I’ve recently started working on mapping the Beyond Frontiers universe, and I’ve decided to chronicle the process, for my own benefit, and perhaps for the benefit of anyone else who may go through the same process.

The biggest challenge with beginning this process was that I didn’t want just a random universe. Since Beyond Frontiers is really based around Earth, I wanted to create a semi-realistic universe based on real stars. I say semi-realistic because mapping a 3-D world in 2-D can’t be completely realistic. Honestly, not many people want to worry about calculating 3-D distances when you are gaming, and creating 3-D maps is difficult at best.

So instead I decided to try to map real stars using current scientific data on their locations, and flattening the map to fit in a nice, happy, 2-D container. This was easier said than done. Getting the data for a good chunk of stars, say in about a 150 ly radius, proved to be a much bigger task than I had anticipated.