On the Art of Worldbuilding: Part 3 - Generating Geography

When approaching worldbuilding on a scale larger than a character or settlement, you might want to consider the landscapes, the geographical layout, the topographical gems that your world is going to feature. It could bring both colour and life to your world and your story, host a plethora of potential adventures, and even reflect on the atmosphere you want to display in your scenario. A quiet, idyllic plane could represent serenity and peace, both in the character walking through it and the story, or it could be a foreboding of something terrible about to happen. Contrarily, a vast, wild mountain ridge could represent the hurdle your character has to overcome, both physically and mentally. It could mean the threshold separating two worlds, pose as a threat, or provide refuge. In this article, we'll have a look at the application of landscape and the detailing of geography in your new world.

Geography is a rather broad and possibly overwhelming concept, so we're going to break it down in the following: Locations, Water, Landscapes, Climate, and Settlements.

Locations

Picture a blank piece of paper, and in your mind, draft the general layout of a map. You can also do this with an actual pencil on actual paper, but if you don't have that, your imagination will do, too. Now, you may have laid out a continent, or a country, but either way, that piece of land should be divided in several separate parts: locations. These locations can be the various settlements your world needs to look more alive, the countries to host your people, or the continents to expand your world to the size of a planet. As in the real world, these locations don't need to be of equal size. Some can be huge, others too tiny to spot on a world map. Additionally, if you were ever to document your world's history, borders could shift constantly as kingdoms invade each other and claim land for their own.

Water

Water is an incredibly important component of your world's geographical layout: without water, nothing can live and grow. Additionally, in the real world, water made for excellent trading and travel routes, so cities often formed along rivers or at the coast. Water and bodies of water are necessary for your world, and make for an interesting landscape to boot. Just think about the Grand Canyon: we wouldn't have something as amazing as that if there was no water. When breaking your landmass apart by oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, brooks, ponds, swamps, marshes, etc. you might also want to keep their source in mind. I'm in no way an expert on geography, so this is as far as my knowledge goes: Rivers often spring from mountains, flowing to lower ground and ending in seas or oceans, or other rivers. Furthermore, rivers often branch out in smaller streams, forming deltas near the shore, offering great opportunities for agriculture, drinking water, fishing, keeping livestock, trading, transport, recreation, mining resources such as sand or gravel, and many other purposes. They also make great borders: the Rhine and Danube made long-standing borders for the Roman Empire, and the Danube is still the border between Bulgaria and Romania nowadays. Rivers can also have a religious role to play, like the Ganges and the Nile, but more on that in Part 6 of this series.

When it comes to the larger bodies of water, people often use the terms "sea" and "ocean" interchangeably, and in practice, they're hardly different. However, in geographical terms, there is a difference: seas are smaller than oceans and usually located where the land and ocean meet. Typically, seas are partially enclose by land. Think of the Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska: it is part of and attached to the Pacific Ocean, but called a "sea", because it's enclosed by land. When you want to include oceans and seas in your world, you can keep this in mind, but I doubt many people are going to criticise you for it if you use their names wrong.

Then, there are the waters that pool more inland. These sometimes produce brooks, ponds, marshes, and moors, all with their respective flora. When plant life dies in wetlands like mires, bogs, fens, and swamps, peat or turf can form over the next thousands of years. These types of wetlands obtain their water in their own ways. Landforms like bogs obtain most of their water from rainfall, due to their location relative to the surrounding landscape. Furthermore, bogs are always acidic and poor in nutrients. Fens are located on a slope and get their water ususally from both rainfall and surface water. They are slightly acidic or neutral and can be both poor and rich in nutrients. Lastly, swamps are usually not as acidic, with a higher pH-level, and are rich in nutrients. Consequently, swamps can sustain tree life and are characterised by their forest canopy. Because of an incomplete decomposition of organic matter, mires arise, where layers upon layers of regular plant growth and decay are preserved.

One of the countries I designed had an entire province dedicated to the quarrying of peat. This meant that the rest of the country's landscape had to accommodate the forming of turf. I drew most of my ideas and inspiration for that layout from places known for their peat-mining, and tried to imitate their waterscape.

