The Rootstock World
When you’re world-building, it helps helps to have a map. Early on in writing the Rootstock saga, I had to stop and wonder how long it ought to take Calum to make it from Iversport to Dundarien.
Searching around for the definitive answer on how far a horse travels in a day turned up the ever so helpful, “it depends.” Is it even terrain? How’s the weather? How spry is the horse? How many step-behind-the- tree stops does Calum have to take along the way?
Forty-two ended up being my magic number because it fits nicely within the bookend realms of possibility (20 to 100) and it’s always my favorite answer to any perplexing math problem.
So I had half the equation. Next up, how far apart are Iversport and Dundarien?
Rootstock takes place in a future cycle on a future Earth. In between each of the cycles the Watchers mess around with climates and do some terraforming to tidy up, but the continents and oceans remain at least vaguely recognizable from one era to the next.
After spending a few fascinating hours contemplating plate tectonics, introversion versus extroversion theories, and the pace of continental drift, I shrunk the breadth of the Atlantic and dubbed it the Atlassia and expanded the Pacific into the “the endless ocean.”
All right, so maybe it was more than a few fascinating hours. Days perhaps. I tend to lose track when I’m chasing a rabbit.
Seriously, have you seen these National Geographic simulations? North America is floating closer to Europe by the day…or maybe just the opposite. As with the horse, it depends on who you ask. Regardless of who’s right, our drifting tectonic plates gave the Watchers free rein to push Innis and Tallu around however they pleased.
Even after herding all the primary settings into closer proximity, that still left too much land to for our pre-industrial clans to cross in only a four-book saga. So, I spent a few more fascinating hours contemplating what happens when we melt the icecaps.
Maps predicting what North America might look like after a foot more ocean creeps up its shores led me to draft this early concept map of Tallu.
But, back to the question of Calum and the horse.
To finish the math, I needed to figure out where to put Iversport and Dundarien.
My first draft for Innis sorely needed some old-world map aging techniques but this early Adobe mock up was enough to keep me honest in getting characters from place to place without teleporting.
Because we have’t discovered the swift gates yet.
Besides Tallu and Innis, a similarly tweaked Western Europe stands in as the Ten Kingdoms of Erusa.
Bresca is more or less France. Larad is an amalgamation of the Iberian peninsula and its Mediterranean neighbors. Wodi fits in as Northern Africa.
Suralia is pinned to the latitude and longitude of South America, though it’s the one named region Rootstock never actually visits. Sorry, but that would have meant Book Five.
It’s a prime setting for opening the sequel.
The rest of the world is known as the Barrens, left uninhabitable by the apocalyptic end of the previous cycle.
We don’t go there. We don’t want to.
Oh, yes. Calum and the horse. About a week.
