Stranger Than Fiction: Fun With Maps

Hello all, and welcome to the first installment of an ongoing series I've decided to call Stranger than Fiction! As I've mentioned before, looking back to the past can provide a wealth of inspiration for the modern elfgamer, because modern fantasy has become so calcified that it allows the old to seem new again. Now there are still cases where modern conceptions make accurate stuff seem fake, but by and large human history is a gold mine for inspiration. In cooperation with Prismatic Wasteland's ongoing Map Bandwagon, I decided to share some ways that historically, maps could be a bit funky, and how we as gamers could latch onto that.

Hic Sunt Dracones

Something odd about the modern age is that a lot of us (particularly a lot of this blog's readership) have a device in our pockets that tells us exactly where we are at all times (especially if you have a data plan). This wasn't always the case; while people could navigate by roads or stars or rivers we didn't really have exhaustive maps of coastlines and mountain ranges. This meant that when making a map, people were limited by whatever information they had, and often had to settle for "Eh, good enough."

via Wikipedia, an 1883 reconstruction of a map by Erasthothenes. I love how Europe is just like "Eh, there's some kinda land there"

We as modern people tend to assume that all maps are, in some form or another, literally true, but there's no reason our elves and gnomes should toil under such delusions. Maybe a hexmap gets less and less accurate as you go North, with what people thought was there being replaced by what is actually there. Maybe people are wrong about the size of the world and accidentally find a whole new continent? Or at least a dragon or something. Dragons are cool.

Spiritually True

For a lot of practical purposes, however, a map doesn't need to be literal. Medieval T&O Maps work just fine assuming you're not planning international air travel from Brittany to Lebanon or what-have-you. And of course, the people making these maps input their own biases and their own culture into these works. 

via Wikipedia, the 1581 Bunting clover leaf map. Note how Jerusalem is the center of the world.

Sure something like the Bunting Map above looks silly to us today, but it's also true to how these people saw the world. Places are placed near each other, kind of. Europe, Asia, and Africa are all linked, and in the center is Jerusalem, which is true both in a spiritual sense (being a holy city to the people making this map) and in a practical sense (it's kind of the meeting point of the three continents), with America (probably Brazil), England, and so on all being apart in a sense. It also shows how little the mapmakers knew of sub-Saharan Africa. While this kind of map doesn't work for everyone, making one is an easy way to avoid fucking up the rivers.

Staking Your Claim

As modern people we tend to think of borders as something rigid and immutable, but that isn't always the case. Cicero famously quoted that the outgoing borders of the province of Macedonia were "those of swords and javelins" (ie how far Rome could exert military force). While borders naturally tend to focus on geographic regions (mountains, rivers, etc.), sometimes those swords and javelins can just stomp over those natural boundaries and declare it so. The colonies that would become the US had absurd territorial claims because, frankly, there wasn't really anyone with the power to challenge those claims. Limits on settlement that were imposed by the British thus inflamed the colonists because that was their land, goddamnit. After the war of independence, everyone collectively abandoned those claims to keep things equal-ish between the states, which is why the US map doesn't look like this:

As a proud Nutmegger, I'm still bitter we lost New Connecticut. I also love looooooooong North Carolina.

This is another way the history of a given world might affect the way the players explore with it. If the map is neat and clean, that probably means someone (likely an outside force) messed with it.

Look at all the straight lines on a map of modern Africa. This kind of thing doesn't happen on accident.

Layers of Time

When I was around a year old, my mom asked a lady for directions from one town to another. She doesn't remember most of what the woman said, but does remember that she was told to take a left "Where the old tobacco barn burnt down." There was nothing currently at the site, the woman just assumed that my mom had the same memory map of the town in her head. 

As time passes, the world changes, but things live on in our heads and our hearts. I'll probably forever remember my local punk bar Hi-Tone as being "Down the street from Black Lodge" even though Black Lodge has been closed for over a year, because I went to Black Lodge first. Even when something inevitably fills the lot that it used to be in, I'll still remember it was where Black Lodge used to be because it was the first place that I ever went out as Liz, and that makes it special.

Fuck I miss Black Lodge.

Anyway, relevant to this is that (like inaccuracies discussed up above) maps might be out of date, or people's references (especially for, say, Elves that live a few hundred years) might not make sense to someone in the present day. It's like that old joke my dad once told me:

"You know, I was a lumberjack in the Sahara Forest."

"You mean the Sahara Desert?'

"Well that's what they call it now."

Projecting

Unless your worldmap is a literal flat plane (in which case more power to you), there are always going to be inaccuracies when trying to map a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional space. What inaccuracies a culture accepts or does not accept can say a lot about it, and potentially tell you or your players more about the world than just the actual shape of the landmasses. This is kinda hard to show in just words, so I've borrowed a few modern maps of Earth to show what I'm talking about:

The Mercator Projection famously makes Greenland appear to be the size of Africa, which might be why our dipshit President is trying to invade it.

The United Nations flag treats the arctic as the center, which is great for international unity but bad for any sort of practical purpose.

This projection of Super Earth from the opening cutscene of Helldivers 2 tells us a lot about the state of the world, from the ecological damage Earth has sustained (the British Isles are gone and the Mediterranean filled in) to the fact that it centers on Sweden.

Conclusion

Rather than treat maps as objective things, it can be really interesting to treat them as what they are: documents made by people, with all the fallibility that that implies. When putting a map together for your game, here are a few fun things to think about:

• What is considered the chief cardinal direction? Assuming your world has compasses that align to the poles, that gives a 50/50 chance of saying compasses point either North or South.
• What do the people making the map consider to be important? This can be cities, but it could also be another site of great significance. What do they ignore, or not even know about?
• What stuff is worth putting on the map? In a world before the printing press, someone has to make every map by hand, and not every detail is gonna survive that process.