Worldbuilding 101 - Part 6: Oh what tangled webs we weave...

Let’s start looking at those interconnected relationship maps I talked about in the last instalment.


Here are the first five.





The new characters dedicated to a specific location have been marked in the "exploding rectangular" shapes, figures who are obviously powerful in the location have been circled. General loose relationships have been marked with grey arrows and strong/close relationships have been marked with black arrows (based on those characters with more points of commonality), and In the last few maps I've decided to cluster characters from the same culture together. I haven't added in the nature of the relationship (positive/negative) yet, and if I were going to get even more detailed, I'd add some kind of symbol to code something specific about that relationship (trade partners, rivalry, romance, old family feud, etc.). I've tried to make sure that everyone is linked to at least two other characters within their specific locations, characters who might be hubs of story activity connected with four or five sets of arrows. No character is linked to everyone in a location, you need some sense of mystery.

You don't need much more than that, and you can already see how complicated things are getting when more than half a dozen characters are involved. All 23 characters (plus ten new location specific ones) on a single map would be a tangled mess that in turn would be a nightmare to work with. 

It's also curious to note that the Borderslums have become such a hive for the cult while they were intended to be a Pirate hotspot. Not intended, but I like the idea that this developed organically from the process. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 7)

Image
A working computer and scanner...that means it is time to get back to work on the geomorph sequence. A lot of the discussion in this set of tutorials has been focused around square geomorphs. They're the easiest for most people to wrap their heads around.  But my preferred form of geomorph is based around the hexagon, these tend to produce more organic and interesting shapes. This is true for natural environments, but it's no less true for urban environments. The example set of geomorphs above as a simple two-phase system. One edge type is plain, the other edge type has a road piercing the centre. There could be dozens of combinations and permutations for each of the two phases around the hexagonal edges, but a quick look at the variety of buildings and road shapes shows that there could literally be hundreds of possible options when drawing these map fragments. But you certainly don't need to create hundreds of designs for the system to be effective. Usin...
Read more

A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 1)

Image
After numerous requests to get back to map tutorials, it's time to start our new series. This time focusing on the concept of geomorphs, modular map fragments that can be mixed and matched. We'll start with a couple of theoretical tutorials before sinking into a few more practical posts. I'm predicting a dozen or so posts in this sequence, but let's see how long it lasts.
Read more