Fictional World, I

As a fantasy enthusiast and creative, I've long been fascinated with fictional universes, the worlds and the characters and stories that take place in them.

This began with the Forgotten Realms by Ed Greenwoon, with games like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Neverwinter Nights.

Then Middle-Earth, Tolkien.

I had my own characters and stories that have been in development for a long time, and thought it was about time I dedicated some time to world building. I figured this could help in future personal projects.

I browsed different websites searching for a means to quickly generate maps as a means of getting some idea of the shape of the landmass going in my head - as I hadn't attempted to visualize the world this way before. I found something.

Of course, the maps that it generated weren't always what I wanted. For example, in this, the landmass is so large - perhaps too large, that it cannot all fit on the same map without being split. It also had the option to generate names and locations, but I opted to leave those out. I would create this world, and would not take generated names and implement them into my world somehow, or I couldn't really call it my world.

On this one the hex grid is removed, but terrain details such as forest, hills or mountains are still in place. I would come up with my own art for these. The landmass is also a little more suitable as it is smaller, but ocean splits the land in the middle of the map, whereas it would make more sense for the land to be in the middle and the ocean to be around it.

This generator could not reliably give me a map I was happy with, but it gave me bits and pieces. So I generated many maps, pinching the bits I liked and inserting them into another image, building up and blending in until I had the shape I wanted.