Influences here were Les Cites Obscures, Invisible Cities and H.P. Lovecraft.
If you have the right map, you don’t even really need to write your generic fantasy novel. There are many like it but this one is mine.
MOPS Day 15. There are two things behind this map: the first is the Russian illustrator Ivan Bilibin, who the border is vaguely in the style of. The second is the process I went through at work of making a big database of places-with-airports in the US and elsewhere. It turns out one learns about some fascinating and oddly-named places by doing this (for example: Chicken, Alaska, where the original plan to name the town after the local abundance of Ptarmigan was foiled when settlers couldn’t agree on the spelling; and the enticing possibility of journeys such as the ‘horse tour’ - travelling across America from Horse Well to Deadhorse via various placenames suggesting you should be better maintaining your horse). So I liked the idea of doing a map leaving out those pesky population centres and just concentrating on the interesting places instead.
Click for bigger, etc.
One-trick-pony maps go! (as previously mentioned, I’m posting a thing a day for a month. All of the Britain people are off doing long bank holiday things at the moment, so I’m posting the less interesting ones first)
MOPS Day 1. This was produced for the Queen’s Head art weekend down in Rye, in response to a vague request to do some kind of map (more maps followed; as you will see, they get significantly more complex). This is a treasure map, of sorts.
