A Hexal Map of Aerb

[RobertWinslow]

This is a map of The Prime Elemental Plane of Aerb, from the web serial Worth the Candle, by Alexander Wales (link 1, 2).

From the world-building document:

Aerb can be represented as an infinitely tessellating hexagon with an edge length of approximately twenty-seven thousand miles and a surface area of 1.9 billion square miles. Traditional directions on Aerb are determined taking the direction of travel of the sun as one axis ("east" and "west") and then establishing a second axis perpendicular to the first ("north" and "south"). For technical purposes, a six-axis directional system, with the three axes sixty degrees offset from each other, is used.

Here's a larger version (alternate link):





Created With: QGIS, Inkscape, and GIMP.

1. This originally started as a raster map in GIMP. But dealing with such a large raster file taxed the limits of my computer. GIMP would frequently freeze or crash.
2. I vectorized the continents and moved things into Inkscape. This worked well for a time, but eventually Inkscape also started to slow. It was never bad enough to be completely unusable, but sometimes when editing a polygon, the software would stutter and fail to register my action.
3. Finally, I moved things into QGIS. This involved saving the map as a .dxf file in Inkscape, importing that data as a vector layer in QGIS, and then running some processing tools to clean up the data. Once in QGIS, things ran smoothly. I could zoom in and out; QGIS only renders what's on screen, and when zoomed out, it simplifies the render geometry.

To get the final result:

1. I first exported the map from QGIS to a pdf file
2. I imported that pdf into Inkscape to add the info boxes, border decorations (based on public domain graphics), and curvy continent labels.
3. I exported the full resolution raster image, sans the subtle mountain shading, from Inkscape.
4. And finally I used GIMP's Bump Map filter to apply shading using a crude height map.

Design Goals: I was inspired by world maps that look simple from a distance but are revealed to have lots of details when looked at up close. To accomplish both of these goals required having a very large map size. I always envisioned this map as a diegetic object -- the kind of map that might actually exist in the world of the story, unrolled onto some table while the characters discuss their plans.

Semi-Commissioned: I worked on this map slowly over the course of several years, while reading Worth the Candle. I initially made the map as a bit of fan art, simply because I was enthralled by the world of Aerb. A few months ago, when both the story and the map were nearing their conclusion, the author contacted me and asked if he could purchase the rights to use the map in ebook and print media. We quickly worked out a deal. He paid me a fee, and also provided some additional canonical details to include in the map, which never came up in the story proper. His wife had a full-size print of the map made, and it's pretty fun to know that my fan-art is hanging in the office of one of my favorite authors.

[RobertWinslow]

As a fantasy-kitchen-sink setting, Aerb of course has a variety of parallel realities and elemental planes. Only a couple of these are super-relevant to the main events of the plot, but I made a little inset diagram of the elemental planes to fill out a corner of the map, and this simple little planar map is worthy of a bit of discussion for its own sake.

Ron Shelbi's cosmological model of Aerb:


This little map was made entirely in Inkscape.

The list of planes is canonical, but the arrangement is a bit of my own invention. I imagine it to be the kind of model that's outdated for serious academic wizarding work, but is still culturally emblematic of the the elemental planes, and is used is art and education.

One of the running gags is that echoes of our world show up on Aerb, but with subtly different meanings or connotations. For example Aerb's trade language is "Anglish", which is almost but not quite the same as modern-day American English. I wanted to stick with that theme, so I used real-world astronomical symbols as symbols for the elemental planes. In particular, I used glyphs from the Catrinity typeface. Some of these symbols are the familiar symbols for the planets, but most of them are the lesser known asteroid symbols. (Scientists stopped assigning symbols to asteroids when they realized there were thousands of the things.)

The exception is the symbol for the Elemental Plane of Chitin. The symbol for the asteroid 16 Psyche is conceptually appropriate, depicting a butterfly's wing. But to be honest, it's not a very good depiction of a butterfly's wing, so I made my own icon inspired by the mission patch for NASA's upcoming Psyche Mission. By slightly displacing the geometry, I think I managed to make a simple little glyph that's simultaneously evocative of a butterfly's wings and an ant's antennae.

[Adfor]

Exceptional work, it must be very fulfilling to have what started as a fan's interpretation, become solid cannon for the world that you love so much. Such an awesome journey, congratulations!

IR

[chorpler]

This is absolutely spectacular! You clearly put an incredible amount of work into this. I really appreciate the help with visualizing the geography of Aerb.

[chorpler]

So many things feel almost like easter eggs, like the shading on the tilted continent of Widders, or the "handwritten" annotations showing certain plot-relevant locations like Caer Laga or Sporsan. My new theory is that someone (Fenn?) inadvertently put their map in the Backpack of Earthly Delights at some point and it ended up with you.

[RobertWinslow]

I used Leaflet to make a zoomable, tessellating version of this map, with toggle-able layers for Cities and Exclusion Zones.
You can view it in action at this link: yiru.me/aerb/

Preview:


(For performance and bandwidth reasons, the background images are far more compressed than the versions posted above.)

[J.Harnerton]

This is truly amazing work, and the tedious effort it took.. wow. It's no wonder the author reached out to you. At the very least I'm going to check out Worth the Candle, and I really hope I have more opportunities to see your work. What an awesome story!

[RobertWinslow]

Here's yet another version of the map, made to put in a worldbuilding document.
In the PDF, the red text are clickable links to different parts of the document.