Mystara

17 February 2018

Lining Up Mystara Revisited

Atlas of Mystara, Mystara, planet renders, world maps 6

Introduction

At around this time two years ago, I finished my Lining Up Mystara project, winding up 11 years of attempts to reconcile all of Mystara’s officially published maps into a single, cohesive whole.

The project ended with a precise 3D model of the world, with dimensions for the Outer World, the Hollow World, and the polar openings all locked in.

Fast forward two years, and I finally found time to begin codifying the results of the project, beginning with a series of world maps along with continental maps done in 72 miles per hex. Everything seemed to be going well, and all of these maps were progressing well.

Then a bombshell hit when I came across Lance Duncan’s Mystara Web Map project from last year. Together with criticism for faulty assumptions and geographical inaccuracy in my project (ouch), Lance joined the dots between Mystara’s inspiration in a map of Jurassic Earth and the projection of the Master Set’s world map. He argued that since the Jurassic map was drawn in the Mollweide projection, Mystara’s map was also in that projection.

At first I argued against this idea, on the basis that just because Mystara was inspired by ancient Earth (something that has been widely known for many years) doesn’t mean that it must be treated in the same way, and that the original designers likely had little or no knowledge of projections. Furthermore, Lance favoured following the Immortal Set notion that Mystara was ancient Earth, and therefore was the same size and scale. This is highly problematic, since it would mean reinterpreting the scale of the hex maps.

However, while all of these points are quite valid, they’re actually also irrelevant — at least as far as projection is concerned. This was made crystal clear to me when Lance posted some test pictures of Jurassic Earth-based Mystara (which I like to call “Jurassic Mystara”) on a globe. (You can view the Facebook posts here if they are not appearing embedded below.)

It comes down to this: regardless of the intentions of Mystara’s original designers, the shapes of the continents are based on a Mollweide projection map. It therefore follows that those shapes will only look “right” on the globe if they are handled in that projection. (Scale is a separate issue.)

Comparison

It’s very easy to check the veracity of this, simply by placing both my Lining Up Mystara model (which I now refer to as my 2016 model) and the Jurassic Mystara model onto the globe and comparing. (I used a standard globe rather than my 3D Mystara model in the interest of simplicity.)

To sum up: while the shape of Skothar may take some getting used to, Brun undeniably looks far better on Jurassic Mystara’s globe. What’s more, Davania is the huge continent we’ve always expected it to be. Overall, the continents are as large as you would expect them to be given their real-world analogues: Brun is composed of North and Central America; Skothar is made up of parts of Europe and Asia, with the rest of Europe in between, the Isle of Dawn being Britain and Ireland and Alphatia being Scandinavia; and Davania is South America, Africa, Antarctica, India, and Australia.

On the other hand, my 2016 model’s continents universally suffer from pinched poles, due to the erroneous use of Equirectangular projection. This was something that I noted back in 2016 that still needed to be fixed, but it goes further than that, affecting far lower latitudes than I had at first thought. Brun’s northern parts look squashed, while Davania’s Vulcanian Peninsula is rather small. Skothar’s Nentsun Peninsula is squashed into oblivion.

The conclusion?

I was wrong.

The Master Set world map is without a doubt a Mollweide projection map. It is not an Equirectangular projection.

It’s easy to see this in hindsight now. I’m sure I should have realised earlier, because I’m quite familiar with the concept that the Equirectangular projection does not show the “true” shapes as you will see them on a globe. I’ve even written a tutorial on how to avoid this very issue. But I guess I was too close to the project to realise this myself.

Revisiting the 2016 Model

The inevitable consequence of these revelations is that I must revisit the results of my Lining Up project and revise my model to reflect the proper shapes of the continents.

While this may at first seem like a setback, on the contrary I view it as a massive step forward. After all, I’ve been searching for the proper projection for Mystara for years; my first assumption was wrong, but that does nothing to take away from my excitement at finally knowing the correct projection.

Make no mistake, this is a wonderful thing. It means that in fact not only the world map but also all of the hex maps have been mapped to a proper projection all along.

However, there are problems. Hey, it wouldn’t be Mystara if we didn’t have problems to work through, would it?

The main issues are:

Latitude — Jurassic Mystara places the Known World coastline further south than any of our previous models. Thyatis is at about 25°N. Moreover, the northern parts of Brun are also further south, with Farend coming at 51ºN. This compared to official figures of 30ºN and 60ºN respectively, which we were able to achieve in my 2016 model.
Size — scaling by the hex maps, Jurassic Mystara is over 36,000 miles in circumference. If this problem sounds familiar, that’s because we already dealt with it two years ago in my last project.
Projection — now that we know that the official maps are mapped to the Mollweide projection, it’s possible to georegister all of the official hex maps. Whereas before we had thought they ignored projections entirely, and therefore defaulted to Equirectangular, in fact that was not the case. The trouble now, however, is that moving the continents around on the globe — as we may want to do to fix the latitude issues — may result in breaking this connection. In other words, if we change the configuration of the world to fix latitudes, it may require all the hex maps to be redone.

