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Thick heavy rain forests grew along the equator, deserts just beyond them, swamps, pasture lands. There was actually a logical progression which gave the earth a kind of mirror image look regarding the terrain of both the southern and northern hemispheres. More importantly it made the terrain relatively striped across the land masses.

It may seem a simple fact to some people but at the time I was fairly astounded. Until then I had created my continents with a swamp here, a desert patch here, trees, pasture land, and whatever I fancied. A patchwork imaginary land. This patchwork effect can work if there is a particularly overriding effect. In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings the marshes leading to Sauron's lands is created by the last battle of the earlier wars. The bodies and magic applied at that time poisoned the land to create the desolate swamp.

This works to explain a few instances of patchwork

Felrani - in the flesh

I became dissatisfied with my drawings and positioning of the lands. I didn't feel as if there was 'enough' there. So I began to create the world. Firstly I built a hollow football sized globe of self hardening clay and made up the continents, their positions and a rough guide to terrain. Painting it in relevant colours and marking in the major towns and cities. It was very illuminating, and a little daunting, to place myself as a character on this world, standing on the coast and looking out over the vast Windlewar Ocean knowing it would take months for a ship to sail from that point and reach the land on the other side.

For the first time since creating the land, Felrani was becoming 'real'. It was okay as it stood but I wanted more, and decided to work on the Western Isles. The Western Isles is basically the largest continent on the world, stretching nearly from north to south poles. A land strongly affected by magic it also had some unusual terrain and as most of my people lived and worked here I needed to understand their lives more. So it was that, fifteen years ago, I began one of the most exciting and illuminating projects of my writing career.

I began to build the Western Isles.

Finding a strong board roughly the size of a dining table top, I began to lovingly create a paper mache copy of the land that was imprisoned in my mind. The mountains, the swamps, deserts. The far southern tundra and the magical northern lands. The rivers, villages, cities, although small were created giving roughly their size and positioning relative to the world in which they lived. And as the model grew over the next thirteen years my understanding of the people who lived there became acute.

It was a vast land, separated by 'states'. Each separately ruled though allieged to a single monarchy. The distance, the rivalry, the sheer struggle for survival in the harsh lands, became more apparent as the land grew and the finer details added.

It was a lot of work, sometimes frustrating when it was almost impossible to get just the effect I knew existed. But singularly it has been the most beneficial exercise I'd ever attempted.

I became able to 'live' with the people I'd created, and have a constant immutable record of their lives.

terrain but will become more and more unrealistic as more areas of illogical terrain are built. One of the best exceptions to this is Terry Brooks imaginary land Landover which is specially created to bridge the world of faeries and the natural lands like Earth. This kind of land has no logic to its creation other than as a bridge. Even Terry Pratchett's discworld has its logical restrictions, its own equator with ice hubs and deserts.

Although the earth's terrain is directly affected by the sun's position there are other contributing factors, plate tectonics basically indicate how and where the formation of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes appear. The size of the land mass affects things like temperature, humidity. A large body of water surrounding a small land mass can make a significant difference to the temperature that land experiences. For example central Russia, on the same latitude as London, has far colder and severe winters than Britain has.

It is these things that I needed to consider in order to produce a consistent world. I took the easy way out and used the earth as a model for my consistencies in producing Felrani, but have since produced worlds along similar principles with non-earthly statutory physics, such as the planet with a thick gaseous atmosphere. The density of this gas changes depending on the position of the sun, the clouds etc. so that on some days it is 'thick' enough for objects to 'float' and swim within it rather than just living on the surface of the planet. Creating a world like this is fine as long as the effect remains consistent for all things subject to it. Trees, rocks, people houses, and how the density of the atmosphere is changed works in a logical pattern, i.e. more sun, warmer, less dense, therefore more dense at night and cloudy, denser in winter than summer, less dense around a warmed city than an isolated farm and so on. Fascinating stuff.

But based on earth and the sciences we know I landscaped the continents of Felrani, positioning them on a globe to help me, and employing such effects as plate tectonics to devise mountains ranges, volcanoes, earthquake regions and so on. Strangely enough once the rules had been established the positioning of these features became an easy, almost automatic, task.

This left me more time for the interesting bit, the development of the races of the lands.

The People of Felrani

At first I took the relatively easy step. Using an A3 enlargement of the continents I began by adding towns and cities at, what looked like, decent places on the map. Again this was based on logical criteria, the inhabitants needs for their town to survive, and hopefully flourish.

I worked from the basics. To found a city required a good nearby water supply, so a river or spring would be the usual staring point. Occasionally I'd use a well but the people I'd created had very little understanding of well technology so these were normally 'inherited' from a previous race.

A village and possibly a small town could easily get along by itself with a decent water supply and food supply, so the land was either cleared for farming and animal husbandry or located near to 'natural' food resources, where the hunting was good. For a decent sized city I'd argued that hunting was too hit and miss and then farming became an essential asset so the land nearby had to be fertile, clear and readily cultivated. Also, a city needs to trade with other cities, towns and villages. On this basis it needed to be in a fairly accessible position. I wouldn't, for example, build a city on top of a mountain under normal circumstances.

Slowly the lands of my continents and towns and villages came into being, and the people of the lands began to take on their own lives.

It was at this point that the development of Felrani began to split onto two parallel paths.