Lining Up Mystara XII
Reconciling the World Map II
Skothar
Let’s start with Mystara’s eastern continent. We actually have most of the western coast of this in hex maps, but the actual continent is huge, so it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
I already established last time that I’d rather not apply a rotation to Skothar’s Master Set outline if at all possible, in order to maintain its latitudes. I’d also rather keep it the same scale as Brun if at all possible. Let’s see how that works out:
This is not too bad. I based the fit on the Bay of Thorin, lining up the southern coast with the edge of Minaea on the hex maps.
Of course there are numerous problems. First and foremost, the northwestern coast is quite far out from its hex map version. I’m tempted to revise the hex map to go with the world map here, because we haven’t generally been placing a lot of faith in the Dawn of the Emperors 72 mile per hex map. However, the standard up until now has been to go with the hex maps, and this seems to be where community consensus lies every time. So let’s go with the hex coastline and join it to the world map coastline as best we can.
Esterhold is actually the least of our problems, because we have all of it on hex maps. I’m happy with this fit, even it’s a bit loose, because it’s only acting as a placement guide.
Minaea is more problematic, because the coastline is very different. At first I thought perhaps the map needed rescaling, because doing so would surely make the northwestern coastline line up, too. But this would require Skothar to be scaled significantly larger than Brun, which seems rather undesirable. It seems better to preserve the relative sizes of the continents, after all.
Look more closely at the small bay on the world map outline that’s entirely missing from Minaea’s hex map. The coastline after that bay seems to line up pretty well with where the hex maps were going. This leads us to another decision between hex map and world map: do we incorporate this small bay into Minaea’s hex maps, or just ignore it?
Actually, I think we could do both, simply by shifting the bay two hexes to the east. That would allow us to keep the detail while preserving the authenticity of the printed hex map.
Finally, I’m quite happy with the placement of the isles north of Alphatia. This is perhaps the most arbitrary thing about this placement, but I’d rather have them placed relative to Skothar, with no rotation applied, than lump them in with Brun. The distance between the islands and Brun, and indeed Alphatia, seems fine. It should be noted that the hex maps require a placement of Skothar that’s further south than the world map has it, so these islands have also moved south. It seems to make sense to keep them in line with Skothar and especially with the Nentsun Peninsula.
So to conclude, I think this is the best fit we can get for Skothar. We keep it the same scaling as Brun, but without any rotation, and join the world map outlines to the hex maps as best we can.
That just leaves…
Davania
Up until now we’ve been working with areas with the hex maps locked in already, so it has been relatively easy to work out placements.
Unfortunately, Davania’s hex maps are not compatible in this way. In fact, all three of Davania’s appearances on hex maps conflict with each other. Let’s take a look:
(If you can’t see this, the maps are available here and here.)
This comparison shows our base hex maps with the three sources for Davania: Champions of Mystara‘s 24 mile per hex map (the corner of Davania is visible on the Serpent Peninsula map); Dawn of the Emperors‘ 72 mile per hex map (showing the Thyatian Hinterlands); and Poor Wizard’s Almanac II‘s poster map (showing the largest chunk of Davania on any hex map). Since Champions and Dawn‘s maps only barely overlap each other, I put them together.
Note first how both Kastelios and Garganin are one hex to the north in Champions compared with PWA2. The coast itself is about a hex and a half to the north. This location discrepancy aside, these two maps give similar views of this small area. The most important point is that Champions places Davania closer to the Serpent Peninsula.
On the other hand, Dawn‘s map and PWA2 are completely at odds with each other. The really big difference is in the shape of the land itself, and the position of the Thyatian Hinterlands. They both place Davania’s northern tip at roughly the same latitude.
To sum up the problem:
- Sources conflict on Davania’s exact position
- They also disagree on the shape of the coastline
What to do?
Latitudes and the Equator
My preference is to take a side-route at this point and deal with the issue of latitudes and the equator. Why? Because the position of Davania is inextricably tied up with the position of the equator — which in turn largely dictates where the rest of the latitudes fall.
The equator’s location is another area where official maps disagree. Michele Carpita produced this map which shows the situation quite nicely:
This is the Hollow World Set Outer World map. It’s a very problematic map, as I have already stated, but its latitudes are not necessarily affected by this, so let’s take a look.
The equator on this map is almost the same as that given in The Voyage of the Princess Ark (marked VotPA on this map, in light green). It brushes the northern tip of Izonda, bisects the Adakkian Mounts and the Jungle Coast, passes just north of the Cape Eriadna next to the Pass of Cestia, north of Cestia itself, then under the “hook” of Oceania. Not visible on this map is that it brushes the southernmost tip of Skothar in the far east. I remade the relevant Princess Ark map for reference.
