Anonymous said:
Tips on making up fake countries?
BORDERS
To create a country, nation, kingdom, empire, state, emirate, whatever, you need some borders. However, sometimes borders can be vague.
- Making Borders: There are a lot of things you can use for borders, such as: rivers, lakes, mountains, canyons, roads, landmarks, coastlines, major change in geography (grass/desert, for example), a giant tree, some old ruins, an abandoned village, really just whatever. More modern and industrialized societies will have stricter borders that won’t be subject to easy change.
- Reason for Borders: You should come up with reasons for why a border is where it’s at, especially if it’s relevant to your story. A border might have been extended after winning a war or two groups might have come to an agreement that one group cannot claim an area past a certain river. Some reasons can be related to mythology. For example, a group of people might set a river or a hill as a border if they have superstitions about what is on the other side.
- Water: It’s tricky to make borders on lakes and other bodies of water if you don’t have the proper technology. Whether you need to figure this out depends on your story. If your characters don’t have certain technology that allows for precise locating, such as GPS or magic, they might use the stars at certain times of the year to locate borders.
- Your Needs: Figure out what you need in your fictional country before you create the shape, size, and borders. If your characters need to be near an ocean or a major trading port, you’ll need an ocean, a large lake, or a sea as a border.
- Vague Borders: Sometimes groups of people have vague borders. They may not know where the exact border is, but they know what is and is not their land. For example, they may say that the border of their area is wherever all of their settlements end, but these settlements can change and grow over time thus easily changing the border.
- The Creators: Who created the borders? Someone within that country? Settlers? Were the borders created by the creation of neighboring countries? The citizens themselves?
- Maps