I always enjoy seeing the maps that tend to accompany many fantasy novels these days. Some science fiction stories have them too, but more often you see ancient, otherworldly lands scrolled out on faded parchment, depicting magical territories, political divides and places known as The Forbidding Lands or little footnotes like Don’t Go Here Or You Die. That sort of thing.
I love these. But I never actually thought about making a map for one of my own stories until I was developing my third novel-sized story and realized I wanted to go an extra stretch in being able to visualize my character’s travels and where they stood in relation to other cities, lands, people, monuments, and so on. At first, I simply sketched out my thoughts on notepads, but I decided that, like my typing versus my shorthand, it just came more naturally when I worked on the computer. So I started searching for a software program that would help me design my fantasy world.
AutoREALM is what I found. “A freely available fantasy role-playing map-making program.” Now, there are numerous programs like this out there, as I saw in my browsing, but this one is just fun to play around with, and has quite a bit of variety to it, not just including fantasy icons and such, but ones you could use for say…laying out the battle zone in a quadrant of space.
To give an idea of how I have used it, here are two maps that I created using this program (and yes, they have been incorporated into one of my stories, which may or may not ever see the light of day…who can tell?)
A worldwide map with places even I haven’t explored yet:
And a zoom shot of the middle continent, where the story takes place.
Look like fun? It is. I can spend hours playing with this thing, and it’s a wonderful tool to make your story come to life all the more. I hope you find it as helpful as I did. Feel free to send me any maps you make. I’d love to see the lands that live in your imagination.
I see that smile.