So, since I haven’t had the mental energy to play games when I’m not writing, and work has kept me from being social, I decided to play around with maps a bit. Specifically, the Europa Universalis IV map.

So I took this:

 

And made this:

I couldn’t find a world provinces map from EU IV without either garish colors (the one that comes in the game files) or numbers (the first one above, from the game’s wiki.)

I have been wanting to use something like this in order to use it for stories and tabletop games. Having made dozens of my own maps for games and such, like:

… I would rather put in a little work now than have to be continually re-drawing borders over a real-world map. Personally I find working with the real world map even more tedious than futzing with the borders of a fictional world, because there is so much real-world geography and geology involved in where borders get drawn.

Fantasy map-making in general fascinates me, because it involves so many layers of interplay, so much created history in every jot of a border or coastline. Just thinking of what would have been necessary for things to end up where they are, and the challenge of coming up with it all is wonderful fun, though I might be a little crazy that way. I hope that doing this EU IV province map will allow me to have similar fun with drawing maps on the real Earth, by keeping the decisions fast and easy, while still maintaining some meaningfulness.

Anyway, if anyone out there wants to use this for similar purposes, go ahead. I’m hoping that if I add this in more than one file type, at least one of them might be useful…