the Continent of Ictaria - political map
Hi all! I'm sure you guys must be sick and tired of my constant reboots of the same map – I know I am from time to time! – but I just can't seem to stop myself.
This time the reboot was inspired by my decision to drop the story I've been working on for the past 20 years and just start all over again. My problem was that over the years it had grown so complex and all-encompassing, with a multitude of "main characters" allowing the reader to explore the same building conflict from tons of different perspectives, that it had become basically unreadable. So yeah, instead of reworking the existing story, I decided to just drop it and start a different story 200 years in the future, but keep the world I had built for it intact. Well, mostly.
Because over the years I had slowly grown tired of the lack of realism in my largest map. I liked the coastline, but the mountain ranges were just too fantasy-esque. I know I was the one who drew them, I had just... evolved, I guess? So. I decided to throw out the topography and do a completely new one. And this time, I'd use it as a B&W backdrop to a large political map inspired by Hendrik Wuckelt's wonderful historical maps.
I'm still far from finished, but I wanted to share what I had already.
So I started by creating the first true world map I ever made for this story. Up til now I had only ever needed part of the continent, but I decided to do it good for once:
Then I started up G.Projector (a free lightweight tool by NASA) to take the part of the world I was interested in and display it in Lambert's projection:
Which I used as a basis for my terrain + political map. I won't bore you any further with intermediate steps, I'll just show you the most recent iteration:
I still need to finish the terrain (especially on the southern continent of Sakhuria but large bits of eastern Ictaria need some additional layers too), and I need to add a ton more labels, but it's starting to look quite okay to me. What do you guys think?
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