In this new series of articles, I’m going to work through these problems, with the ultimate goal of creating a hybrid 2018 model of Mystara that incorporates Jurassic Mystara’s shapes into my 2016 model.

One last thing: if you’re worried that this will delay the 72 mile per hex continental maps, you can relax, as I still intend to finish all three of these maps. Eventually I will likely need to create updated versions, but I feel it’s definitely worth finishing these three maps now.

Do you have any comments or suggestions? Please feel free to chip in below!

One last word…

If you enjoy my maps and would like to see more of them, you may be interested to check out my Patreon.

Thank you for all of your support!

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Jurassic Earth from Continents in Collision

5 February 2018

Jurassic Earth as Mystara

Atlas of Mystara, Mystara, world maps 18

About thirty years ago, my father bought two wonderful sets of books about the Earth. Along with our world atlases, I adored these books. (There are definite advantages to having your father be a scientist.) I loved to read about the solar system, gemstones, ice ages, earthquakes and volcanoes. But my absolute favourite were those that told about plate tectonics, and showed what the earth used to look like. I took these books aside, and kept them close on my own bookshelf.

The Voyage Through the Universe series of books from Time Life

Mystara fans will likely know why I was so interested in plate tectonics: one of the maps bore a striking resemblance to our favourite game world — so much so that it was obviously the inspiration behind Mystara’s world map.

Over the years, I tried to find the map online, but without success. Not for any lack of paleogeographic maps of the Earth, but rather because these maps have evolved quickly and drastically over the years, as the scientists who draw them incorporate new data and new techniques. Many maps came close, but none fit as well as the one I remembered.

Fast forward to the present, and I came across a series of articles by Lance Duncan last week, in which he reconstructed Mystara’s world map based on a similar map of ancient Earth (below).

This map is pretty close, but the isobars and rainfall data somewhat obscure the coastlines — it’s clearly not the exact map we’re looking for. It reminded me of my search, though, as well as alerting me to the possibility of finding it online in a scientific journal. Sure enough, searches brought up more maps similar to this one, but again none were quite right.

It’s at this point that I remembered the books. I asked my father to look for The Third Planet from the Voyage Through the Universe series. He found all the other books, but not the one I was looking for. It seems I had placed it in the proverbial “safe place”.

But surely, I thought, someone else would have these books, and be able to check. So I posted to Facebook (click here if the post is not appearing below):

Most crucially, I shared this post to the Mystara Reborn Facebook group. No one had the book at hand, but Richard Balsley suggested that it was Continents in Collision, a book in another Time Life series, Planet Earth, that had the maps in it. Again I asked my father, but it was not to be found.

The Planet Earth series of books from Time Life

Then a few days later Andrew Durston not only said he had the book — he even provided a scan of the page in question.

And there it was — the map that in all likelihood inspired Mystara!

It’s captioned as 135 million years ago, although it bears much more resemblance to the present paleogeographic maps showing Earth 150 million years ago.

Look closely and you will see that all of the major land masses are there, and they are largely the same as Mystara’s world map, which was provided in the Master Rules Set. There are a number of minor differences, but the resemblance is undeniable — even the mountains are in roughly the same places.

Continents in Collision was printed in 1983. (Google Books and Amazon.com both list 1st January 1983 as the publication date, although this may simply mean that the date is unknown.) The Master Set was released in 1985, but the Companion Rules Set as well as CM1 Test of the Warlords both included continental maps of Brun in 1984. Meanwhile 1983 saw the release of X4 Master of the Desert Nomads and X5 Temple of Death, whose maps may be considered to be derived from the world map. X6 Quagmire! followed in 1984 with the Serpent Peninsula.

So the timing is tight, but not impossible.

Lance Duncan brought up some quotes from Frank Mentzer about the origins of the map:

Some of the Suits wanted to create their own in-house campaign world for D&D (i.e. no royalties for a change) and thus Mystara was born. It started with a worldmap of Pangaea from Francois Froideval, twiddled by yours truly, and introduced in brief in the DM’s Companion and extended to the entire world in the Master DM’s Book.

Frank Mentzer, 4th August 2005 at in a thread at Dragonsfoot

You can see more relevant quotes on Lance’s page. Frank Mentzer mentioned that he and François Froideval “played with plate tectonics as early as ’82” (The Piazza, 23rd October 2013).

