Worldbuilding Blog Episode 2

This first entry will focus on the creation of the planet itself. I will talk about creating continents, ocean currents, rivers, and natural resources.

• Continents

• When I started out, the creation of a planet was what scared me the most. I mean, why wouldn’t it? Isn’t every painter most afraid of a completely blank canvas? I tried a litany of paint programs, actually drawing by hand, using random paint dropping on a canvas to inspire me, everything you can imagine.

• There is a lot to be said for creating an entire planet by yourself as it was an entertaining, if not extremely tiring, process. However, after about a week of banging my head against the wall, I decided that no amount of artistic inspiration or geologic study online was going to give me a planet with a realistic topography.

• Luckily, the internet if rife with fractal generators for anything you can imagine, and planet generation is no exception. There are several truly high quality fractal planet generators out there. If you use Mac or GNU, I’d suggest Fracplanet. This little bit of software can create some amazing 3D worlds at a click and allows for POV exploration. It also takes into account ice caps and elevation. The link above also has a download for a limited functionality Windows version called TerraJ.

• You can also take a simpler approach with apps like Donjon or Planet Map Generator. If you don’t mind dropping some real money, you can spring for Fractal Mapper, a solid program for basically building the world from the ground up for you.

• Images from each program

• I recommend using Fracplanet or TerraJ for major projects. Using TerraJ I was able to create the following base planet.

• Revel (welcome to Revel)

• Ocean currents

• The next major step was to put together some ocean currents. These currents were important, because they determined the climate all across the globe. Warm water pushed from the equator and cold water pushed from the poles affect temperature and rainfall. I knew about that much when I started putting together the streams.

• There was quite a bit of research (e.g. Wikipedia) involved in creating believable ocean currents. The prospect of actually starting terrified me. There was not real way to start as every single point on our own planet is both the start and end of the currents. This was probably the first time I considered just doing it the easy way.

• Then I found this gem, a 3D interactive globe that displays the oceans currents in real time. I stared at it for probably 15 minutes, before realizing I was not actually on any drugs. It is absolutely mesmerizing. Beyond that, watching the currents move is a more effective way of understanding how they work than an entire semester of oceanography (a class I took in college and managed to learn nothing from).

• Once I had gotten a solid understanding of how the currents moved on Earth, I began to create my own. I started from the poles. Much of the cold water currents originate from the South Pole on Earth and my planet features a massive northern continent called the Endless White. It made sense to have the same approach.

• I began by pointing some strong currents out from the polar region. I tried to work in stages. I added all of the current arrows coming directly from the pole. Then the next round from those and so on. This was to prevent letting a current go too far only to realize that it would have been intersected by some other current.

• At this point I added a few large islands in the world. I didn’t need any more land mass, but I wanted to just play with currents, and landmasses allowed me to do that. Honestly, I was just having fun and barely even thinking of worldbuilding. However, I’m glad I did it, as it resulted in a much more interesting global current.

• One thing worthy of note is that I didn’t indicate cold or warm water currents in my map. This was a pretty large omission, but one that was planned. The temperature of the current is such an important factor in determining weather and temperature around the globe. Determining those would have made the entire globe absolutely immutable. I opted not to calculate cold and warm water flows in order to leave myself some more narrative freedom for the resources stage. You’ll see what I mean.

• Temperatures and Rainfalls

• Temperatures were done fairly. Given that the basic design of the planet follows that of Earth, the temperature were mapped based on the equatorial line. The planet was given tropics, sub-tropics, temperate zones, sub-arctic zones, and arctic zones at the poles. All were proportionately similar to Earth.

• Determining rainfall was by far the most difficult task. Rainfall is determined by several factors, but the most important are distance to equator, presence of warm water currents, altitude, and distance to the ocean or sea.

• I started by adding an overlay that determined rainfall by only the presence of warm water currents. Areas with high warm water currents were given a rating of “high precipitation.” The less warm water influx, the less precipitation. For easy tracking, I set values at 100%, 80%, 60%, and so on. I then reduced the rainfall by 10% for every ½ of a climate zone it was from the equator. So, an area in the tropics was reduced by nothing, while an area in the sub-arctic was reduced by 25%-30% depending on how far north it was.

• Finally, I factored in the altitude. Areas with high altitude that lay in the path of predicted precipitation got an increased precipitation rate based on their altitude. Likewise, areas that lay on the other side of high altitude areas lost a corresponding amount of precipitation. For example. A region has coast, then mountains, then plains, all of which fall in an 80% precipitation zone. The coast gets 80%, the mountains get 90%, and the lowlands on the other side get 50% (the increase given to the mountains multiplied by 3).

• map

• Rivers

• Rivers were added to the map in areas that had high altitude precipitation. Likely water collection points were selected based on altitude and the path of the river was decided by following the contours of elevation already on the map.

• Natural resources

• This is where I decided to go nuts. I had spent hours working logically and pursuing scientific research I knew nothing about. I was beginning to lose the feeling that I was telling a story and starting to feel like I was working on a science project. I took out my dice.

• I decided that I was going to roll the natural resources of each region. Of course I could probably determine them by just looking at the map I had spent 15 hours creating. However, I wanted to tell a story. Rolling the dice made for a challenge. How would I explain that an area with tons of rainfall had no agricultural potential, or that a tropical desert had an abundance of water? The moment I decided to do it like this, I could feel myself getting excited again. Here’s what I got:

• Rolling

• I determined a quick set of resources and decided that I would roll a percentile die. A roll of a 50% would mean that the region had neither a shortage or an abundance of a resource, just enough to sustain its people’s needs. After spending about thirty minutes coming up with a list of resources and rolling them for each region, I spent maybe 5 hours figuring out how these numbers made sense. This was, by far, the most intimate and involved part of the work. Until now, I had been working with a map, but needing to explain how the massive continent of Central Primaria could have heavy rainfall zones and still have less water than the other regions? Well, it made sense that the mountains in the west and the small precipitations zones in the east might make for a massive central desert, surrounded by steppes and grasslands.

• Now, FINALLY, I was building a world, not just a map. I had to contain myself to keep from getting ahead of myself. Despite wanting to just write it all right now, I wanted to leave something up to narrative again. I decided on the core feature of each region, but did not go into much detail about them. I wanted to do that as I built the planetary history, a process I will talk about in the next entry.

• SUmmary

#Revel #other #worldbuilding