Part 1 : The pool of creation (May 1996-2000)
Cancon has not been created from scratch. Between the age of 15 (when I got my first PC) and say, 19, I was a cesspool of creativity. I drew, although limited by the possibilities of the program Paint, a large number of small maps and wrote down a few ideas about them. In most cases, nothing much ever came from them. For years they were neatly stored in a few folders on my harddrive. They were still interesting, but I mostly saw them as separate entities or just some funny sketches.
The main part of Cancon was formed by the later as such named continent of Ebewar. Originally it was not even named as such. It did not even have a name. Even the name Cancon was something I finally made up during the process of making the new detailed map of what would be Cancon. I remember being unsatisfied with the name of the world. At least I was sure about that. The map I had belonged to a world and it should have a name. I made up a few of them and they were dissatisfying. I prefer to still call them working names as I will not refer to them specifically. The earliest versions of Ebewar were created in May 1996 (joy to the fact that the computer stores the date of last change, which makes it easier to make this origins story). Originally, Ebewar and Miewar were one continent, connected through what is now the islands of the Ghean Sea. In the southeast were also only a few small islands. All of Rom Trhyss was also part of the mainland. This was a very simple map, although it had a nice shape. But already within days I had been somewhat dissatiesfied with the lack of islands and the fact that the continent ranged totally from north to south. It seemed to lack some east-west dynamics. Thus I flooded the weakest part, created an opening with a number of islands and subsequently created the great long delta of Siesieghiendea.
Part 2 : Revival (June 2009)
13 Years later I was once again flicking through my old maps and was again struck by the simple but strong shape of Ebewar. Inspiration called to me (especially as I, at the time, had been without any inspiration for 1.5 months, which is unusual for me) and I finally took up the challenge to expand the original 548x378 pixel map into a 1644x1134 pixel map, tripling the size, because I felt that this was necessary to create enough detail if it really was a big continent of sufficient size. I expanded it so I could just draw over the original coastlines and rivers which I had just given a different color so I could remover them easily. Obviously I chose the second variant with the split continent and more numerous islands. Redrawing the old map went fairly easy. In the old version a rough lineout of the mountain ranges had already been drawn and also the big rivers were included. The only difference was that I put in more detail for where more mountainous areas were.
How much of the original map still exists in the current map? First off, most of the cities of the old map are still in the same location. Most of them belong to the bigger cities or are capitals. Some have become minor towns and a few have been relocated because they did not fit in with the new nation and culture they were made part of, especially when they had become minor towns. A number of original cities have had a slight name change as well. Mostly to make them fit with the culture they were made part of or if I deemed them as too ugly. Secondly, most of the coastlines are still the same as the original. I made one big change. The Viseri Sea in the middle of Hiora originally did not exist. This was at first one huge swat of land and in my view just too boring. I am still very pleased with my choice. The shape of a map has to inspire and the creation of the Viseri Sea did such. No original cities were flooded because of this act. I neatly drew the coastlines around them, except for the city of Alirtho, which now lay on an island.
With a new huge map obviously came the problem of names. New cities and nations had to be created in great number. The old text file that went along with the map only had a small storage, most of them already being used. Thus I did what I have been doing for some years now: I took a number of other projects like Ebewar that I gave no chance of actually making it to a serious project one day and incorporated them into the Cancon project. Only their original maps remain. For completeness, these were the Cuesar and Degadi projects, and the mapless and rough sketches of the Wrx and Hareha projects. The Degadi project originates from December 1996, but the others all have the same date (May 2000) due to a PC change, but are obviously from a similar period or a few years before that. I have no idea why not all files got their dates reset. At this point it's not really relevant.
In the weeks that followed I used this new store of names to fill in the maps of the continents of Ebewar and North-Miewar to great detail. A number of small shifts were made, especially after I made a few historic maps to portray a number of the large empires that had existed.
