I love a good fantasy map. It transports you instantly to another world and helps you burrow your toes into the sand, or soil, or marsh, or pine needle carpet of an ancient forest floor, far from reality.

The Dangers of Brave & True and the whole Broken Spell series is set in the world of Arvalonia. Book one’s main characters traverse the eastern slice of that huge land mass, questing from north to south, so I wanted a clear but beautiful reference to be present at the beginning of the story.

Regions

Arvalonia includes regions like: The Inner Heat (an endless north-central desert with circling sand storms, few sources of water, Yakkayakkas and dunes), Far Forreston (a mysterious little-traveled forest home for mysterious southerners who rarely emerge), True’s home town Harboursfort (a seaside area with an estuary and a river running through it) and Kingsfort, Brave’s ancestral home. Each area needs to be clear on the map and represented in a non-fussy, emblematic way that hints at what I’d like to call its ‘geographical personality’.

Work out distances between main towns and features

For the first reincarnation of this story, I drew my own map. A fantasy quest needs a map. So embarking on it the second time around wasn’t as overwhelming as it could be. I had a clear sense of the world, the navigational distances and its limitations. I knew it had a massive mountain sundering it’s centre, dividing the transport-challenged Arvalonians from ever getting to ‘the Other Side’. Besides that, I knew it existed as a southern hemisphere world – hot in the north, cold in the south. Plus, the seas were inaccessible due to human-intolerant sea creatures.

DIY or employ a map designer?

After attempting a few drawings though, I requested quotes from fiverr (usually an excellent source of designers and artists and all sorts), then decided on the recommendation of a family member to try Inkarnate, an online, easy to use map making platform. Turns out I do not excel at this but luckily I had help at hand and Inkarnate was a dream to work with. This is what we created …

Do you like it? Me too!

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