The World of Gaia
In 2008, I had an idea for a story. So, of course, the first thing I created for it was a map.
I’d been playing Dungeons and Dragons for, oh, maybe a decade at that point? And while I had only been a Dungeon Master once or twice, I was fond of all the world building that creating your own campaign world entailed. I had always admired Tolkien’s extensive world building as well, and I love maps. So when I decided I wanted to write a novel, that’s where I started.
Well, I started with this map:
OK, technically not THAT map, but the point is I started with our world. I wanted to be sure the size was appropriate for one, and for another… well, that’s my secret for now.
This was actually the map I started with. It’s been so long I’m actually not sure what the circles I drew on it mean. There’s a different map with other circles I do understand, but now is not the time for that map. Join me in looking at the mystery of this map instead.
At the same time, I also tried out these two concept sketches. Thing is, the story I was writing was not Lost Blades. Instead, it was the story of Ebryn, and he was going around collecting the four crystal lights — so I started with the idea of where those temples were and what kind of peoples lived there and what the theming would be like. The scale is way off, but I just wanted the rough idea. The concept was much closer to a video game idea, where the protagonist has to go to a number of distinctly themed areas and get a special item before beating the final boss. I had an almost twenty-page outline for that series, and it only covered the first three areas.
This one was where I started to put it all together. It looks similar to the maps you might have seen, but there are a few things that are still off. Espon also has a lot more going on — this map is pre-Empire. Not everything has a name either, but most species are in more or less the right place, though some of this would still change as time went on. There might even be some species here you haven’t heard of yet ;)
And, of course, some of it is just illegible.
I decided to make a continent map, naming each continent after a different deity (I was working on the pantheon at the same time — I also really enjoy coming up with religions!). Espon, Falin, Patoran, and Nyphoren are all named after the elemental deities primarily worshiped there and tied into the temple concept for Ebryn’s story. You can also see the southern-most continent is named Satran — for a while I wasn’t sure if I was going to go with Hades or Saturn as the name of the death goddess.
The six seas also got named. I have no memory of how I named them. Probably just strung a bunch of sounds together until I liked them. I did make the conscious decision to call them seas instead of oceans; I just liked the concept of it.
You can also see that I started marking out some sections for mountains on Falin and Espon.
Time to digitize! I added in the rough locations of some of the mountain ranges and drew in markers for the Shae Sea current for some reason. I added some more mountains on Kaldon and Patoran. A large portion of my process was to draw something, digitize it, make notes and marks in pencil, then apply those notes digitally. Rinse, wash, repeat. On the continent map you can see Ni Fon being moved to its final resting place off the Kaldon coast. Many of the countries and communities still do not have names.
These were among the last changes I made before shifting the book concepts as a whole. I cleaned up the maps a bunch, finished up the placement of the mountain ranges, and decided on place names. The maps got stylized with fun fonts and a number of important cities got marked.
Then I decided I didn’t want to write Ebryn’s story, and conceptualized Jamirh’s. The story shifted from pure high fantasy to taking on elements of urban fantasy and science fiction, and I needed a new map — one set over a thousand years in the future. No longer were there so many different countries on Espon, as the Rose Empire had taken its place as the dominant power on the globe. Some edits would need to be made. Even then, a number of places do not have their final names.
Now is as good a time to mention this as any — these maps are diegetic, and created from the point of view of Agale (in 1006 AG) and the Rose Empire (in 2026). As such, this is not what the map would look like if made by someone from, say, Tapuya or Aradia. The Forbidden and the Darklands are not what those areas call themselves — they are what the Rose Empire calls them. Romania and Thracia are there because the upper echelons of the Empire do know they exist. For the purposes of Lost Blades, this map works perfectly well.
I’ve added some colors to make it easier to see what belongs to what, at least from the Empire’s point of view.
Then I stopped writing for ten years.
When I came back to what would become Lost Blades in 2020, I picked back up my maps. I was still happy with them for the most part, though I did change a few names — Romania became Romanii, Aradia became Dalmara, Satran became Haden. I clarified where the borders of the provinces of the Rose Empire were. I redrew the maps to have a different style to them, chose fonts that were easier to read, decided on an actual color palette. The final result is what you now see in my books and on the maps page on this website.
And so here we are, at our final destination! I hope this was interesting. If you would like to see more content like this in the future, or if you have suggestions, please comment down below.
Cheers!
