Robert Louis Stevenson said that Treasure Island began with a map. He drew an island to amuse a boy on a rainy holiday, named its hills and inlets, and the story walked out of the drawing. The novel appeared in book form in 1883, and pirates have carried folded maps ever since. A map is not an illustration of a world. Often it is the world's first draft.
Drawing the Coast First
Begin with a coastline, because coasts are where invented lands look most natural. Real shores are fractal, full of small bays and headlands; smooth coasts look artificial. Trace the edge of a torn piece of paper, a coffee stain or a leaf to get convincing irregularity. Then add mountains, remembering that rivers flow from high ground to the sea, join rather than split, and rarely run along ridgelines.
J.R.R. Tolkien's Thror's Map, printed in The Hobbit in 1937, shows another principle: a map can be an in-world object. It has a dragon drawn on it, a secret door marked in runes, and moon-letters that can only be read under the right moon. It is a prop with its own history, not a neutral survey.
Maps That Lie
Medieval world maps such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, drawn around 1300, place Jerusalem at the centre and fill the edges with monstrous peoples. They are wrong about geography and completely right about what their makers believed. In your world, let different cultures draw different maps. The empire's official chart may omit the rebel valleys; a sailor's map might show sea monsters where the navy sees only shipping lanes. Those discrepancies are free story.
“The empty corner of a map is not a gap. It is an invitation the player has already accepted.”Codex note
Myths That Disagree
Real mythologies are contradictory because they were told by many people over centuries. Invented myths feel more authentic when they share that texture. Write your creation story twice, once as the priests tell it and once as farmers do, and let them disagree on who made the world and why. Players who notice the contradiction will feel like scholars uncovering something.
Inkle's Heaven's Vault (2019) puts this at the centre of play. The archaeologist Aliya translates an ancient language glyph by glyph, guessing meanings that are confirmed or overturned as she finds more inscriptions. History becomes something you read, misread and correct. Andrew Shouldice's Tunic (2022) does something similar with its in-game instruction manual, whose pages are found scattered through the world and partly written in an invented script.
Layering an Invented History
- Deep time: the myth age, told only through legend and ruins.
- Founding era: when present cultures arose, half-remembered and politically useful.
- Recent past: wars and disasters within living memory, with witnesses.
- Present: the pressure the player walks into.
Each layer should leave physical traces: older ruins buried beneath newer cities, place names that no longer make sense, festivals commemorating events nobody fully remembers. Failbetter Games' Sunless Sea (2015), set in the subterranean world of Fallen London, lets these layers surface through ports, captain's logs and rumours traded like cargo.
A Lexicon of Lore
Terms that players, writers and designers use when discussing invented worlds:
- Canon
- Material officially considered true within a setting, as opposed to fan theory or apocrypha.
- Deep lore
- Background history hidden in descriptions, environments and optional text, rewarding close attention.
- Environmental storytelling
- Conveying narrative through spaces, objects and their arrangement rather than dialogue.
- Iceberg principle
- The practice of inventing far more than you show, so that what is visible implies a larger mass beneath.
- Conlang
- A constructed language, from a handful of names to a full grammar, used to give cultures distinct voices.
- Unreliable source
- An in-world text or narrator whose account is biased, mistaken or deliberately misleading.
- Retcon
- Retroactive continuity: a later change to established facts, best handled as an in-world revision of history.
Keep a glossary of your own world's terms from day one. It prevents contradictions and doubles as a quick reference for collaborators.