Skeleton Architecture

I love me a book with a map at the front.   I love reading, and I especially love fantasy stories because you can get really into the telling of tales, without all the faffing around with fact-checking.  I read plenty of stories that are in the real world too (I'm reading the incredibly good story 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' by Kate Atkinson at the moment, and would highly recommend it), but it really annoys me when you get too much focus on where something is happening, and of course, all places have a lot of baggage both in the writer's, and our own imaginations.  I find Ian Rankin particularly maddening on this front.  Edinburgh is a bigger character in his books than is Rebus. Creating a made-up place enables the writer to create their own place-baggage, and also to create religion, social mores, societal structures and so on and so on and so on. All books need research, but the nature of fantasy books is different - the writer creates a world, and al