i'm a bit late to making a pinned post, but here we go!
Welcome to my blog! Here i'll post occasional rambles and updates about my current project, Myths in the Wild (former joke title of "my way or the highway"/MWotHW)
MitW is my post-apocalyptic fantasy setting with LOTS of speculative biology/evolution and sprinklings of horror. I've been working on various iterations of this setting since ~2018, but began chipping away at the current(ish) version circa 2024!
The current branches of this project include:
The setting itself (maps, creatures, etc!)
A work-in-progress TTRPG i'd like to share someday
A custom oracle deck (using standard playing cards)
Possibly some short-stories and characters in a sort of anthology style, we'll see :3
Main Tags: #mitw project, #rambles, #rb, #others art
(Will add more tagging stuff later, but the rest is hopefully self-explanatory for now)
This is gonna be a long one and you know it’s serious because I’m gonna try to use punctuation/capitalization for once
Context: For starters, this is the various layers and steps behind my Myths In The Wild world map, using the worldbuilding guide by Madeline James (youtube playlist found here, although there’s also a text version on her website). Everything here is approximations, to say the least. It took me a few tries and many iterations to get it close to what I envisioned originally, so… if memory serves me right, I’ve ended up at version “3.7” of my map? Oof.
Anyways, time to get into it.
I began by looking over my old maps again, which by this point I hadn’t touched in over a year. (You can find them in this old post of mine!)
Then began the process of… well, basically starting over. For one, I didn’t account for ANY map distortion with my continents originally. In an attempt to offset this, I put my landmasses on a slightly-less-drastic Robinson Projection. Not perfect, but a step in the right direction.
Then, following over where I had placed mountain ranges, I drew tectonic plates and their directions. Following Madeline’s guide, I also noted the intensity of the plates’ movements and hot spots/mantle plumes under the crust (volcanic islands!)
Next came elevations:
And then… the more complex “invisible” parts. Pressure cells, messy wind directions, and ocean currents. These got a little tricky because they vary with the seasons (winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, summer in the south, and vice versa) so there’s technically two versions of each.
First, the North Summer/South Winter maps:
Aaand the North Winter/South Summer maps:
Next came temperatures and precipitation (NS/SW and NW/SS order again)
Which, with their powers combined, give us info for humidity/aridity!
Now for… climates… this is where things got messy for me.
This is probably on account of me not being the best at absorbing instructional info and overthinking phrasings, and nothing against the guide itself. I just struggled a LOT with this, and ended up with weird gaps in the climate zones no matter how precise I thought I was with clipping layers, lasso tools, etc. I even found other tutorials and tried to overlap the results to find commonalities. It, uh, wasn’t pretty.
I eventually went through the entire map, the one using Madeline’s guide only, and manually circled each blank spot to fill in the gaps. Because I’m stubborn and had too much free time, I suppose.
Which gave me these step by step köppen climate maps: the messy original, the patched holes, and the cleanup edits. The third also stretched out the tropic zones, as in a later step of the guide the aridity is brought up and the tropics are tweaked to account for between-seasons rains, if that makes any sense. Anyways, here’s the maps:
I was… still not really satisfied with it. It still felt too arid, to me? But I didn’t want to return to step one. Instead I returned to step three, actually, where Madeline’s guide has a “climate shortcuts” section. And thus I hatched an evil scheme to combine the maps.
With the shortcuts version, it all looked a little too neat and tidy.
So… I overlayed it onto the previous map, distorted the hell out of it with a liquify tool, patched up the messy bits, and got… this!
My final map of wretched approximations that I’ve decided to stick with since!
It’s rendered some of the previous “invisible” steps inaccurate probably, but I’m willing to make that sacrifice. I now have a map to lay the proper groundwork for my setting! HOORAY!
Finally, FINALLY I could move on to more steps! I continued following the guide, mapping out weather types and river basins!
The rivers will most likely need a rework soon, since they probably don’t match up with the new and improved climate map. But the drainage divides themselves are still accurate… probably…
Then, combining previous info from climate, precipitation, aridity, and other maps: biomes!!! This one took many iterations as well, since I’d actually done biomes before revamping the climates map. So here’s the before and after:
And there it is folks! This map has come a long LONG way from its original renditions
A lot more detailed, and lot more foundation to it than I originally stuck myself with. Improvements all around! Functionality-wise, that is. I still want to make a more “flavorful” weathered map like this one o these days.
Anyways, thank you for reading! This passion project has been a wild ride and I’m excited to be working on it again :3
I’ll be making another post soon(?) about the rest of the steps in the guide I followed, namely the geology and then cultural info! Stay tuned! Yippee!
i should add that this was preceded by an even messier monstrosity, wherein i tried to make a timeline of the landmasses joining/separating + approximate notes of when certain animals appeared. yknow. for fun. to figure out where animals could populate and where they would be isolated. yknow for fun.
WOOPS I DIED BC I’VE BEEN MOVING AND WE DONT HAVE WIFI HERE YET !!!! anyways here’s a recording of some hasty Continental Drift i animated last night yippee
We are approaching the maximum of images you can post here so I thought it was time I make a little showcase of all the formation pieces we covered so far on the streams.
For people who don't know: for several months now I draw one formation or fossil locality every Saturday. The next place we visit is chosen by a wheel of names, which we also constantly fill up again when a new formation is picked.
I try to make it as interesting as possible in my composition and choice of animals and I can tell you this series has been a great training when it comes to constructing these, how I call them, Menageries.
I have to thank a team of friends and colleagues who help behind the scenes with research, creation of size charts and conversation partners when it comes to deciding on the compositions of these pieces. Their help has been invaluable!
A young girl puts her knowledge of alchemy and necromancy to the test when she breaks into a natural history museum to steal the final ingredient for her next experiment….
To make a smol friend!!
How could this possibly go wrong?
the appeal of studying human history is like. your brothers and sisters, who all died just before you got here, managed to pass down only a few things to you, and almost all of them are in your blood. the rest of your inheritance is scattered in ruins and tombs and libraries that have outlived their makers. they wanted you to know them but they are gone. will you look back into time and try to find whatever is left?
People in the past liked having colorful clothes, too! And the cost of (local) dye was pretty low compared to the labor required to spin fiber into thread, let alone all the other steps in making clothes.
