Building Merithaya: Part 2 - Broad Strokes

This is part of a series of articles where I'm building a world, for now called Merithaya, from scratch. Each of these articles will start with a description of what I've been working on since the last update, and eventually will end with writing inspired by what has been discussed.

Now that I've got some of the things I want to include in my mind, I can start thinking a bit about the layout of where the main landmasses in the world are going to be. At this stage, I'm not trying to produce detailed representations of each continent or island group - I may even add or remove some of them later. However, having a broad strokes picture like this to start with helps a lot when considering things like cultures later on. For example - are there other places nearby that folks can travel to or from? Is the country isolated, or close by its neighbours which might cause conflict?

For Merithaya, as discussed last time, I want the main continent to be the focal point. I probably only want two main landmasses, with some smaller islands and archipelagos in between to explore. This will give me plenty of options for settings for several campaigns, without bogging me down with huge amounts of content to create upfront. I can plot these out on a really rough diagram a bit like this:

As you can see, this doesn't really show much of interest at the moment, but it's helpful to visualise conceptually a rough scale of where and how large these lands might be. As we develop them further, we can rescale and work on the actual gaps between them, but at this stage I'm thinking of the distance between the continents and the central archipelago to be around two weeks travel by boat. This gives the real possibility of trade and movement between continents, as well as a reasonably realistic several months of travel to sail "around the world".

This layout has advantages that tie into the other aspects I wanted to include too. If we assume an Earth-like climate for now, then there is plenty of different biome possibilities - and that might tie in nicely to the seasonal pantheon I wanted to work with. Perhaps the north of Continent 1 is an arctic landscape where they worship the god/goddess of winter? Maybe the god/goddess of summer is more celebrated in the southern, more tropical landscape? Again, we are not bound to this right now, but it leaves open those possibilities which is going to give us the maximum creative freedom when we start diving into the details.

Now that we have this framework in mind, we can start to build more of the global aspects of the world. Next time - our first look at the pantheon of Merithaya, and how they have shaped the world! After that, a look at Continent 1 in more detail...