cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8880368
I wrote this for the Fully Automated community but I think it might be a useful idea for solarpunk writing in general. I mostly learned about writing fiction from reading worldbuilding posts and campaign logs from Tabletop RPG GMs like Shamus Young. (I always found TTRPG story advice to be very practical, compared to whatever resources for writers I'd found back then. Though it does probably explain my worldbuilding-first approach.) Either way, I hope this'll be interesting!
I've been thinking about Five's excellent comments about states and the borders of a post-state world on one of our previous discussions. And since this Lemmy community is intended partially as a repository of resources for players and GMs, I thought I'd gather up some of the cool maps I've been looking at, and organize them into categories of options/inspiration for anyone who is thinking about what a region outside the more-lore-established Nation of Pacifica might look like.
Five suggested a few really cool options, the first of which was the overlapping zones of the historical lands of indigenous peoples. The setting already features a massive, successful Land Back movement, so it would be quite reasonable from a lore standpoint to restore these wherever possible, or to establish a sort of hybrid mix with modern landmarks. This interactive map is also very useful: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/10/1127837659/native-land-map-ancestral-tribal-lands-worldwide
The next was Watersheds and I really love these maps. To paraphrase Five: in a world where states no longer exist, borders that still have importance are those drawn by nature. People still need to coordinate over land and water management. They give some wonderful world building suggestions though I'd also suggest that as Fully Automated! Is in the transition to a post-state world, but is not there yet, that there's excellent potential for factions, feuds, drama, and plot hooks in the existing states losing relevance to watershed organizations that overlap their territory and authorities, but don't necessarily encompass all of them.
The cool thing with watersheds is you can aim for huge nation-sized chunks of land, or tiny town-sized boundaries, all depending on your needs.
The last one I'll include is biomes. These are another natural boundary, though often a softer one than the watersheds.
And there's no need to restrict yourself to just one new way of redrawing the map. Societies are messy, and often slow to change. It wouldn't be unrealistic to end up with a mix of all of the above, along with existing cities and state or national borders too. Here's one example, though it's alt-history rather than scifi.
I hope this is useful, and if someday you're playing the game and redrawing the map, I'd love to see what you come up with!
