Tiffany MunroAkeron: The Light, Twilight and Dark Fantasy Continent Map
Akeron belongs to a long-running homebrew setting I have had the pleasure of mapping more than once.
Bloodfen Keep and Gulf of Storms Region Map
The Continent of Metaria Fantasy Map Painting
Fantasy Continent and Region Maps for a Long-Running TTRPG Setting
By the time Rick came back for this piece I had already made maps of Metaira and the Blood Fen with a relatively unified vibe, so this commission was less “invent a visual language” and more “all right, what impossible thing does this continent do?”
The answer was: quite a lot.
Akeron is the First Continent of the setting, the land where the gods originally stood while creating the peoples of the world. The barriers between planes are thinner here, and Rick divided the continent into three broad regions: the Light, the Twilight, and the Dark. In the Light, elemental forces are so present that mountains can move, storms have opinions, and settlements survive by learning not to irritate the landscape. The Twilight is close to the Feywild, Astral Sea and Shadowfell, full of dangerous boundaries and strange old societies. The Dark exists in the shadow of a rift to the Far Realm, where an ancient empire has spent its history keeping things with far too many implications from getting out.
The practical cartography problem was almost as interesting as the lore. Rick had mapped the east and west separately but never really joined them through the middle, so I had to take two established pieces of geography and make them feel like one coherent continent. The final map is poster-sized, painted and densely detailed, with the large regional transitions doing as much storytelling as the settlements and labels.
This is exactly the kind of commission I enjoy: the client already knows the world intimately, but there is still room for me to solve the geography visually and add texture that makes the setting feel older than the map itself.
The map under the title of “Fantasy Continent and Region Maps” came after this one, for an empire on another continent.
We hope that ultimately, we will be able to combine all of these into one MEGA WORLD MAP in the end.
Looking for a custom map?
I create custom fantasy maps, science-fiction maps, book maps, regional cartography, and world-building artwork for games, books, and personal settings. If you have a world that has escaped the notebook and now demands geography or blood, contact me for a quote.
© Tiffany Munro. All rights reserved.
