Mono Mondays: Map of the Known-ish World

On Mondays, we like to support our resident artist, Mono!  They're an up-and-coming scribbler of things dark and weird, and we consider ourselves lucky to have leeched onto— er, formed a mutually beneficial relationship with them.  You can watch Mono hard at work creating various pieces on their YouTube channel.  For those who don't feel like watching digital paint getting splashed around, we'll be showcasing a different piece of theirs right here every Monday.

This week is Mono's first attempt at cartography.

So, a neat little story about worldbuilding:

We here at Vagrant Dog Productions are, of course, keenly interested in the subject, but there are quite a few people out there who stumble into worldbuilding incidentally.  The most famous is certainly JRR Tolkien, of The Lord of the Rings fame, who wrote down The Hobbit only to keep track of the details he told his son Christopher in his nightly bedtime stories.  Similarly, Tolkien wrote The Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings cycle mostly because he had developed the Elvish languages and needed a historical and literary context to make them work.  In both cases, worldbuilding was a secondary concern, to the point where (for example) Tolkien never really did get around to figuring out where orcs came from.

Mono is in a similar boat.  All their talk of empires and forests and whatnot made them realize they needed a map to keep things organized, so they quickly sketched one out earlier today.  Of course, since they're only putting in the details that are needed to keep track of what they have so far, much of the world is blank, and what little of the world isn't blank is still mostly old-school "here are dragons moste foul" guesswork.  A few details that aren't uncertain:  the magical density and variety present does more to determine a biome than natural geography and climate does, and water has magic-influencing properties that conspire to make rivers the natural borders of such biomes.  Also, the presence of the empires mentioned in other Mono Mondays.

Mono added one other worldbuilding tidbit that helps explain why even a map of known areas contains so much unknown territory:  high magical densities tend to draw in monsters, but they also tend to be dangerous for creatures that aren't naturally steeped in magic (such as, for example, humans).  It turns out high magical densities do similar things to a person as steadily climbing blood pressure, such as severe headaches, chest pains, dizziness, spontaneous nose bleeds, and loss of consciousness.  It is, as Mono laconically notes, "Very bad for exploring, so they're trying to find ways around it in the empire."