The questions were all about the back-story of the world. What the PCs do to it is a different ballgame. The one thing that I always admired about Tolkein's work is he built a history of races then figured out how it would interact with everything else (languages, societal structures, etc).

This is about figuring out who lives next to who, where the roads would go, which races would have migrated to ensure that nice physical boundaries are between them and their enemies.

Example: Orcs came from Goblins and were driven out/exiled as freaks, therefore the Orcs were banished to the far side of river X into the deeper jungle.

Example: Humans had a long standing war with dwarves over mineral resources, consequently there are a number of heavily fortified towns on both sides of the war with few roads between the civilisations and good roads within each civilisation.


So your world history must shape your map and if there isn't a heap of detailed history, personally I'd be asking for it. In general for my own work is it is "rough map first, history second, final map".