Consume Product

yes (?)

on a more serious note, it's all of the above. creative vomit to free up my mind, visual aid(s), world building tool. bum wipe in an emergency u/#topkek

i wonder if there are map making programs for this stuff. or do serious authors just hire cartographers?

but yes, it's for an actual setting that i have established. too much and too long and too convoluted to explain but the tl;dr **for the novel i want to write within the setting** is that Thom goes off to a local monastery at 12, where knights are wintering, and next spring Thom (13) leaves with the knights, becomes a serf, then a squire on the trail after a show of bravery, they winter at the Bellfry Pass fortress, cross over into the Estlendings (14), cue 6 years, Thom returns to the west a man (20) and full-fledged knight of the Order, but with PTSD from all the shit they had to do and endure. The Order is called the "Order of the Dove", it's a sacral (church-bound) order which protects the faithful, evangelizes new places, serves as armed diplomats and missionaries and protection for diplomats and missionaries, builders etc.

let's just say, the Estlendars *really* hate it when the western kingdoms and the Church showed up to bring order and civilization to the plains, and "traitors to the old ways" who have settled and done good with the knight-settlers and church-evangelists are pogromed by torch-riders.

this map is just a snap-shot of a greater whole. it's the north-eastern most part of a continent. the Nortlendars of the Nortland kingdoms are descendants of Galthlendar settlers. That thin strip of the Galthlendings is just the southern-most coast of a far larger continent stretching north. Think of the Nortland kingdoms as "the Outremer kingdoms, but originally established by Norse heathens who then turned Norman English-French-German Christians".

there's the Nortland Church of Holy Martyrs (or Church of Saints) and the Sundaren Temple of the Bright One. let's just say, it's complicated and martyrs have been made.