The March Annual issue is all about Map Projections, which normally implies that you’re starting with a globe!!

In the last post on this topic I talked about how small and insignificant my Tolrendor ‘World Map’ was when placed on a ‘globe’ sized map. It covers an area of approximately 3500 by 2800 miles … when the full size world (when extrapolated out based on latitude etc.) has a circumference of almost 24000 miles!!

This means there is a huge proportion of Tolrendor that is currently completely uncharted … and therefore pretty boring for any sort of map projection. To fill in the blanks, I decided to have a play with Fractal Terrains, another product from Profantasy. By setting a few parameters, this software can generate realistic looking worlds in seconds. Once you get the hang of it, there are a bewildering array of options to play with. A simple click creates another of the infinite worlds!

The challenge here was to generate a large scale world map that suited my rough ideas for Tolrendor, but that also matched in reasonably with my existing maps. After many attempts, I have settled (for now…) on the below (shown as an Equirectangular Projection):

This suits the concept that my main current campaign area (i.e the World Map area) is the western-most tip of the world’s main continent, and is largely European in inspiration, whilst leaving plenty of scope for more exotic lands to the south and east.

So what are the next steps? From Fractal Terrains, it is simple to export a CC3 file of the entire world, which can then obviously be edited to slot my own maps into it. However, one great feature of Fractal Terrains is its ability to generate map projections directly, such as this Orthograhic Projection seen from the north pole:

The problem is, to be able to generate these correctly, with my ‘World Map’ integrated, requires me to get this data into Fractal Terrains, and from what I can see, this is not simple 😦  For now I might have to stick with the one-way export, but I would love to achieve this at some point …