Worldbuilding 201: Geography
Greetings and symbology! We are doing a lot of symbols today, so better be ready! Actually, no, we’re not. In today's blogpost, I’ll be discussing geography! And how it is important and sometimes overused and done wrong; we are in for a ride!
Ele Definition
El+le, ele! :D Yeah I am hilarious (not). Anyway, I love definitions first so I will do it as always. The difference here, however, is that first, I will describe an issue. The term ”geography” comes from the Greek words “geo” for earth, and “graph” for writing, description, etc, implying it’s directed at the physical, natural world. But it is often used along with the locations of human built places, cities, villages, towns etc, and the political landscape in a region, including how humans move and migrate. It also often refers to non-physical landscapes, including culture and how cultures and languages migrate, not just the physical people.
It is, however, a huge headache to have so many meanings concentrated into one word when they are so distinct yet also important. So we’re going to skip the non-physical meanings and focus on the physical world, and for all four of the meanings centred on that–physical landmarks, cities and towns, politics, and migration–I will give its own definition to make the words narrower. I will be doing a standard definition of one word, and three of them will be coined by me.
The first one is physiography:
A collection of features, not of sophont origin, and their relative locations to each other within the world and space.
Sophont is another word for people of human-level cognition. But basically, what I am saying is that if a person hasn’t created a feature in the land, it is part of the physiography of the area. Pay attention to the fact that I am allowing this to include space features for space operas. While definitely not ”earth,” I think the word can carry on to be broad enough to fit that, too, without having to make a word for that. Physiography by this definition is very scale specific; after all, the size of the collection of features you consider can change to fit. We also include random magical realm stuff as well.
And then I introduce this word, urbography:
A collection of sophont-created features and their relative location to each other within a world or space.
It’s cities and towns and all those things. Whatever people build and generally keep stuck at one place falls within the urbography.
And for the penultimate definition, politography:
The configuration of nations, states, or any political entities in relation to each other in terms of physical locations.
This refers to your neighbours in terms of politics and which political entities are the most likely to influence you. After all, a nation that is half across the world is less likely to matter to you than one that is right next door.
And finally, the last one, migratography:
The pattern by which a sophont migrates from location to location and tends to settle for periods of time.
Basically, this means that people like moving. Ever since the two great migrations out of Africa when humans realised there was prime real estate outside of Africa, people have liked moving around, and there are patterns to this insanity. I like staying put and always have, but some people are constantly changing locations. Either way, how people move is not random, and migratography is the paths people tend to take.
So finally, we can define Geography as all of those above. It is the sum total of all those words. Technically, there are more, but we are getting detailed enough as is.
Those are the four big ones that often get lumped together, and I will be honest, it is for good reasons they often get put together, but we will keep them separate so we can discuss them more clearly. Onward to next!
Physiography
This is the one that I think the most of, honestly, using maps of nature to run around like headless chickens in a forest trying to figure out how to not get lost and resort to cannibalism in 3 hours when we start getting hungry and are waiting for rescue even though no one has realised we’ve fallen so far already.
Anyway, imagined trauma orientation is not what we’re here for, we’re here for physiography! As the definition above said, this is all about geographical features of natural origins. This includes the standard things such as rivers, lakes, mountains, islands, forests, oceans, deserts, and I think that is about all I generally see on fantasy maps that everyone loves so much.
Though speaking of fantasy, we have magic there, lots of magic. Why is it that it rarely actually shows magic having effects on nature and the physiography? Seriously, I made a steampunk fantasy world where various mana sorts existed and where the mana appeared in the world radically affected the physiography and everything around. Far too often I see maps and physiography where magic seems to do NOTHING to it, and it is so boring! Spice it up! Maybe there are magical regions that overlap so it isn’t just a magic forest, but a region of a forest is magical and then right next is a portion of a mountain also being disturbed by said magic.
Another thing often overlooked in a lot of physiography is… where all the tsan resources are located. An important aspect to any civilisation and how they develop is the availability of all important resources. This includes building materials but also metals. This one is so important that during the Bronze Age, a lot of power between the civilisations was actually determined by who had access to tin. To make bronze, you need copper and tin, and tin was the harder of the two to access. In modern times for you humans, oil is the big one. During the Industrial Revolution, coal and iron were the two big ones. You can throw in magical substances here as well. If you need mana to forge special weapons, it would become very desired by a lot of people and whoever happens to have access to it would get a disproportionate amount of power… or become a huge target.
It is less common, but even in space, you can have physiography. In my post on FTL, Faster than Light, I went through a lot of examples of FTL. One was the network model where you have specific paths you have to follow; the layout of these paths is part of the physiography. But you can also include nebulae, how solar systems are structured, and so on here as well. If you read my post on struos, meaning anything material, particles, substance, or the likes that you use to get new abilities in your world, you also have the ability to make it so different solar systems have access to different struos.
