While most of us use Google Maps and GPS on a daily basis, it’s pretty rare to find real fans of cartography, the study and practice of making and using maps. If you were ever into geography or history as a kid, the chances are you’re not much of a map person.
A Zac piece got me looking at maps and thinking about how maps help tell stories and suggest adventure. A good map Suggests places to check out. Springboards for adventure. Also good toys for the DM. the above map looks pretty complete and you could have a few years in game time getting to know the place. I could see five or six sessions from this map easily. A instant sandbox. Dunno where i stole it but i could just slap a few games here on they fly with tables and recycled stuff. I could run a game on the fly with tables and try to act to players curiosity. I could plant some canned adventures (PDF) off the net. Or steal something from a old fantasy novel or film (preferably something obscure. It might be fun for some players to know it (like happens in cthulhu constantly). In my Psychon game I have been trying to run Anomalous Sub surface environment as a region on Psychon. I have basic setting notes but lost all dungeon stuff. Got maps and weird new monsters. Players really got into maps. Players were getting over mt rendon after gate house and morlocks. Party argued if they should go back to that tower they killed a wizard at and a character stayed on to be the new wizard. Others said whats this livid fens and the strange lake and the ruins. I teased them there could be a paddle steamer casino wreck nearby from the ancients. But rumour that someone had seen the medstation doors open the morning after the mountain and they were off. Med station = drugs.So i made up a medical station complex kinda like you might find in fall out. I hope to find my proper published adventure dungeon but players like it when i bullshit games on te fly and expect a fair amount of freedom. but all his comes from what a good map inspires. looking at some good maps and ways of adding text and narrative with border art and features i think most big settings try and offer you a world with lots of choices - in my history games people took a years to get from India to the pillars of Heracles - or from Greenland to Byzantium. perhaps you don't really need to do whole world just on trade routes and focus locations. Or just major routes, cities and interesting locations. Two or three different scales add a lot to landscape. I really like pictorial exaggeration of feature on maps. Size of the city equals importance. Whats that cave. Whats that ruin. Mutant epoch calls adventurers excavators and refer to archeology, not just looters. In a fanasy game you are often plundering tho remains of past wealth and hoping to find loot. If you good you might rather find that relic a guy in the pub said was there. I like borders that are ornate an not just repeated. Realm of Chaos has the best ever. I kinda over the parchment look and find in long run harder to read and find stuff. I like clean textbook for some maps (like DM maps). And fancier for setting and player maps. I like old almanacs and vintage maps with info graphics in borders. Timelines Mountain heights, River lengths, Towns by size Heraldry borders Pictures of important people Pictures of haunted places Pictures of lost relics Crops and calender scenes Industry and workers Famous battles and soldiers kit Local hats and dress - the wrong hat could got you killed for lots of history Local animals on farm or wild If i drew it it would all be adorable retarded octopi Im thinking in future on Planet Psychon - players leave map hex and see bizarre unfinished terrain like leaving fallout map in a computer game when you mod game to leave the normal permitted play area. Vids on this on youtube. I did a barrier table for the edge of hexes on psychon that the gods use to keep people apart. Maybe a d100 weird hexes and some other weird places for psychon. Failed hexes, disaster or apocalypse hexes. Getting in mindset of tech and superheroics again after seeing Daredevil, BMvsSM and deadpull. And i liked them all. Seamonsters and octopi and shipwrecks on a seam map are a must. Mysterious forests. Sinister plains. Suggesting a few tables too with Adjective+terrain. Narnia and Middle Earth are of course classics, Historic maps can be stolen and re purposed. Sometimes the vagueness can be useful and give you more freedom. Give wild rumours of what distant people are like. Then make it nothing like that when you get there. Medieval people believed dogmen and the kingdom of prester john was somewhere on he way to china or india. This Noah's Ark world map would be great for players. Pretty useless. Cities look good. Is that a dragon? Id use this in a lost world or for serpent men citadel. (Monster Age I mention in my setting history inspired by zeb cooks forbidden city intro and clark ashton smith. Seven ruled each with a cohort/slave race. Seven rebel races ended them. This might make a good dugeon zone type. This looks like a good ready made posh ruin Some maps make you think of plans of attack, or who lived here and what they did, A pretty amazing city has a good amount of information for a lot of purposes. Fortress inspired designs could be use for dungeons too. With magical