First blog post!
So I guess I need to get the ball rolling with these blogs... Those of you who know me know what I do, those of you who don't might have stumbled on this page by mistake, in which case I can only apologise for what you've already seen and what you may see should you decide to stick around. For those of you who found their way here from google searches, I imagine the words worldbuilding or fantasy map are what brought you here. That's essentially what this page is about. I made a world, called Elyden, and have been slowly fleshing out since around 2006. I create maps for the world, typically in a modern atlas-style that is sufficiently different to most fantasy maps to have garnered me a small by loyal following of people, including my beloved patrons. I also write history and lore for the world, as well as flash fiction, short stories and unpublished novels (I'm working on the latter, but there's only so much a one-man operation who also has an unrelated day-job can get done!). The lore could be about anything and everything I think of that I find remotely interesting. Hopefully others also find it interesting. It's quite varied: I've written about the world's magic system, the mythologies of the world (in the so-called Mythologia Elyden), the organisation of the Fraternal Orders of the Inquisition, the heraldries of various noble families, national imports/exports, legends and folklore from around Elyden, and much much more besides.
I'm probably most well-known for my Atlas Maps, which tackle the ubiquitous subject of fantasy maps from a different design perspective to what most people are probably familiar with. the first maps I made were in your standard parchment fantasy-style though as the world evolved from a generic kitchen-sink fantasy world to something more specific and post-industrial, I realised that the maps needed to reflect this higher-level of in-world technology, and so the infamous fantasy-style maps were devised:
I've been steadily publishing a map every 4-weeks since 2016, making high-res and textless versions available to my patrons, and am on map #50, with an eye towards collecting the maps made so far into a PDF and physical book... which takes a lot more planning that I would have ever expected previously.
I am also slowly working on the Encyclopaedia Elyden, which collates all my notes and lore written about the world into a book that draws inspiration from classical editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (c. 1880's). I'm constantly adding entries to it as I make new maps - every label on each map has an entry in the encyclopaedia which is at least one sentence long and in most cases considerably longer. I'm also going over old entries, bringing them up to date with the modern formatting, and making sure that important details are hyperlinked. This is quite tedious and time-consuming and tends to take a back-seat to other more important aspects of the worldbuilding, like maps, so work is going slowly. Once done I plan on making this available to patrons and the general public as a fully hyperlinked PDF or a physical book (though at close to 600,000 words and growing, the latter may be quite costly).
Now I have a site, I plan on making maps available to purchase as prints or individually as high-res digital files with regional information attached to those who are interested. Low-res versions will remain available to anyone who is interested.