is a lot of snow in the winter, lots of rain the rest of year, and not fun to cross in the few passes that exist.

3)What are some important places in this area?  For my mountains, the passes would be the big features.  So I would mention how they are protected, any cities there, any problems for that area.  The biggest pass is Devonshire and I would mention this is also the site of one of the biggest battle in the War of the Chosen.

4)How in depth do you ant to describe the places?  For Devonshire, I would mention the High King's troops manning the walls, maybe some local business, like taverns, inns, and shops a person in the world would see or frequent, and maybe some major NPC's, (Non Player Characters for you non-roleplaying people). I would put any characters from here in your character section, but don't go into depth about them in this section.

5) How is this area important to the story?  You don't have to make it tie in directly, but readers like to see the tie and maybe a little more in-depth description about the areas the characters of your story have gone.  But feel free to flesh out areas just mentioned or not mentioned as all, but make sure there is a good balance!

Hoping this helps kick in your creative juices.  Keep on writing!