Wednesday, March 09, 2011

some cool map details

Over on Wikipedia I found a cool map by Ortelius, one of the greats of cartography, showing the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts.  You can see the whole map in all its glory here.  I found two bits particularly interesting.


I love, love, love inset illos like this on maps.  Game cartographers take note!  I think the colorist dropped the ball on those bulls, as they're probably supposed to have bronze hooves and mouths and that smoke should look more fiery.  Those guy are almost certainly the kick-ass robo-bulls that Hephaestus made for King Aeetes.

That dragon is pretty wild.  Here's a close-up:


Head of a wildcat, wings of a bat, tail of a serpent, body of camel.  That's classic heraldry-based monster design right there!

The other detail I'm digging on is this tiny larger-scale map in the corner:


Lots of great stuff going on here:  If you didn't know better you might conclude that Evro and Pa were neighboring realms.  Conan the Barbarian comes from the land just north of the Immense Forest.  And Great Britain is call Peuceassa.  I don't think I've ever heard that one before.  I think Ortelius was Dutch, so maybe that's where the name comes from?

10 comments:

  1. Evro is the realm founded by the famed Evro from the B1 pre-gen fighter list. From rags to riches as they say.

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  2. "Peuceassa"... something to do with "puke"... sorry can't assembly semi-witty thoughts today.

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  3. If it has anything to do with this Peuce Island, some 1000 miles off, it is the worst map ever:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peuce_Island

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  4. Wow, I'm slow today. It took me far too long to make sense of that Evro Pa comment.

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  5. I also like that Evro appears to be a sweeping desert.

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  6. Hey... now that I say that it would be a pretty cool map for a Labyrinth Lord/Mutant Future game that takes place 3,000 years after the end of the world.

    Damn you blogger for not having an edit button!

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  7. I have a soft spot in my heart for visual depictions of the voyage of the Argos. In fact, my one and only tattoo is a stylization of a scene from the story that was depicted on a Greek seal in the 2nd or 3rd century BC.

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  8. Going into the details of the "modern" Cimmerians (also known as the Kimmerioi and, apparently, Cimmerii) and the Hyborian Age Cimmerians is a bit outside the bounds of a blog comment: we'll just say the modern Cimmerians are among the descendants of a mythical prehistoric ancestor tribe also called Cimmerians, and that Conan was one of the latter, not the former.

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  9. This is so my next campaign setting. Thanks for pointing this out/sharing the link, Jeff.

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  10. Carta Marina is one of my favorite maps. Lots of things going on in that map. :-)

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