Many people discovered in new hobbies during the COVID pandemic. For me, it was worldbuilding. I’ve always enjoyed speculative fiction, the opportunity to immerse myself in new and unique places; from fantasy worlds that explore ‘good’ and ‘evil’, to science fiction universes that interrogate our understanding of reality itself.
I’ve always been attracted to the idea of building a universe of my own to play in, and even dabbled in doing just that over the years. Then, when the empty evenings started to stretch out in 2020, I discovered Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator. It felt like my very own little sandbox.
Basically, the website allows you to create your own imaginative world. You can start by getting it to generate a random world, and then editing that world to your own liking. Or you can start from a blank slate, sketching out continents in the ocean, then filling them with mountains, forests, grasslands and deserts. Once the geography is sketched out, you can populate that world with various cultures, and create kingdoms, empires, religious states or any other polities you can dream up.
While I was creating the map, I was using other platforms to ‘colour in’ my world – coming up with more details about the different cultures and peoples, the history of these peoples, and some of the stories that have shaped them. The map and the details informed each other. The geography and climate of the world map helping me envision the people who lived there, and their history and stories. The peoples I created away from the map helped me consider where they might live in this world, and how they might relate to the peoples around them.
Indeed, it’s that dynamic that struck me as most interesting about worldbuilding. Azgaar’s maps let you change the climate of the world at a few clicks, increasing temperatures, rains, or changing wind patterns. This has an immediate effect on the environment, turning forests into grassland, or grassland into desert. The population of those regions changes too – where once cities might have tens of thousands of inhabitants, now they might have a few hundred. What I had previously imagined as a thriving kingdom might now only conceivably exist as a culture of isolated towns. How might that change in climate play out over hundreds or thousands of years?
Playing God with climate change on an online map might be a bit of creative fun. But