Tuesday, July 12, 2011

even more stupid map tricks

I bet you didn't know that you can go from the Wilderlands to Greyhawk via Minaria. The map below almost sort of works, if you assume Rhombume (the pink realm at the bottom of Minaria map) is a peninsula and that the Waste of Va-Ka-Ka and the Land of Black Ice are somehow the same.


That's the Known World of Basic/Expert D&D tacked on to the bottom.  Since you have to go through the jungle or desert to get to it from Greyhawk, maybe it could serve as the Flanaess equivalent to the Kingdom of Prester John.

I think Ed of Esoteric Murmurs is right, the best explanation for this arrangement would be that they are all part of the setting of The Fantasy Trip, Cidri. The canonical description of Cidri suggests that it is a flat earth of vast size, but I prefer to imagine it as a hypersphere. That would give it a crapload more surface area than an ordinary planet, but it could still look like a sphere in 3 dimensional space and it could still orbit a star (sunrise and sunset over a large plane seems tricky to me).  But it would look radically weird from space, as whole new continents slide across the surface for days on end.

6 comments:

  1. Okay, that's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time!

    I understand nothing about the hybercube idea, but I like how "hypercube" sounds... :)

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  2. Side note on all of this map stuff: I think the five mile hexes for the Wilderlands comes from wanting to match the OD&D rules for movement with the published version. Not sure if Bledsaw's was actually leagues or not, but that's at least why the version everyone is familiar with uses miles.

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  3. Actually, Cidri is not a flat surface or a hypersphere. It is stated to be a planet in orbit around the Sun in its dimension in Earth's orbital path, as a substitute for earth. It simply is much larger than earth. I can double check how much larger when I get home (10,000 x the surface comes to mind which would mean 100 times earth's diameter) but with the same mass.

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  4. /goes and reads Al's comment to your last maps post

    Oh... never mind.

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  5. Canonically, there's no indication whether Cidri is a "flat earth" or just a really big planet, or even a ring world... I prefer to think of it as a hollow sphere one earth-diameter thick.

    Here's what TFT says about the size: "Cidri is BIG. No complete map of its surface is known. The standard work, compiled two hundred years ago by the Imperial College of Cartographers at Predimuskity, shows 48 continents (defined as land masses of over 5,000,000 square km.); five of these are in excess of 60,000,000 square km. Almost half the known surface of Cidri is covered with water; most of its seas are dotted with islands. Yet even the great Book of Maps lists nine hundred and eleven locations which cannot be found within the known area - including the mountain city of Paska-Dal, which (by Gate) has carried on commerce with gem merchants everywhere for at least four hundred years."

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  6. Ok, we know that Tekumel is in your Glittering Vast (Asteroid 18) but where's Arduin on that map?

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