World of Quandrum: Evolution of the Map

It's really unfortunate that I can't find my old childhood drawing of the very first version of this map anymore although I clearly remember that I have stored it somewhere in my old archives. Back then  most videogames packages not only contained the cartridge but also a thick manual fully packed with tutorials and extra content like story texts, character descriptions and sometimes also fictional world maps. The Golden Sun series for instance has a lovely detailed lore around the history of the fictional world of Weyard which has actually the shape of a disc instead of a round planet as seen on the included map of the retail version. I loved its design as a child and never got tired of examining it. That map was my main inspiration for my first early approach to create an own ficional world.

As far as I rememeber, the design of that early version was a bit messy, full of noisy elements, like thousands of islands all over the place. I just wanted to make it look cool without taking natural and geographical aspects into account (like how continents get their shape in the first place due to the contintal drift).

You can see the clear influence of Golden Sun  on my redesigned version of the map which I created during a Photoshop workshop at school several years after the first draft. Similar to the games, the original story of Erlmaiden Discordia revolves around a team of adventurers as they travel from one kingdom to another to activate the magical fire of multiple ancient lighthouses. Only the fire of the ancient lighthouse has the power to banish the raising numbers of monsters that terrorize humanity since decades. 

I started to use some shapes from our actual worldmap like those of small islands which I scaled a bit bigger. For some reason I also thought it would be a cool idea to categorize the continents by apply them to nations while each nation is represented by a color. I never went to deep into my own lore though since I was afraid that it would restrict my creative freedom too much if I try to came up with the background story of a location too early, way before the protagonists could reach that point in my story - in particular at that time where nothing was set in stone yet.

The forth map looks more like the current one with one additinal continent where the final arc of the story is supposed to take place. There was the idea that the nation of the moon-shaped continent and the one in the middle were ruled by the same queen (who is now the ruler of the continent in the west of the latest map which is also the homeland of our protagonists by the way). I don't want to go too deep into details here but what I can tell you about the reasons of the change is, that I struggled a lot with the overall plotline and thought it might be troublesome for said empress (who will play a crucial role in my later arcs) to keep the balance of her influence between those faraway positioned locations.

I also had some major conflicts between several nations in mind. Therefore the positions of those continents turned out to be a bit inconvenient for my outlined upcoming events so that I change some positions and also got rid of a continent entirely. I will return to this and tell you more about more changes when we will reach that point in my story (probably in the next decade haha).