Finally, John Tudek found the book on his own bookshelf, and provided me with a high resolution scan, which I tweaked to show the mountains more clearly.

John also checked the artist credit, and found that it was credited to Dr. Christopher Scotese — the same man who is still making these paleogeographic maps today. (He’s pretty famous for them, in fact.)

So what happens when you overlay the Master Set world map on this map? Let’s take a look!

Master Set world map outlines on top of the Continents in Collision map

To say the resemblance is striking would I feel be an understatement. It’s practically spot on; although the exact placing of the continents is not quite identical, the mountains are so close that I think we can say with confidence that it was this map — or at worst perhaps a very close relation — that François Froideval brought to Frank Mentzer back in 1982, and which they used as inspiration to create Mystara’s world map.

Further, we the loose fit of Brun in the above map compared to the other continents may suggest that it was perhaps done separately — as indeed you might expect, since it was published first, as noted above.

Taking a closer look, we can see that the coastlines of Davania are almost a perfect fit, with the two major exceptions: the Addakian Sound, and the Vulture Peninsula. Cestia and Everfeed are also missing, although Oceania is present. Davania’s mountains are very close, with the following differences: the Addakian Mountains have been expanded, while those north of the Izonda desert have been much reduced. Also the northwestern coast is free of mountains on Mystara.

Skothar’s coasts are very similar, although the extreme north is hard to make out. The small islands are almost all missing, however — including Zyxl in the extreme east.

The Alphatian Sea area has close versions of all the major subcontinental islands, including Alphatia, the Isle of Dawn, and Bellissaria. It also has a much larger-looking Ochalea, slightly off from its Mystara position.

Brun fares the worst, with quite a poor match. But does the Companion Set Brun map fit any better?

Companion Set (black) & Master Set (red) outlines on the Continents in Collision map

Well, no. Not really. It’s a bit of a mess, although the pattern of the mountains at least does line up nicely.

So what now?

You may be wondering: okay, so now what? That is a very good question.

In my opinion, we can use two things from these maps directly in today’s Mystara: the mountains, specifically the shape of the ranges; and the sea depths, meaning the extent of the shallower coastal shelves and the deeper oceans. Both of these are welcome additions to Mystara’s body of maps. The shape of the mountains should help especially with my current work filling in the hex maps for all three continents, but also with future projects where such knowledge will be very useful.

Of course, it’s all just guidelines, and I don’t expect any of this “new” information to override things that are already set.

The other point is a little more complex, and it’s to do with projections. We now know that the map that inspired Mystara was in the Mollweide projection. Which begs the question, what does this mean for Mystara’s world map? Should we also interpret it as being a Mollweide map?

As it happens, Lance Duncan has already done just that. You can see his treatment of this (centred on Karameikos, but also including the world map) over at his web page, where he has a great interactive Mystara Web Map. Out of interest, here’s what happens when you reproject the Mollweide projection proto-Mystara map into an Equirectangular projection:

*Jurassic Earth in Equirectangular Projection*

My own answer to this question is a definite no. Why? Because such a top-down approach at this point in Mystara’s lifespan, when every map so far has ignored the issue of projection altogether, and our primary concern is hex maps with a marked scale… would inevitably mean rescaling all of those maps at best, or at worst having to redraw them all — effectively throwing out everything we have now and starting anew.

My solution, as outlined two years ago in my Lining Up Mystara project, is to treat all of the maps as if they are Equirectangular projections. The reasons for this are twofold: it preserves the “top is up” aspect throughout the maps; and it preserves the north-south scaling of the maps, so 8 miles per hex will always mean 8 miles per hex — as long as you are measuring straight up and down. This last part is a bit of a cop out, but it’s also the best of a raft of bad choices, because no choice of projection can make the hex maps read 8 miles per hex in any direction; in fact, that is simply not possible in a 2D representation of a 3D ellipsoid.

It’s not perfect, but I believe we have a consensus in the community to go this route, since it makes the least trouble.

In short, Mystara is a uniquely complex world, with its polar openings and Hollow World also to take into account, and quite large sections of the world already mapped in beautiful large scale (8 mile) hex maps. For many of us, the world needs to be reconciled in three dimensions; for others, it’s not really a priority. With the Atlas of Mystara, I propose to walk a middle ground that satisfies both these groups.

I leave it to others to recreate the world anew from this inspiring map. And — I can’t stress this enough — I would love to see such a project happen. I’ll be the first in line to cheer it on, and indeed help out where I can.

Phew! What a day — what a week! — this has been. Thirty years on, and I’m still getting thrilled by Mystara.

Here’s to another thirty years!