Part 3 : North-Indussu (July 2009)
It did not take long to expand the map. As I had been filling in the history and the peoples of Ebewar and Miewar it occurred to me that the Chui did not really have a strong place on these two continents which had such different names. This was especially the case on Miewar, where they were dominant, but still a discrepancy concerning the naming of the continent. Also in the light of the historical dynamics I had soon decided that the Chui must have invaded from a nearby continent, mostly likely to the southeast of Ebewar. Thus Indussu was born, although the name came much later. The northern part was created first. Even as the coastlines were more creative, it went fairly easy as most of this map, in size similar to the Ebewar one, was almost empty. In the middle were some island groups which were part of the Setic Empire, but most of Indussu was only shown a northern part of. For a nice contrast I made a huge island in the western part which would become Manshu. It was all very much unlike Ebewar and I liked it.
Part 4 : South-Indussu (August 2009)
The small part of Indussu that I was showing kept swirling in the back of my head. What would the south of it look like? Could I draw something that would fit with the dynamic shape of the northern part? It was easy to screw it up and make something ugly. Even as I knew that in the past I had managed quite well in drawing interesting and natural shapes, I hadn't done so for quite a while. I still had some leftover names that I hadn't used yet but fitted to be set in Indussu. So after muzzling for some weeks about the shape I finally drew it. I'm still quite happy about the result.
Part 5 : South-Miewar (August 2009)
Like Indussu, only the northern part of Miewar was shown. The main problem concerning Miewar was the fact that the north had mostly been colonized and was still not very populated. There had to be causes for it. The easiest solution was because of vast plains stretching all to the icefields in the south. As Indussu was located to the east of Miewar I also had to explain why all the Chui had come to the northern part. This because I did not want to have more Chui on Miewar and wanted to fill most of it up with Segai. An analogy with America was easily made. While most of Miewar would be plains, the eastern coast would have a long stretched mountain range from north to south. Miewar was not supposed to be a large continent, so I gave it a long stretched shape. To further decrease the liveability of Miewar I decided to make a set of large rivers flowing from the northeast to the southwest. Because of this the lower parts of the rivers would stilly be frozen in spring when the upper parts would started flowing again. Thus most of the riverland would turn into a huge swamp. This in an analogy to the rivers in Siberia.
Part 6 : Eytwar & Shokeim (January 2010)
After some months of reconstructing my website for easier and better maintenance, creating a second design and working on some background, I got up to setting up the next continent, named Eytwar. I had already been fumbling with it a bit, but I dit not get to much concrete yet. This changed when another idea I had for the geofiction project sort of got cancelled as it was not required anymore. Automatically I decided to transfer the idea to Cancon where it would obviously be part of Eytwar, a continent I had only named and located as an island continent west of Ebewar, lying south of the equator. Further west of Eytwar I envisioned Shokeim, which would be a collection of large islands which in itself were too small to be named a continent and for that reason were not given the -war suffix, although one could dub it Showar as I did with Indussu. Although I had an idea of the outline, no inspiration did come up to actually draw the map.
Besides Eytwar and Shokeim I also had some ideas on how to fill in North-Ebewar. North-Ebewar is its own subcontinent next to South-Ebewar. North-Ebewar encompassed the already mapped regions of Thaon, Liyagar, Lukayar and Haoz. I decided to name the northern subcontinent Arieal, while the southern subcontinent would carry the name Beo Chjad. In a sense this is a sort of benediction, as these two names were already very old, but I never could make up my mind to where to put them. Now they are part again of where they belong.
Part 7 : North-Ebewar: East-Arieal and Deinaegea (May 2010)
Once I had things in my hand it only needed some time to get to fruition. Shokeim I had left to rest, but filling in existing continents always motivated me more. After a lengthy break of several months I finally drew my concept for North-Ebewar, including the long desired Niarinna Sea which forms the heart of North-Ebewar. Only the eastern half of Arieal was drawn in the end, but this would be the greater half. The eastern subcontinent I have subsequently called Deinaegea after some musings so that it would be in concert with Arieal and Beo Chjad. I like that sort of thing. I had already planned a large part of Arieal to be plains populated with violent nomadic peoples. Only on the western coast a number of small kingdoms would exist. A sudden idea made me decide to found nations in the north of Arieal. Vhildenia would be it's center and some smaller nations would lie to the west of it. These are very cold and harsh land, but with short summers warm enough to grow crops. I was not sure how feasible these nations would be, but as I am no expert I allow myself some freedom in my imagination.