fire blasting and flying fantasy things dungeons would be logical fortresses. Star shaped post castle fors of gunpowder era were prety amazing. Fireballs in place of cannons these shapes might be better than castle. Many have towns inside or cities. Some places grow more organically like cells and might even follow old animal trails, Its good if you find a settlement area or hotel map or deckplan that suits your needs. So much easier to just use stuff from online. I run old dnd clone games as gamer intro sessions and teach that there is a mountain of stuff online for free. Better than buying a hundred bucks of games if you only play a few times. Kids shoould be able to make this a frgal hobby not just adiction to cofeee table books. Bury some ancient map from a historic culture presto a dungeon with cultural style Spies SF Superheroes Post Apoc all have free public maps ans interesting locations I might do again I'm starting to sort comics collection and will sell some old stuff. Will get a new computer for travel then a scanner and start digitizing my 40 litres of old note books ans another pile of gamer notes going back to 80s so then will see that here. Some nice links https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVZjHH_jGNbTd5Y4e2ZENOtfArA4aOcIXT-Chor8hyphenhyphenAmUZWC8wUMj3LXKCcfrV4k1ldq8c_208Q7x1F8Cbf37KcgH1O0AGk0eKxVaejaok-tFSkhONr72eK8ktpSbtXOUQKy9KczlwO88l/s640/dave-stevenson-huntress-map.jpg http://www.cartographersguild.com/ http://time-for-maps.tumblr.com/ http://bensack.tumblr.com/post/94664497875/hieroglyph-v https://www.pinterest.com/kitikatti/maps/ nice lot of map tangents under this pic https://www.pinterest.com/pin/570549846518808859/ Dont forget my flickr stuff and my tectonic dungeons https://www.flickr.com/photos/konsumterra/albums/72157631656547261
Eduard Imhof (1895 - 1986) was a professor of cartography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich, from 1925 to 1965. His studies on relief shading were revolutionary: all the editions of the Schweizerischer Mittelschulatlas, and the Schweizerischer Sekundarschulatlas, the atlases...
For many of us, cartography day in geography or history class meant a quick nap. With our eyes open, we’d dream of all the delicious stuff we were gonna eat after school, of music we’d play on the Walkman, of a message we received the other day from that cutie…
The Trove digital service has been releasing some of the more quirky old maps of Australia, starting with a graphic dividing the country up into the sheep haves and have-nots.
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Dark age history, early mediaeval period, Mac Erca, Muircertach Mac Erca, Ireland, british history, saxons, franks, picts, Scots.
I’ve drawn up a few “how to” infographics during 2013, and a couple of them went viral out on the wild world of the interwebz. The first one also appears in a modified form in the…
Our list of the best medieval maps - ten maps created between the 6th and 16th centuries, which offer unique views into how medieval people saw their world.
Whenever I crack open a book and find a map, I know I’m in for an adventure. Plus, maps in books are incredibly helpful since they lay out fictional, imaginary worlds in a way that makes the story clearer for directionally-challenged people like me. I can’t read a real map to save my life, but in books, […]
Did you know that Swedish has more in common with Hindi than it does with Finnish?
The United Kingdom is a nation in north-western Europe, including the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, small islands and fourteen overseas territories, the last pieces of the British Empire, which included approximately a 1/4 of the world's landmass at its height
Educational diagrams of scientific discoveries, from the moon's surface to the longest rivers.
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I'm a fairly good artist, but I know not everyone is like me. Even I'm not that good at one of the most important parts of writin...
"Whoa." - You, after reading this post.
An amazing mix of genetics and history.
“Super cool map of #Asian languages:”
The Battle of Penn Hill was fought in AD 665 between a British and an Anglo-Saxon coalition at Penn Hill in northern Dumnonia, the precise location of which is unknown. It resulted in a decisive British victory, and reversed the Saxon expansion westwards across Albion. Germanic migrants, mainly from the Angle, Saxon and Jutish tribes, began arriving on the east coast of Albion in the mid-5th century, during the chaos following the Roman withdrawal from the provinces of Britannia. They quickly pe
This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Reddit user: bezzleford Related maps:
For background see: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2010/11/celestial-mechanics.html
#Map: Predominant Ethnic Groups in Europe http://t.co/yPJNlT5Ys6 #Slavs #Franks #Celts
The following map shows the language families of Europe (distinguished by colour) and languages within those families. Note that the terms
While most of us use Google Maps and GPS on a daily basis, it’s pretty rare to find real fans of cartography, the study and practice of making and using maps. If you were ever into geography or history as a kid, the chances are you’re not much of a map person.