Speaking of which…

With apologies for the self-promotion… It’s not Mystara, but if you’d like to see more maps from me and support my cartography, please check out my Patreon. It’s thanks to my patrons and other supporters that I am able to continue with projects like this and develop new skills and techniques to apply to all of my maps.

Thanks for listening!

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20 January 2018

Mystara Climate Maps

Atlas of Mystara, climate maps, Mystara, thematic maps, world maps 10

Creating 72 mile per hex maps for Mystara’s continents has led me to investigate Mystara’s climate. I’m going to sum up the issues here before reporting on my progress.

Bruce Heard posted two articles about Mystara’s climate on his blog back in 2012: Climate in Alphatia and The Winds of Brun. In these articles, he outlined a climate system for Mystara based on the Köppen climate classification system (see also climate at Wikipedia). Most usefully, he marked the climates, ocean currents and predominant winds on Michele Carpita’s existing Mystara Climate map (which showed Brun and the Alphatian Sea area, as well as the northern tip of Davania and western Skothar).

I started a thread over at The Piazza, to explore finishing off Bruce’s work, and some great ideas were posted by Robin and others, which should be very helpful in filling in the missing parts of Davania and Skothar.

In the meantime, I decided to move ahead with assembling the coastlines resulting from my Lining Up Mystara project. This is obviously an essential step in making the hex maps, but also in constructing a new world map — something that has been a mere dream up until now.

I tackled each continent separately, starting with Skothar (the easiest) and finishing up in Brun (by far the most complex). Luckily I already had all of the source maps in vector form, so the main task was copying, pasting, rescaling, and then merging them all together. To sum up:

Skothar: I took my traced Master Set coastline and the best of the 72 mile per hex coastlines — which turned out to be Dawn of the Emperors in most cases. The hex mapped areas overrule the Master Set world map, so I deleted that part and then merged these all together. The only exception is Minaea’s little inlet bay, which was not on the hex maps but I decided to preserve anyway — a very rare example of disregarding the hex maps in favour of another map. With Skothar itself done, I brought in the outlines from my 24 mile per hex maps of Alphatia, the Alatians, Ochalea, and the Pearl Islands. Finally, I added CM1’s Brun map to get Orol Island and its southerly neighbours.
Davania: The main base is again the Master Set coastline, but I decided to add Princess Ark maps from Dragon 155, 157 and 158 to get more detailed coastlines for those parts, which is to say the eastern Jungle Coast down to Fire Bay, including Cestia, Oceania, Everfeed, as well as the Vulture Peninsula. Next I added Poor Wizard Almanac II‘s 72 mile per hex map, and incorporated Champions of Mystara‘s 24 mile per hex fragment from the Serpent Peninsula map. Finally I brought in the results of my Skothar map, including CM1’s Brun map, and added the two extra Pearl Islands.
Brun: This one took a long time. Starting with the 8 mile per hex maps, I brought in the Known World and Sind coastlines, then the Savage Coast and Trident Bay area’s. Next came the 24 mile per hex coastlines, with the Great Waste, the Isle of Dawn, my Arms of the Immortals map, and CM1/M2’s Norwold. I’m glad I already had this stuff partially collected together, or it would have taken even longer. After slotting all of this in, I then brought in CM1’s Brun map, and cut it up to allow two placements: one for the Arm of the Immortals/Orc’s Head Peninsula area, and another for the rest of the map. In the end, this map fits rather well with the results of my project, with the stretch from the Arm to the Gulf of Hule being the sole exception. I ended up basing Yalu Bay largely on CM1 and Savage Baronies, with an eye to maintaining compatibility with the main new parts of Dungeon 6’s Great Northway Lands map.

As you can imagine, this took about a week to do. But now that it’s done, I can finally produce new world maps for Mystara.

So let’s take a look at my progress with this. First up, with the finished coastlines I decided it would be fitting to produce a new Robinson projection map. This one is far from finished, but I want to share my work-in-progress version with you so you can see what it’s going to be like.

What I’ve done here is take the Equirectangular projection coastlines that resulted from my Lining Up project and reprojected them into a Robinson projection. Note the lack of stretching compared the Hollow World Set‘s map.

It’s worth remembering that the extreme north and south of the map are extremely non-standard (to say the least), and in the finished map I intend to show absolute north as well as the beginning of the polar lip. The Polar Openings themselves will require their own maps, but that’s a topic for another day.

Next up is the current goal of all this work: the in-progress climate map.

What I’ve done here is adapt Bruce’s climate map to my Equirectangular projection’s coastlines. It took a bit of tweaking, and it’s not exactly ideal in that it would work much better with some of the terrain (mountains, rivers, lakes, plateaus) in place. That’s coming next, along with filling in the blank areas of Skothar and Davania.

Once the climate map is complete, I’ll get back to hexing the continents.