Part 8 : Sequewar & West-Arieal (August-September 2010)
After finishing my vacation and some sickness my creativity surged again. I took the remainder of my Gymiot-Kitykki project (created in 2001 and active until 2006) which was virtually dead as it was part of an interaction project that ended and the country itself was too tiny for much more development. I still had a lot of material and I decided this would form the basis of Sequewar. Sequewar would lie west of Ebewar and north to Eytwar. When I drew it Sequewar happened to be connected to West-Arieal in the north so that it's almost another subcontinent of Ebewar. To make a clearer break from Ebewar and also encompassing the position of Eytwar I decided that Eytwar had originally been the southern half of Sequewar but had broken of millions of years ago and is drifting to the south. Subsequently there had to be connections between ancient Eytwar and Sequewar and from that I created new races. Until that point I had only three main races, the Chui, Orai and Segai. Now I added the Sykic of Sequewar and a number of new half-races.
When I had fitted the new maps to the global map I felt I was getting close to being done. Not that the world of Cancon was finished, but that I had come to a point where the things I had in mind have blossomed and come to a closure. What still remained was Shokeim and Coum, a nation on a small continent far to the northeast of Ebewar. That one certainly wouldn't be a possible subcontinent. I decided to call this continent Daome, or Daowar if one looked from the dominant Segai viewpoint. I also had some leftover material of what remained of Sequewar after filling in the map, so that might help giving it a bit more variation. Either way, one can never tell where the expansion of Cancon would continue. One thing I did had to take into account was the size of Cancon I had defined. I needed to calculate the size of my current map to see how much was still left. As I had defined the diameter of Cancon to be 11.300 kilometer (equivalent to the kilometer of Earth), I just needed to multiply it with Pi to find the circumference. This would be 35.500 km. As I have defined the scale of my maps as 1 pixel equal to 4 kilometer and 25 pixels equal to 1 degree, it meant the current map had a size of 18.064 by 11.860 kilometer. This meant I had 17.500 kilometer left of Cancon to be drawn, which is almost half of the globe. Plenty of space still.
Part 9 : North-Ebewar: Deinaegea (December 2010)
I've been a bit unhappy with Deinaegea sinc I created it. As a subcontinent it is bit boring, just one long rectangular (mostly) shape with a mountainous geography. It did basically conform to my intent but it lacked something. So I decided to add a few large islands on the east coast which was mainly the part that felt weakest. I made some other small tweaks to the website and changed some details but this time I didn't do as much work as I usually did.
Part 10 : Daome (March 2011)
Cancon has really been turning into a long-term project, almost 2 years now, but I've been more busy with adding additional stuff than going further into details. At a certain point I do have to get on with that. The material on the website is not very substantial. Only two parts have been on my mind. These have been Shokeim and Daome. As usual it is up to my inspiration. Inspiration hit me first with Daome, which is the most distant continent in my collection. That is, in the northeast, far to the east of Deinaegea so it can't be reached from there by ship. However, it should be reachable from the outer reaches of the maritime Setic Empire.
My original idea for the continent of Daome was it to be somewhat cold, similar sized to Sequewar and without a more regular coastline so that it would be a big mass of land. I also intended it to have little relief and mostly smaller mountains and hills, maybe some lakes, with a large dominant nation called Coum. When my inspiration came I decided to do things a bit differently. I am not sure what made me decide it. Perhaps it was The Way Of Kings by Brandon Sanderson or Marune by Jack Vance. The latter seems more obvious although the first would make me keep things more closer together. What I basically decided to do was to shatter the continent. Thus I created a number of large islands with fairly regular shapes and most would be rather flat. Good harbors would be few. The north, which would be the real mainland, would get some mountain ranges, although relatively small and not too high. Around the large islands quickly a large range of small islands followed. Coum would be the center and a number of small nations and city states would lie around it. I was unhappy with my first try. The mainland felt unnatural and the large islands too many and too small. I thought a few days about it and tried again. The second try was right. Now that I had the map, filling it in came quickly. I gathered all my remaining leftover ideas for nations from the brainstorming sessions of the previous continents and combined them. As such I was now pretty much devoid of leftover nations. About everything has been fitted in. Only Shokeim was left.