The red line shows PWA2’s equator, which is further north. This one is problematic, and I much prefer the Princess Ark maps as a source for this.
The rest of the latitudes are not quite so important, except that official sources place Thanegioth (presumably the Isle of Dread) at 20ºN, Thyatis at 30ºN, Landfall at 40ºN, and Farend is 60ºN. (These are from TM1’s “Sunrise and Sunset” table, and were repeated in Poor Wizard’s Almanac II.) These are marked on Michele’s map above in blue. Note how the Hollow World Set‘s map has a totally different set of latitudes.
I contacted Bruce Heard about these issues, and he replied that his calculations may have been wonky, and may need updating.
My conclusion is that we should use these numbers as guides, and see how things go. I highly doubt it will be possible to make all of them work, but we can use the most important of them — Thyatis being at 30ºN — together with the equator location to scale the rest of the latitudes properly.
Note also that the locations of the tropics is not relevant, because these are determined by the axial tilt — which we have already arbitrarily set at 24º. Thus, the tropics will appear at 24ºN and 24ºS. These were not consistently placed in official maps, so I am disregarding them.
Davania and the Equator
First, let’s overlay Davania’s Master Set outline with Dragon 155’s map showing the location of the equator. I’ve added in Dragon 158’s map for good measure.
I went for a best fit with these rather than lining up the meridians. So far so good. They fit pretty well. The northern tip of Davania seems slightly out of sync, though.
The question is, how does this relate to the rest of the world?
Well, it depends on what we use as a reference point. The Master Set map itself is out of the question, as we’ve already seen that it had to be cut up and spread out in order to match the hex maps. But let’s slot this in anyway just to see how it looks:
It could be better… Ochalea and the Pearl Islands already being out of sync bodes ill for how this will look with the hex maps. The problem is, what do we line it up with?
Let’s explore some possible placements:
Placement 1
Placement 1 is based on Champions of Mystara‘s Serpent Peninsula map, lining up Davania’s outline with the small area showing Kastelios and Garganin. The black outlines over the northern continents and landmasses are the Master Set map’s coasts, in their placement
- Pro — the 24 mile per hex map is the largest scale to show Davania on any map, and could therefore be considered to be the most accurate.
- Pro — the Master Set outlines of Ochalea and Dwair match hex map Ochalea and Dwair almost perfectly. This means that the relative locations of Ochalea, the closest of the Pearl Islands, and Davania match the Master Set world map.
- Con — the Serpent Peninsula is in a totally different position relative to Davania from where it fits on the Master Set map. However, Champions‘ map could be considered to supersede this anyway.
- Con — with the equator in this location and Thyatis at 30ºN, the extreme northern and southern areas of the world are devoid of land, meaning that there may be more space between landmasses within the polar openings.
This placement could be made to work if we revise latitudes so that Thyatis is a bit north of 30ºN.
Placement 2
This is just placement 1 with latitudes redefined so that the landmasses stretch almost to the limits of the world. This should result in a placement similar to the one I modelled back in Lining Up Mystara X.
Specifically, the north polar opening should look something like this:
- Pro — the polar openings would look more like they do on official maps, with roughly the same amount of landmasses folding into the poles.
- Con — Thyatis would be at around 32ºN, and none of the other official latitudes would be quite correct. They would be reasonably close, though.
Other Placements
Other possible placements include lining up Davania with PWA2 or Dawn of the Emperors‘ maps; rethinking the equator and going with PWA2’s location for it; or trying to keep the relative placement between the Thanegioth Peninsula and Davania from the Master Set map (this last would involve Davania bumping into Dwair, unfortunately).
There’s an interesting effect when moving Davania: moving it south moves the equator south, resulting in Brun and Skothar moving north and being shrunk slightly. Moving it north moves Brun and Skothar closer to the equator, and enlarges them slightly. For the same reason, the Princess Ark equator makes Davania slightly bigger, as it straddles the equator more, while the PWA2 equator leaves it slightly smaller — and Brun and Skothar slightly larger.
Conclusions
This isn’t something I can just decide by myself, so I’d love to hear some feedback before continuing. Having said that, I also want to continue with this ASAP, as my mid-February deadline is upon us, and I need to get this done and move on to my next project.
14 February 2016 @ 4:58 am
Magnificent work Thorf! It perfectly describes mapping issues with Davania.
