So the point of this worldbuilding event is not for me to tell you how to do world building. There’s plenty of resources for that out there. I’m interested in giving you a playground to write in and maybe play some DnD or something. So this blog is not necessairily where you can learn something, but I’ll at least try to show you what I’m doing while I’m doing it. So here is how I made the map of Juno that we are starting with.

Step 1: Save yourself a bunch of time!

I’m going to make some assumptions about Juno to save us some time in the world building. First off, Juno is Earth like. It’s sitting around a single star at around the same distance. It’s in a similarly cosmographically situated solar system. So there are other planets between Juno and it’s star, and there are big gas giants a little further out and some chunks of ice out there somewhere. Sprinkle a asteroid belt in the mix for protection from comets and such and you’ve got a habitable planet.

Next, Juno is about the same size and situated in a similar position and spinning at around the same pace. This means that we have a similar day/night cycle and the progression of the year, how ever long that turns out to be, has the same seasons and arrangement of weather more or less. Cold at the top and bottom for the most part and warm to hot in the middle.

Sure we could do something outrageous. Tidal lock the world so one side is always dark and the other light. Or dramatically extend the year, or make it a world in perpetual winter or summer. but what that really means at this point in the development of Juno means a bunch of work. Of course we could do anything, but that means also figuring out the why and the wherefore of it all. And listen I’m not a astrophysicist. I write stupid horror and fantasy stuff. So for me to spend a bunch of time learning about how planets work, is certainly a thing I can do, but that’s not worldbuilding, that’s a college degree, so not what we are about, so let’s just save some time. Which brings us to Step 2, where we are going to make time!

Step 2: Continents

Let me give you a gift. Tectonics.js

Tectonic movement is not something that it’s easy to visualize without like, ya know, math. And even more terrifying then math is the blank page. An open map is both. Things that we know about tectonic movement and the creation of the topography on our own world, is that things start kind of in a big chunk and then breaking apart over billions of years. And I’m sure that there are some people who just jump into the ocean and start painting in the land, but I find a good starting point helps me get things oiled up. So this site, Tectonics.js, allows us to start with a randomly generated Pangea that we can watch slowly become a collection of separate landmasses. And you can stop the clock whenever you want. Keep thing Pangeal if you want, but I think Juno will be, as we’ve already started with, Earth like.

I love the site also. You can set the time scale anything from real time to all the way to 1 Million years per second. I love watching things move at a million years and nothing seems to happen when suddenly the Antarctic continent breaks apart and flies into the group of southern islands and becomes a whole new landmass. It’s beautiful, and already I can feel the gears turning just watching where land starts and where it ends up.

So here’s the world of Juno at 1.15 Billion years:

Now I’m going to take that and draw it into a map making program called Wonderdraft which is going to see us through the rest of the map making process. So that turns our rough draft from Tectonics into this:

We smoothed out some of the straight lines and added a little color gradient. Wonderdraft gives us the ability to mess with themes and color and paint in some different terrain. Right now what we got is just a flat world. So in the next edition we will tackle a few more steps to finish this big world map to add more land features like mountains and rivers and such.

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JUNO - The Face of the World