Caldera: Birth of a World

The creation process can be a difficult one for me. I have ideas that I want to integrate into my game, but find that I struggle to put them on paper in a way that satisfies me.  My creativity ultimately is quite derivative - I troll the web until I find something, or many somethings, that are close to what I envision, then massage them together and end up with something I'm reasonably happy with. A "big picture" view of my game world was one of the things I have never been satisfied with, but eventually the pieces seem to fall into place.

What if this is the known world?

The first piece of the puzzle was a post just after Christmas by Erin Smale of The Welsh Piper. He points to a cool vector-based creation tool that makes island maps, called MapGen2. I tried my hand at making my own world map but... meh. With maps via MapGen, I'm getting what I really wanted.  

A couple of weeks later, a was half-listening to the TV while my kids were watching something and hear a word that flipped a switch in my brain. "Caldera". The gears started to spin, and I began to contemplate a place where the entirety of the world was contained within an enormous volcanic caldera.  Like Crater Lake, only... bigger, with each island a continent in and of itself. 

The World of Caldera

Some time spent cycling through random island maps garnered a dozen or so that I liked gave me enough to work with.  I pulled up Photoshop and set to mixing and matching them, re-sizing, rotating and tweaking to taste. Now I have a starting point and can drop these into Hexographer and move forward.

And so Caldera was born.  Drop a couple of Erin's hex templates over the whole thing and I now have a world map (Atlas Template, at 300 miles/hex) and pulled out a Regional map and from there I chose a single 300 mi hex to focus on for my Trevail campaign map.

This bit is pulled from the middle of that triple-island cluster in the center. We'll see what comes of it all.