About Davania I’d prefer Placement 1, especially because it leaves more space to seas in the northern and southern polar openings, so nearby landmasses are (a bit) farther away from the Poles and so (a bit) less distorted.
Notice also that south of southern Davania (Grunland/Vulcania) there should be room for (the island of) Evergrun. This land might have been demolished by the Immortals after teh GRoF to be substituted by the new polar opening, but the area it occupied cannot have been removed from Mystara. That’s why I’d go with more room between the Poles and the southernmost (and northernmost) tips of the continents’ coastlines.
About the Equator placememt I’d definitely prefer HW/VotPA location. PWAII map is utterly wrong in this, in my opinion.
If you remember we had a mail exchange a few years ago about this subject and i suggested a solution involving the stretching of the western half of northern Davania to get a better match.
For details I summarized the whole approach I’d use here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_huOOfYqf0BaUFBVzJ1ZGpYckU/view?usp=sharing
About Skothar, what about a little enlargment of Mentzer’s map in order to match the hexed maps? If you do this you could have multiple advantages:
– The bay on the Mineaean coast would be pushed eastward (likely moving off the hexed map border) so you can keep it as an interesting feature of the coastline (I’d keep it too, by the way);
– The northern coastline of Skothar will move northward but this is not a major issue if you go with Placement 1 option as there is enough room to accomotate it before reaching the Polar opening;
– Skothar will be enlarged also eastward, filling at least a bit of the large ocean that seems to be necessary in order to have a proper equirectagular map.
About the islands north of Alphatia I like your approach of linking them with Skothar. You could choose to enlarge them as well or to leave their size unchanged and to link their positon to some specific point on Skothar’s coastline. As these islands were never detailed nor mapped except fromt Mentzer and HW map I believe it is admissible to tweak them a bit.
This is my feedback, so far, I hope it could be helpful for you!
14 February 2016 @ 10:46 pm
For my replies, I think my next article should be quite relevant. Unfortunately it seems like Placement 1 is just not going to be viable — and neither is Placement 2. Mystara’s Outer World is just too big, it seems. This is also why I would consider PWA2’s equator, though really it would just shift the problem to southern Davania, so I’m not sure it’s worth thinking about. Besides, I agree with you that the Princess Ark equator is the better one.
I haven’t forgotten your article about Davania. 🙂 Thanks for the link — in fact I had already looked out the file you sent me before.
Thanks for the input on Skothar! I’m reluctant to enlarge it. Isn’t it better to keep the three major landmasses the same scale? To tell the truth, the exaggerated size of Skothar has been an issue I’ve had with some other fan-created maps.
14 February 2016 @ 6:16 am
IWow
That is minute detailing work.
Alost as if you would be working on Mystara itself makingf an accurate map of te world.
Respect…but is it possible at all to mix all these maps of different makers, different desing, different opinions, and of course different flaws (they obviously never noted, or did not bother…”it’s just a game after all”).?
Eitherway
I would go for placement 2, as in my opinion it gives less problems in regard pro/con and is easier to do.
Also, as you said, Bruce was not very correct in it himself…(“wonky calculations”..typical Bruce 😉 )
The problem with Davania in my opinion is that the Norther Coastline varies waaaaay to much to merge.
However, if fusing them together, a new (better) map could be the result.
As for Skothar and the world map in general…I believe to remember that the original map was hand painted, over a matte pencil drawing. Many flaws would have arisen here. especially to size and location detailing. I myself would therefor not use these large non-detailed maps as a base, but concentrate on the hex maps and use the paintmaps (to give them a name) to fill in the blanks were no hex maps do exist….to later overlay these with hex maps.
As example that small bay you mentioned; I would do the last option..keeping them both.(the bay in itself is interesting) and since it comes from the world map, could easily be shifted eastwards.
The same you did with the alphatian isles. Linked to to a sold fixed pint that was overly credible, with a good result.
Then only one question remains; You’ve probably collected all the canon maps to enable this, but the area covered as such is limited.
Do you intend to use oyjer sources (fanon) or your own imagination in those almost blank areas (like you did excellently with the upper section of Arm of the Immortals)???
Any way
Great work
Do continue 😉
14 February 2016 @ 10:56 pm
Thanks Robin. 🙂
I do indeed intend to use fan-created maps as sources to expand the official hex maps. Doing it all myself would be fun, but it would be a lot of work, and most importantly it would needlessly conflict with the work of others. I see no reason to create more conflicts, so I am collecting fan-created maps, which I will adapt to my base maps.