Geographic Determinism
This is a pet peeve of mine. Geographic determinism, or, if we use my new words, physiographic determinism, is the idea that given certain physiographic features, climate, etc, then a culture and people are destined to go down a specific path of development, technologically and culturally.
This is in some way offensive, as it reduces cultures and people into beings that lack agency. It deprives the cultures of the choices they have made, the history that they have written, and what has been done to them.
Sure, a lot of choices made are purely out of pragmatism. It is not a coincidence that cultures up to the north have developed clothing habits that keep them warm. It gets FREAKING COLD in the winter. But you know who else has made similar pragmatic choices? People in mountainous regions because it gets cold there, too! But the styles and specific choices in the clothing still differs from the many cultures who endure the cold regularly.
Clothing styles, architectural styles, etc, are only somewhat affected by the physiography that the culture and people experience. Think more that physiography sets constraints, but human ingenuity will freely roam in an infinite myriad of ways to express themselves.
Technology is not necessary to develop in certain regions either. The requirement for technological development is multifaceted, as I describe in my post on advanced technology. Necessity by climate and availability by physiography are only some of the parts required in order to become great technological power and complete arseholes that colonise everyone else. There are literally thousands of choices made by people and society itself that will dictate how technology develops. The Roman Empire was, for centuries, only 100 years away from the steam engine. They had the concept, they needed to figure out how to make steel which wouldn’t be that difficult, but one choice they kept making held them back from an Industrial Revolution of their own–one choice. What choice was that? Slavery. It holds back society so much, and that one choice made it so they would never industrialise.
So no, expansionist technologically-advanced island societies don’t need to be Japanese-looking.
Urbography
So we have a world with sophonts–I need to make my post on sophonts–anyway, sophonts exist, and the physiography is laid out. How the tsan are people going to settle down? Yeah, the place where all the artificial structures by sophonts will come about is where they decide to settle and put things, who’d thunk?
Initially, before agriculture, there was nothing to speak of. People move around and try to survive, and when there are too many babies made, the people are told to sod off when they are old enough and people spread out. But after agriculture, people start settling down, and with more food comes a lot of things being built as people figure out that the whole thing about building sturdy buildings is that the buildings could last from when you needed ten attempts at children to when you just needed the one successful child.
But where do all these towns and villages start to pop up? First and foremost, where there is food. It is often arable land areas. Rivers are good early on, as they tend to flood and refertilize the ground. This is why a lot of old civilisations arose around rivers. But technology progresses, and as people figure out that they go do the whole breeding thing on plants to make them even better for sophont consumption, people spread out, and economy becomes the primary reason for the location.
Where are all the resources you have in the physiography? That’s where people can make money, so more settlements will start popping up! Which makes sense, doesn’t it? People can make money, or whatever you use–if you go to my post on currency you’ll find more and why it appears rather quickly–and with that money, they can buy stuff, including food!
So people set up where food can be made, resources gathered, and where you can trade all these resources, products and food. But you know where else people start setting up camp? Where roads cross! There are a lot of places to go now, and people either build roads, or walk the ground until it is some form of excuse for a road. Anyway, if two or more roads cross, at the cross section another settlement tends to develop. This is now a great trading spot for people going in any of the directions! An additional thing to think on here is that if there are nearby additional roads, they do often tend to bend slightly in order to go to the nearest settlement that is growing. That extra distance is often worth it going to where people are.
Another thing to keep in mind is that settlements also grow up ALONG the roads. Often it is about every 1 day of walking to 1 day of riding where settlements tend to pop up. Want to take a guess why? People like places to sleep, and sleeping with other people is safer than in the wild where animals will eat you! This is also a reason why at least some, if not many, cultures have developed the xeno relationship–xenoship?–where the host and the guest have a special relationship with honour and all so they can travel safely and not be a burden to people. Though depending on what you have, settlements should be between 1 day of walking by foot and 1 day by whatever the most common form of mount riding is in terms of distance. Is it vague as hell? Yeah, but to this day we measure distances by time it takes to travel.
Politography
As stated before, this is about the political map of geography. This will delve into the question of what a state is. (Do we have a post on this? I don’t think so) One important aspect when it comes to the concept of state is that it is generally only applicable after the Peace of Westphilia in 1643, if I recall correctly. It was after that that proper states were formalised and became a thing. So it is best to avoid states despite it being such a ubiquitous concept today. So naturally, you then ask
You beautiful limax, what general vague concept do you suggest we use for maps then?
Ah, I have missed your complimentary questions! And you know me so well now! You know how to flatter a herm. Well, I think it is the word… realm. And defined thusly:
A realm is a collection of settlements and adjacent physiography where the settlements are joined together by some mutual perception of belonging.
