Whenever I pick up a fantasy novel, the map is always the first thing I look for. A well drawn map makes all the difference when you’re trying to bring an imaginary world to life. The people and places become more real when you can follow the heroes’ route through their world or when you can see where all the points of interest are.

I'm a firm believer that the map just as useful to the creator of the world as it is to the people reading about it, so when I began writing this story, I started with the map. (More than likely because I have an awful sense of direction and can barely navigate my own neighborhood let alone an entire world.

This particular world, though, has gone through a lot of changes since it's original inception.

The earliest version of this world was a hand drawn map on a sheet of notebook paper. A number of key details were there even in the earliest phase. Sadly, most of the earliest drafts have been lost. I know I have the notebook somewhere, but a good chunk of digital assets were lost to a pretty devastating hard drive crash 11 years ago that cost me just about everything (minus all the info I had committed to memory, anyway).

This printed map is one of only a handful of art assets I still have (but the associated Illustrator file is gone forever):

If you look close enough, you'll probably notice that the compass is backwards, so, honestly, it's probably for the best that this thing is dust. Out of those, ashes, I took yet another stab at drawing up the world using a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop.

I was able to put together some really cool looking assets that were pretty close to the stuff I lost:

In working on this version of the map, I learned some Photoshop tricks to paint some interesting mountains, and was (mostly) happy with the outcome—especially for the Stonespyre Mountains around Thoranee.

The major problem with this pass, though, is that it is absolutely gargantuan.

The process of painting this map was kind of, uh, brutal. The “fully painted” image earlier in the post took a couple days to get right, and that was just a tiny little segment of this larger image. (Have I mentioned that I like to bite off more than I can chew?)

That massive blotch of green on the right half of the map is simply called “the Wilds" primarily because that was the easiest way to stop myself from trying to fill it all in. It's uncharted. It exists, and some explorers know about it, but no one's mapped it yet. (How's that for an in-canon “placeholder text?”)

When I picked up this project again at the start of the year, the first thing I did was wrote that sample I posted a couple weeks ago. But the very next thing I did was draw up a new world map. Specifically, a smaller world map. One focused specifically on the Northlands (which is the region where this first novel is set).

These other areas are still out there, and I'll get to them eventually, but I'm trying really hard to avoid my usual pitfalls and focus instead on something manageable. To that end, I decided to not only redraw the world, but also to reduce the scale of it. The Northlands used to be comparable in size to the continental US, and while that isn't necessarily a bad thing, that is a lot of land for one person to fill with history. Thoranee’s history can be just as exciting with 4 or 5 cities as it was with 15, and I'll have an easier time keeping track of them.

Which brings us to the following image. This is the new (much improved, and significantly reduced) map of the Northlands:

Minus cities/roads, anyway. If I showed you those, you'd get some pretty big spoilers. If you want to know more, you'll have to subscribe to this substack (or, I suppose, wait for the book to be finished).

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When I started this section of the substack, I had some lofty goals. My plan was to tell the story of Aluron from beginning to end, one small chapter at a time. That was one of those “more than I can chew" bits I mentioned in my last post.

I have a lot of lore tucked away in my head, and I thought I'd take a stab at just sort of laying it all out chronologically “on paper." (I tried creating a wiki at one point, but figuring out how to organize the volume of content proved to ve overwhelming, and I never got very far)

Given the new push to finish a novel, and in keeping with my daily goals, I want to get back into that worldbuilding mindset, but I'm going to jump ahead a bit in the timeline and focus on stuff a little more relevant to the novel—starting with the primary setting for its opening chapters: The human kingdom of Thoranee.

Population

Thoranee is the largest kingdom in the Northlands, and its population is almost exclusively human. There are some dwarves in a couple cities—primarily those near the mountains and/or mines, and there are a handful of camps housing Brushwood elves, though they aren't permanent settlements, and, at least on paper, the Brushwood elves are considered citizens of Furling.

Thoranee’s people are (primarily) descended from the Lycenians of Eden who first settled in the Stonespyre Valley after their ancestral home was destroyed. At the start of the story, Thoranee is likely the strongest military power in the region in terms of raw strength. I say likely because statistically speaking, they have a number of advantages. They have more soldiers, more regimented training, and the majority of their kingdom resides within a natural fortress. However, their strength hasn't been tested in some time.

Geography

Thoranee is located in the northeastern corner of the Northlands in the heart of the Sonespyre Valley—sometimes called the Stonespyre Garrison. The mountains form a protective barrier around most of the kingdom's major settlements with only three significant points of entry—all of which have been walled off and heavily fortified to keep invaders out.

Thoranee is known for being an exceptionally fertile region boasting rapid growing seasons and routinely bountiful harvests. Coupled with verdant forests and a robust fishing trade (thanks to their control of Sapphire Lake), Thoranee’s citizens are generally well fed. The kingdom is no stranger to poverty, however—most of which is the result of actions taken by its recent kings.

