The World of Ortho

What would a fantasy story be without maps? Of course there are maps. It's never a matter of "if" but "how many". And boy, there are some.

Personally, reading about how "the characters departed from X and traveled 120 miles north" doesn't say much anything to me (and probably nobody else). Unless there's a map involved. It's only when properly illustrated that the journey starts to show its true scale and direction, taking one significant step towards perceived reality. 

I didn't pull all those measurements you frequently see in the stories from my...sleeve. Obviously, I drew a map. And then another map, and another, and performed various other mental gymnastics alongside. 

Thanks to the development of modern software and technological know-how, we now have, for the first time, the chance to view the journey of A Hero Past the 25th in highly life-like detail.

( Right-click to view the images in full size. )

It has to start somewhere. 

The goal was never to create a ready, complete world first and carefully plan every little detail before ever writing another word. Not at all, I wanted to explore the world together with the characters and learn about each fabulous location in the order they would become relevant. These stories are at least as much for my own entertainment as they are for others. 

Like cartographers of old, I'd travel with the cast and draw maps along the way.

Due to this carefree approach, the first maps were quite rough and simple, and not really worth showing to anyone. I only had a vague impression of what should be where, a rough idea of where we're going and what else might be there, but nothing concrete. 

I made up a lot of placeholder names, before giving more thought to what is actually there. In the process, some lands disappeared, while new ones appeared.

The series is mainly set in the continent of Noertia, one of the major land masses on the planet. I always had a fairly clear image inside my head regarding how it should look, but actually conveying that image onto paper proved a lot easier said than done. As you can likely see.

It never felt quite right.

I studied a lot of fantasy maps and came to notice that the major continents depicted are often only a few hundred miles wide. I fell in the same trap with the first maps too. But when you look at our actual world map, this is barely the breadth of a single country! The worlds in question would have to be smaller than our own moon! It wouldn't make for a very impressive otherworld, if you could ride around it in just a few weeks. And who would want to spend the rest of their life in a place, which has shown you everything it has to offer in a year? I'd get claustrophobic.

So the scale of things was one of the issues I had to adjust the most. I referred to past hiking experience to estimate how long it would be to get from place A to place B, as well as basic math. I studied things like, how fast and how far can a horse run while carrying an armored rider? What if the horse is pulling a cart too? 

I guess you wouldn't expect fantasy to care about such things, normally, but it was a learning experience. 

The bigger the better, right? I wanted the reader to look at the map after reading two or three books and go like, "wow, so much has happened already and we've barely left our backyard yet!" 

But actually filling such a vast world with places, races, and whatnot would've been a task beyond my schedule and endurance. So I had to try and find that delicate balance between having a sufficient amount of detail for the lands to seem occupied, while still leaving a good deal of things to the readers' imagination.

Notice in the early sketches, Alderia is depicted as being the size of a continent instead of a simple island. That's because in the very early planning stages, it was meant to be the elves' actual home. Then I scrapped the whole Tolkien elves concept and started over. Little by little, the locations found their appropriate positions and sizes when the world history was pieced together.

When I felt the map was clear enough in my head, I moved on to creating 3D-models of it, which would make determining the scale considerably easier than a basic, flat drawing.  

Adding more detail to the maps, we can easily move from the continental level to the level of specific story locations, allowing us to get a much better view of what happened and how. It also makes it easier to revisit places in future parts while keeping things consistent. 

A lot more dependable method than my memory, at least.

A lot of this might seem like unnecessary effort for such a straightforward web novel, but while about it, I already began to set my sights further ahead than that. Instead just making up a single-use background for this particular series, my goal was to produce a solid foundation, where to also set other, different types of stories in the future. 

And I think it would make me very happy if another author somewhere found Ortho interesting enough to build their own story there, and so add new life to this magical realm, of which a lot remains yet unexplored. I think they'd find these maps very helpful in such case.

Volume 1 locations:

Volume 2 locations:

Volume 3 locations:

Volume 4 locations:

Volume 5 locations:

That's it for now. Let's see where the story take us next and what kind of landscapes await there.

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Until next time!