Landscapes

As I mentioned earlier: rivers often spring from mountains, when the snow melts and the water flows downwards. That means you have to have a distinguished higher and lower ground, such as mountains, hills, valleys, canyons, trenches, and possibly volcanoes. Now, say you have placed a mountain (range) on your map, that realistically would be formed by two tectonic plates crashing together and pushing earth and stone upwards. From that mountain (range) you can have a river spring and flow to lower ground, meaning the ground around the water can be fertilised. Things can grow now! This will add some lovely colours to your world in the form of flowers, plants, bushes, forests, fungi, etc. You can make the execution of the addition of such lifeforms as realistic as you want, as long as it looks believable, or you give good reasons for a flock of penguins living in the middle of the desert. After all, there's always that suspension of disbelief that needs sustaining.

Climate

Climate may be a little tricky to get consistent, especially if you're not very knowledgeable on the subject.

Count me in, I'm not knowledgeable at all, so the best I can do here is recalling what I learned from a quick search on Google. According to NASA, climate is the statistics of weather over long periods of time, at least 30 years. It can be measured by assessing patterns of variation in temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, and several other factors. A location's climate can be affected by its latitude, terrain, altitude, nearby bodies of water, and water currents. Consequently, climate determines the flora, as well as the fauna, in a specific area. Back in 1884, Russian-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen published his climate classification system, categorising the several different types of climate.

Additionally, as you can see in the table on the right, the climate can also give you an indication about the corresponding landscape. I should give the side note here that this classification system has been revised and updated several times since its first publication. Furthermore, there is another climate classification system, that is maybe a little less well-known, but if you are interested in this subject, you could also check out the Trewartha climate classification system.

Settlements

It may seem a little weird: going from locations to a broader, vaguer subject like climate, only to dive back into detail and finish off on dotting your world with settlements. Let's view it as an example of "Inside-out to Outside-in", even if the change is rather rapid. That said, let's focus on bringing some literal life to your world.

Settlements come in all shapes and forms, both in the real world, and in fictional worlds. From villages to entire metropolises, people flock together and create societies of varying sizes. While in reality, there's a lot of bureaucracy involved in settlements, the common idea about settlement sizes are, from small to large: hamlet, village, town, city. This was especially true in earlier times, but now, you have settlements the size of a city, while still bearing the title "village". However, to keep things simple, you can abide by the general guidelines for such settlement's population.

• Hamlets are pretty tiny settlements and consist of several houses, with maybe a dozen inhabitants. Often, they centre around a farm or two, and they might even have a shop. If your hamlet is religious, they could have a small, primitive chapel or other place of worship. This place, however, is nothing grand or beautifully decorated.

• Villages are small settlements with several hundred inhabitants. Streets and roads can pass through them, and possibly branch off into other side roads. Villages might have more than one shop, a place of worship if religious, and possibly a place of education.

• Towns are medium-sized settlements and can have over a thousand inhabitants. Towns are arguably the first settlements to attract business; shopping centres, factories, cinemas, circuses, fairs, cafes, or their period-appropriate equivalents, if your world is set in earlier or later times than our present.

• Cities are where it all happens. These are the larger settlements and a city's population can vary from several thousand to several million inhabitants. They usually have lots of amenities, elaborately decorated places of worship and everything the towns have; just bigger, better, and probably in greater quantity. Depending on their size and importance, cities can come with different titles that describe their enormity (megacity, metropolis, etc.).

Moreover, there are several other settlements that, while similar in size to previously mentioned settlements, are built with specific functions in mind. Ports are built by bodies of water, either for the fishing industry, trade, tourism, or maybe all that combined. While on the subject of tourism, holiday resorts often focus on this type of income and include as many means of entertainment as possible. In rural areas, it's common to see market towns, with regular markets where farmers can sell their produce. On the other side are industrial towns: settlements who focus mainly on factories and businesses. There aren't often many houses, save for those occupied by factory employees.

Giving Your World Some Colour

I hope that with this, I've given you some ideas or inspiration on how to turn the blank sheet of paper into a colourful world map (either a physical sample or one that's in your head). As per your own interests, you can detail the previously mentioned topics as greatly or as little as you please. As long as you appease that monster that is the suspension of disbelief.