With Drown Deep’s release just around the corner (October 22nd, if you missed it!), today I’m sharing the maps from the Blood Scouts books so far, so I can give you a little detail about the setting. I’ve been geekishly into drawing maps since I was a kid, but these are the first ones I’ve properly published, so let’s have a dive in…

The World of the Rocc

However Many Must Dies was my first full-on fantasy novel in over ten years, and the one before that was the first in much longer. It was a joy to build a whole new world, and accordingly gave me a chance to get back into proper map-scrawling. I did this with the fantastic software of Wondercraft, perfect for making any kind of fantasy map.

But, being the first in a series and with a rather epic scope, I was somewhat cautious about going into too much detail with However Many Must Die’s map, which reveals the entire continent of Boldarow, focal point of the One War. This is probably about 1/5 of the overall world; my much bigger map of the other continents is still a work in progress.

I sympathised with what I once heard Joe Abercrombie say about the lack of maps in most of his books: cementing such things can make life difficult in the writing. That said, with the complexity of this series, and the fact that I had to use the map myself to keep track of things, it was of course necessary to nail down.

The map of Boldarow is there to accurately depict the layout of the various countries of this continent. I also produced separate maps for my own use with coloured sections to demonstrate the different territories of the books’ empires, and the shifting front line of the war.

It doesn’t have any specific place names, because that level of detail quickly gets cluttered, though I could point out where everywhere from the book is. I’m not sure the scale is entirely accurate, given the distances the Blood Scouts travel in However Many Must Die, but I did use one which roughly worked somewhere in the regions of the scouts travelling well over twenty miles a day on foot…

Introducing The Saints Mire

The action of Drown Deep has a much narrower scope and the map, I think, is perhaps more necessary to get a quick idea of the lay of the land. This was also an opportunity, I felt, to demonstrate the character of the region in question. It takes place in The Saints Mire, a supposedly neutral holy land with deep history and rather evocative place names.

You can see here the detail of most of the places visited in the book, crucially including the locations of the Ten Priories, each a uniquely situated outpost in an inhospitable land. It was necessary to map these out accurately not just for the journey of the book, this time, but for the strong sense of historical detail that underpins this story.

The names are deliberately dramatic, and all with good reason that is partly explored in the book itself. The eagle-eyed reader may even notice Drowndeep itself in there, nestled amongst the horrible marsh of Paradise Fails. Each priory honours one of the Rocc’s Ten Prophets, and this is one of the dreariest. Obviously, the Blood Scouts are likely to pay a visit.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the preview of the lands to be explored in Drown Deep. Get yourselves orientated and ready for its release on October 22nd!