Culture

At the start of the book, Thoranee is in the midst of some notable changes. They're coming off a string of rather awful kings. While you likely wouldn't notice within the capital city of Phalorn, there is still a lot of unrest elsewhere in the kingdom.

Galdon Alcaste is proving to be very different from his predecessors—especially his father—but wounds don't heal overnight, and he has a lot of work ahead of him still.

Thoranee places a lot of stock in its military power. They train extensively, and offer a government subsidized military education to the eldest child in each family. Historically, the Lycenian people were largely nonconfrontational, but that burned them one too many times. Thoranee has the largest standing army in the Northlands by a considerable margin.

Notable Factions

Thoranee is home to the Shadow Clans.—a loose confederation of bandits and street gangs whose sole mission is to dethrone the Alcaste family (according to public opinion, anyway).

The Shadow Clans have a long history with the crown. They originated as local militias rallied to defend the Stonespyre Valley from bandits when Thoranee’s army marched off to wage war on Roshane (long before Galdon came to power).

Trained by Brushwood elves, the Shadow Clans were so good at their job that the king eventually sent them to replace his army on the front lines of the war.

When that war ultimately ended, the Shadow Clans returned to Thoranee to learn that the king had claimed their lands and homes, and he'd divided them up amongst ranking officers in the Royal Guard as payment for their service. The Shadow Clans got nothing.

In the years that followed, the Clans were forced to resort to thievery in order to survive, and they ultimately evolved into the very thing they were created to combat.

By the time Galdon was crowned, the Shadow Clans were largely divided into two main factions with one group supporting Tucker Arise (pronounced uh-reese) and his quest to eliminate the Alcaste family, and the other group backing Benjamin Sardonis and his push to repair relations with the Alcaste family and restore the Shadow Clans to the war heroes they once were.

Points of Interest

There are a handful of notable landmarks/locations in and around Thoranee that play an important role in the story (and in the kingdom's history.

Stonespyre Citadel

The Stonespyre Mountains are definitely a point of interest on their own, but I won't rehash what's already been said in this post. I will, however, mention the Citadel. The citadel is a massive wall/fortress that spans the southwestern gap in the Stonespyre Mountains.

This is one of only three points of entry into the valley. While it's possible to cross the mountains in other locations with a little ambition (and some reliable climbing gear), the southern pass is one if the only openings large enough to fit an invading army through.

As it exists at the start of the book, this fortress is especially unique in that it isn't just a single wall with a gate. It's a bit of a death trap designed to box enemies in (almost literally). The Citadel has 4 fortified walls surrounding an open “courtyard”, which stands completely empty.

The side walls are set high in the mountains in order to make it difficult for normal siege weapons to reach them while providing defending soldiers an easy vantage point for eliminating invading forces. The fort is equipped with dwarven engineered catapults and ballistae designed specifically to operate within the confines of the inner courtyard of the fortress.

The courtyard itself is really more of an open field designed to be a “holding pen" for anyone who breaks through the outter wall. Once inside, an invading force would find themselves surrounded on three sides (and whatever remained of the fourth) facing an enemy their weapons typically can't reach.

Northwatch & The Arlysian Wall

Like the Stonespyre Citadel, Northwatch is a fortress built to guard an entry point into the Stonespyre Valley, though Northwatch is notably smaller. Northwatch exists primarily as a deterrent for smaller strike forces—assassins, spies, things like that. The mountain fortress provides a good vantage point for spotting incoming threats, and the wall does a decent job of keeping those threats out.

What makes these landmarks so interesting is that they're both very difficult to see unless you know what to look for. They've been expertly blended into the natural slopes / peaks of the mountains in the area rendering them almost invisible to the naked eye. Unless an invading army knew exactly where to look, it's likely they'd just see mountains with no way through. The hope is that attackers would end up looking for a way around the mountains—leaving Thoranee plenty of time to fortify their defenses, or even send an army of their own to intercept the attack.

The Cellars of Thoranee

The Cellars are a large network of underground passages and shelters constructed by the dwarves shortly after the kingdom of Thoranee was founded. They were built in secret with entrances hidden throughout the valley to be used in the event the kingdom was ever invaded.

The Cellars proved to be instrumental in repelling an invasion during the early stages of the human civil war, and following the end of that conflict, they eventually became the primary operating base of the Shadow Clans.

The Cellars connect every major settlement in the valley, and even a few locations outside the mountains as well with full blown cities erected in some places designed to mirror the structures on the surface.

In theory, these shelters are large enough to house the entire population of Thoranee—or at least, that was the intent of their original construction. In the years since, Thoranee’s population has grown, and it's likely at least a small percentage of citizens would need to have their names struck from the guest list.

At the beginning of the book, the Shadow Clans and the Royal Guard are at war with each other in an attempt to conquer the Cellars—a war that the Guard is winning thanks to help from Benjamin Sardonis (you'll hear more about him later)

This is just a quick crash course in a few key points about the kingdom of Thoranee. There's a lot of history here, but you'll have to wait for the book for some of that.

In the mean time, (if you haven't done so already) consider subscribing to get more world building updates. And don't forget to share a link!

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