I drew (literally) on my skills with graphics and design to do this, so while the tone of this post may be sort of here’s-what-I-did-next I’m not going to assume you have a full understanding of design methodologies. One thing I was sure about was that the graphics had to be of the highest quality, as close to an actual hired map-maker might produce. I know the program very well, so it was an easy decision for me to make, although I had never used it for something as detailed as map, with all of its coast lines and borders. There are a number of ways you can build a map, but I’m going to talk about the way that I used which was using Adobe Illustrator. I used grey for the sea to pick out the white land more. A ‘zoomed in’ view of Dali with map pins, hills and borders. (See more below on styling a vector map) The map used in my upcoming RINGLANDER novella THE BATTLE THAT WAS LOST ( available for preorder from Broken Binding – link to be updated soon). Here’s a closer view from the same source file, which has been edited in a slightly different style. It also contains a few countries within those continents: Rengas is a ring-shaped fantasy world comprised of 5 main continents: The main antagonists the Bohr want to conquer the lands they have yet to reach, and so maps in this world are revered and rare. It helped me find a way to knit the story into the world very literally, as the main character’s heritage is to do with navigation. Briefly though, I wrote my debut novel over 7 years, due to a multitude of reasons, so the details of the world I had created were able to marinate for for a long time. I’ve tried to make this guide as general as possible, although I do use examples of how specifically Rengas came to be and how I built it. If you’ve landed here without knowledge of my book, fear not. I was able to use it from my work computer but I don't have that anymroe so now it's QGIS, which is many ways is nice but its not the same.1. The lack of maneuverability with the QGIS labelling is honestly making me consider labelling features in. If you have any ideas I would love to hear them.Īnd omg yea! ArcMap's labelling image is leagues beyond QGIS. ArcGIS custom projections may be easier to do it with- I remember that you can set the extent so maybe if you hack it up you can say its like 50,000 miles. But I've been trying to figure out how to make a custom CRS that's larger or smaller than earth. I've been struggling with this big! I'm lucky because my planet is the same size as earth.

Some things I could see being added to this tutorial are creating a custom GCS for non-earth sized worlds and custom projections. I use ArcGIS Pro and the Maplex labelling engine is amazing.

Once I started using them, there was no going back. This is great! I love seeing more GIS tools in fantasy mapping.

Custom map creator fantasy