My original map had the world laid-out in a ring of islands orbiting around the sun (actually a fire elemental node). This was how I wanted it, as I had envisioned the world breaking and its chunks settling into a plane of asteroid-like islands orbiting the sun. I liked the visuals of this layout but it posed some problems. First, how would say and night work? If the islands are all orbiting the sun there would be no day/night cycle; only perpetual day/night depending on which side of the island faced the sun. I thought about having the individual islands rotate on their own axis, but that would make the day/night cycle vary by island and it was too much work to figure all of that out.
Second, if in a ring, the three primary nations would have to be positioned linearly, meaning one would be caught between the other two & that's not how I wanted it to work. I wanted all three nations within reach of each other.
And the last major problem was that it provided shortcuts to the region that I wanted to leave as inaccessible and mysterious. So I needed a better layout that would prevent easy excursions to that part of the world.
So the solution to these issues that I came up with is to keep the remnants of the world in a sphere instead of a ring, and to have the sun orbit the world rather than the world orbiting the sun. The idea is that the devastation that broke the world didn't spread the remains out, rather it sort of unglued the pieces so that the world just broke apart into chunks and drifted outward from the center, expanding outwardly but retaining its spherical shape. The sphere is bisected into hemispheres by the Dark Nebula, to prevent easy access to the other side. Since the sun orbits world, the islands wouldn't need to spin, so I could keep the day/night cycle mostly normal and consistent. I could also lay out the nations in a non-linear manner, allowing for there to be territories claimed and contested between the three nations.
So, that's the plan. I'm working on drawing out the map now, which is presenting new challenges, such as now I have a 3D sphere to map out instead of a 2D plane, but I can work with that. So far I'm happy with the redesign. Just goes to show how you can shelf a project and let new ideas incubate until they are ready to hatch.