Is it vague as tsan? Yeah. That is kind of the point: people group themselves together in very many ways and in very layered manners. So you can have realms within realms like a Russian doll. You had, for example, the Christian realm, but that was divided into Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. Within the Catholic and Protestant realms, you had the Holy Roman Empire, and within the HRE, you had many smaller German realms. And at points, you had Italian and even French realms within the HRE.
Keep in mind here that the perception of belonging may not be cultural or religious and can be purely political. And for old times, it can even be multidirectional. The edges of many old realms often had a sense of belonging to one realm, and another at the same time, and which one that was the “real” one could easily shift. This is why a lot of old empires and kingdoms never had fixed borders but rather fuzzy edges. The edge parts could belong to you and your neighbour at the same time as both of you struggled to make them perceive themselves as entirely part of one or the other.
So if you make political maps, especially in eras of limited communication where it is not functionally instantaneous–see my post on communication–keep in mind that the edges will never be truly in the kingdom or empire. So it is generally better to paint with gradients of colours than solid lines. People are complicated and how they group each other politically, religiously, and every other imagined way is a billion times more complicated, and for most of history, unless there are natural barriers, there are no clear cut lines for politics.
Speaking of natural barriers, avoid straight lines like the plague. The places where natural divisions of groups exist are natural barriers. That is because these barriers prevent people from coming in contact with each other, exchanging ideas, language, culture, etc. So over time, they diverge more and more, so a lot of countries today, and even historical places where divisions between realms happened, were divided exactly at natural barriers, rivers, mountains, anything that makes traversing it difficult. And nature abhors straight lines. Straight lines are indicative of someone artificially making a line on a map without any care. Which is why Africa has so many straight lines; Europeans came in and drew lines that fit them without regard for the local realms and divisions. And we see today how well that is going.
Migratography
As I said earlier, before civilisation, people moved around and migrated as per their lifestyle, but even after that, people still migrate for a myriad of reasons. It can be because of a population boom due to new technologies, or something like natural disasters, war, famine, diseases, etc. The last one with diseases does help spread said disease, so, you know, it can be troublesome! Check out my post on disease for some ideas!
The Bronze Age collapse happened when, all of a sudden–I think about 2000 BCE?–all Bronze Age civilisations collapsed around the Mediterranean, and people regressed, and all trade was greatly reduced or outright ceased. Part of the cause was because of what was called “the sea people.” No one knows who they were to this day, but one hypothesis I have heard is that people further north–modern Nordics, Netherlands, and North Germany–expanded outward as their populations were growing suddenly and rapidly with agriculture really taking off there. But as said, we don’t know to this day.
There are patterns to how people do all these migrations, but general guidelines are that, first, people will always head for where other people are known to exist unless they have an explicit reason to want to avoid those people. Second, they will take the easiest and the safest path. This can be highly dependent on what technology level they are on. Some people’s migration might go by ocean and sea because they have mastered seafaring, but other people go by land as they cannot go by the sea.
Migration can be thought of in terms of push or pull. Push migration, pushgration? Nah. But push migration means that people are pushed away; that is, they have a reason to leave. Pull migration is the opposite; something is attracting the people to come. That is, they have a reason to come.
One important aspect with push migration is that it often leads to desperation. And desperate people will be ready to do anything to get what they need. So never underestimate what these people will do. You might think that “no one can get through there,” but if the push is strong enough, or the pull, the people will go through the deadliest regions just to get through to the other end, no matter how many die.
There is much more to migration, but I cannot go into all here. Maybe in another post I will go into more detail. But in general, think about how people perceive the dangers and ease of migration and draw the lines along where people THINK it will be easiest. It doesn’t matter that it might not be, but if people think it is, that is where they will flock in their migration until perception changes.
Summa Summarum
So are you ready for the pop quiz? Don’t worry, it is just one question! What is geography?
Time's up! Answer is, TOO MANY THINGS! Today, we went through four of them, and even came up with words for them. Those are not the only ones I am likely to revisit and do the rest of all the things that make up geography. All are related, but they do so many different things. So final words on all of them:
Physiography: Be creative if you have magic or do scifi; you can add a lot to the natural world that people have to interact with.
Urbography: People settle where food and economics incentivise them. And remember the 1 day walk or whatever amount of travel lies between small settlements as a rule of thumb.
Politography: When you deal with non-modern states, the concept of realm is important, and think of them as having fuzzy undefined edges instead of sharp lines. Even in space operas, it is better to think in terms of fuzzy edge regions.
Migratography: Perception is reality, and people are motivated to move by events pushing them away or belief of things pulling them to come.
I think that is all, good luck with your geography in magic, space, or on your own worlds!
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as geography and its components are classified as common knowledge. The terms physiography, urbography, politography, and migratography are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, all language and exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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