Thinking Big about Guild maps

[NeonKnight]

I agree with Torq. I would rather a comprised world map of a fantasy world to mapped with a variety of styles. Looking at past historical maps from Earth, they did not all have the same style to them, thus we had things like the Mercator Style, the John Speed Style, and other incongruous styles.

Even the Forgotten Realm Atlas had a few different styles of maps within it.

[Redrobes]

I am in agreement in that the style should be loose. People comment on my maps for using pen and ink + photos + 3D renders all together. The problem comes if one map of a region has very sparse small villages with a kind of frontier rustic feel and then a new megaplex of high magic is placed down in the middle as a city. It would feel absurd if there were no limitations.

You kinda want what the wikipedia has with its discussion forums. You discuss the changes, and in our case, new maps, before going ahead with one so that there is some overall acceptance of the idea. Actually we should take some pointers from the bigger collaborative web sites out there as, no doubt, they have been through all of this before.

[ravells]

Here's an off the cuff idea. Generate a random planet using FT, and superimpose state bounderies on top of it. People can take ownership of a state and start mapping it, giving it labels and names etc. I guess the useful thing about using FT would be that you could get it to generate climate / rainfall /altitude and scale data so that the mapper would have something to start with.

I'm not quite sure what you would do with it afterwards.

[GlennZilla]

I was just musing on Spelljammer with a folks in my gaming group. It gives me the idea that we could make the "world" a kind of interdiemensional network of connected worlds. No need for everything to connect geographicaly if we agree to use some kind of portal to jump to other worlds. The idea of Crystal Spheres and Spelljamming not required.

This would allow for wide variation in styles and map content as well as keep everything usable as one large setting.

[ravells]

I just had a look at CeBeGia on the CBG forums, it looks like it's still in the discussion stage. And this is one of the problems (IMO) of worldbuilding by committee - the pace of actually doing anything is very slow because there are so many views to consider. If this is to just be a mapping project, then we could just start mapping (after being given a very rough overview map to work with drawn by one person (cough..Torq..cough) and some other sundry details. I think the act of mapping the world will start to give it a character of its own, as people will be able to feed off the information from other people's maps.

[Torq]

I agree with the Fractal Terrains idea. Or some other worldmap generator that could provide basic geographical, heightfield and climate info, around which we can build. Glennzilla, the Spelljammer paradigm might be a little too fragmented. It might have the effect of creating 100 different mapping projects with little or no need for collaberation, instead of one common mapping project.

Other than a basic world map (which I'm not really qualified to do Ravs), what else would be necessary to start? Maybe a general consensus as to type of world, genre, brief history, broad cultural grouping, what else?

Torq

[ravells]

I was thinking basic D&Desque fantasy as the genre most of us draw maps of. Apart from that do we need anything else? It would be quite good fun just to throw the project out there and see what people make of it. As people map their own bits, presumably they will see what others have done and try to interlock their maps with what is already there while adding their own stuff. If it doesn't work we can learn lessons for the next time, I guess. I'm just curious to see how the project would coalesce if everyone had a free hand and mapped with half an eye on the WIP of other people.

Torq, if you don't have FT, I'm quite happy to generate a map with it and draw some random borders on it so people have can 'claim' a territory and make a start. If there's a reasonable amount of interest we could ask Arcana to open a subforum for the project.

I think the important thing is to just do it and learn as we go along rather than trying to anticipate problems in advance (I know, I know, we're both lawyers, and this approach is anathema to how we're trained to think!).

[Redrobes]

If people all map different and separate regions then theres no incentive to be in any particular region. For me the interest is in having an area mapped more fully than we could do so alone. Gamerprinter said that he would be reluctant to engage in vanilla worlds (areas). Whats required is to get one area up to the point where you can set a campaign in that place and have the incentive to map extra stuff for it, push back the borders, add characters and get story into it. Once your story is driving the mapping then its a breeze.

Its like populating a wilderness with people, you cant put down twenty individuals sparsely across the land. They will all die. You need a village and when its large enough a few of them venture out and start a new area. You gotta feel like your progressing and making something worthwhile. As soon as it feels like a chore or is so gargantuan that its scary is when people will desert the cause.

Maybe we should aim to make a single adventure. Then a single village / town then the area around that town with more adventures. Enough to sustain a few adventures and grow it out. The point here is that many people can come in and get a great deal out of it with little effort. Thats the kind of traction that would be needed to get people enthused to start or stay there.

[ravells]

Well that just sounds like a question of scale in that we just start with a smaller scale and work our way outwards. But what I'm not sure about is whether you're saying that we need to have a full brief for the adventures that take place in the area before we actually start mapping? I guess I was thinking more in terms of a 'vanilla' world (if I understand the meaning aright) in that each person maps and world-builds his particular bit and then people make adventures out of that, so the emphasis is that it is a mapping project and not one which requires adventure writing.

[RobA]

First time chiming in on this thread.

It almost sounds like what is needed is a "graphical wiki" where larger area maps are hot-linkable to more detailed maps, and so on... Or even like those map books of street maps where the NSEW pages "point" to the next map in that direction... Just being able to geolocate every map, providing the lat/long of each corner as well as the projection would go a long way to make this workable.

-Rob A>