Worldbuilding Project : Day Eight - Economics and Politics
Once again the quoted text comes from 30 Days of World-Building by Stephanie Bryant.

Day Eight - Economics and Politics

Just as you examined your timeline for events and pressures,now examine your map for resources and deficits. For five minutes, make a few notes on the map to mark places that have more of a type of resource, and jot down anywhere that has a definite deficit of something needed. Also check your timeline; some of your pressure-point conflicts in the last 100 years may have resulted from an unexpected increase or decrease in the resources of one area or another.

When you're done with the resources, take another ten minutes and identify which major groups in your civilizations care about which resources. These factions may appear in your story-- they may be opposing the hero(es), or even helping the villain, or they might help the hero or at least get out of the way, depending on how each faction perceives and responds to the various characters in your story. If you are aiming for a political story, you'll want to flesh this out with descriptions of how the factions perceive each other as well as the hero and villain, key people in the factions, and their tactics in dealing with others. Again, feel free to label these with generic names for now; language is coming soon!

The North-Western region is in many ways like Western Europe. It has good resources including arable land, timber, iron, copper, tin and other ores, peat, coal, oil, livestock, salt and plenty of fresh water resources. Obviously the resources are not evenly spread but nor is any simgle region obviously rich in all of them. This is one of the things that has led to the extensive trade networks that led to the treaty mentioned yesterday.

The non-human antagonists in the north want access to some of the natural resources they lack and for various reasons aren't willing to trade. This is why they are building up to attack the human states and why the human states are more inclined to trade with each other than fight over resources. The Bugbear on you doorstep makes infighting seem counterproductive. Which is not to say there isn't tension and tradewars.

The Desert region is interesting.

The Mountain People have plenty of water, mineral and timber wealth but a limited amount of agricultural land due to being limited to the passes. What land they do have tends to be fertile and productive though and they've learned to make floating gardens (idea based on the Aztec Chinampas) on lakes to increase food production. They also don't have easy access to salt for preserving food.

The Desert Nomads don't have agricultural land obviously but they do control virtually all of the oases in their territory and have livestock. Their primary trade items are cloth and meat. These are possibly the least defined of the groups in the desert area at the moment. I'm currently researching nomads on Earth to get more ideas.

The Coastal People have the most unusual resource spread. Their entire food supply is based on halophytic plants, seaweed, fish, crustations etc and livestock that graze on the mangroves and other halophytes they grow. They do have access to fresh water (from the few rivers that reach the sea from the mountains and also via extraction from salt-excluding halophytes) obviously but they don't use it for agricultural purposes. They also produce lots of salt via evaporation. They also harvest pearls and coral and have the silk-spiders I mentioned yesterday. They don't have access to metal ores or much stone (they tend to build in clay bricks). Metal is important to them both gold and silver for jewellery, and bronze and iron for tools and weapons. It's so important to them that they are considering attacking the Mountain People to get access to the mines. Only the fact the Mountain People have access to better weaponary is stopping them so far.

Well that's all sketchy so far but it's a start. I think I need to be careful with the Coastal People though. I love them entirely too much.