But this is beyond the scope of this current project, of course, and it will likely take some years to get it done completely, because there’s so much to cover. For now I need to concentrate on getting the official maps sorted out so they can be the foundations for a new set of maps.
14 February 2016 @ 6:34 am
Hello Thorf,
Excellent work, as ever!
With regards to Davania, I must confess that some of the mapping issues with regards to latitude are above my head, but my suggestion would be to go with whatever option ties up most closely with this excellent map from Christian Constantin:
http://pandius.com/NE_Davania_24mph.png
This map was discussed at length on the Piazza when it was completed, and Christian modified it on a few occasions to reflect the general consensus at the time. It therefore would, in my view, be a great place to start when deciding which option to go for.
I hope this helps!
Regards,
Matt
14 February 2016 @ 3:35 pm
Hi Matt!
I agree that Christian Constantin’s map is great. But it has a number of problems with placement. I’m not sure what he used for reference, but the relative locations of Ochalea and the Pearl Islands, as well as the corner of Davania from Champions of Mystara‘s map are all out of sync with each other. These are things that can all be linked up using official maps.
There’s another issue with the western part of the map, as LoZompatore mentioned in his comment on the previous article.
On the other hand his detailing is wonderful, and I will certainly use it as a source for later Davania maps. But I don’t think it’s going to help with placement.
Thanks for bringing it up, though — I had it downloaded but had forgotten to look at it.
14 February 2016 @ 8:09 pm
Great work, Thorfinn! The decision to tackle all those controversial mapping issues is surely going to leave a mark on the future development of Mystara. I’m very happy you took this duty on your own shoulders. 🙂
Now, coming to the continents.
Skothar first. I’d rather avoid to rescale anything, as you suggested. Also, my preference is to stick with hex maps for areas covered by them, and use Mentzer’s map only for the areas outside of them. This means, for example, discarding the small bay east of Minaea. After all, we’re going to ignore the odd shapes of the northern Isle of Dawn and most of all of Alphatia due to the fact that we have more detailed hex map for these regions. I’d do the same for the small part of Skothar we have on hex maps. When the Mentzer map conflicts with hex maps, I’d always use the latter, at least for coastlines – meaning that if Mentzer map shows some additional isles that were not featured on hex maps, it might be worth adding them (such as the two islets found west of the Pearl Islands in the Companion Set map).
Moving to Davania, my first idea was to use PWA2 map, which is the only one which consistently connects Brun with Davania in the same map, thus tying Davania’s position to the ones of Ochalea and the Pearl Islands. If I have correctly followed your analysis, it seems that the Serpent Peninsula’s position from PWA2 matches that of CoM – the difference regards the distance of the peninsula from the Davanian Green Coast (Kastelios-Garganin). So I’d ignore the distance of Davania from the Serpent Peninsula featured in CoM and move that small 8mph chunck of Davania to match the PWA2 map.
Instead, if single maps’ internal consistency is to be preserved, I’d rather stick with your solution as shown in the “Placement 2” hypothesis. Its defect isn’t really such – I mean that having Thyatis at 32°N instead of 30°N actually helps moving M-Rome/Costantinople to a more “Mediterranean” position. 😉
My two cents!
16 February 2016 @ 5:28 pm
Simone, thanks for commenting. 🙂
I’ll definitely add everything from the Companion and Master Sets that was not featured on the hex maps, don’t worry. This includes details like the bay in Minaea — I’d rather not just discard details like this. After all, it’s perfectly permissible, no in fact it’s expected to add detail to these world map coastlines.
The problem with PWA2’s map is how to place it in reference to the 24 mile per hex maps, because no one placement works everywhere. That said, I have just realised that the placement I’ve been using for reference in these latest articles is the Alphatia-centred one, which is probably not the best to be using.
I guess I forgot I was supposed to be using local placements. So I just tried lining up the Serpent Peninsula on PWA2 and Champions, and comparing it this way is much more favourable — in fact, they are fit reasonably well, at least as far as 72 mile per hex maps ever fit.
In other words, I’d say that PWA2 and Champions largely agree on Davania’s location. This is quite useful. (Having said this, lining them up based on the Serpent Peninsula means that the locations of the eastern Thanegioth Archipelago, Ochalea and the Pearl Islands are all a bit off. But there’s just no way to make all of these line up. We are forced to choose one, so why not go with the one we have a 24 mile per hex map for?)
I’m really interested in your latitude comments — this is something I’d love to hear more ideas about. What latitudes do we want these cities to be at?
Lining Up Mystara I – Thorfinn Tait Cartography
28 February 2016 @ 1:46 am
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