Let’s tackle some of the easier issues this time.

Yavdlom 8 & 24

Yavdlom’s 8 mile per hex first featured in Dragon 170.  It later reappeared in Champions of Mystara, with two more rows of hexes added in the north, along with the reimagined 24 mile per hex Serpent Peninsula map.

As it turns out, they don’t match up all that well.  The best fit I could find left a few settlements in the west in out-of-sync positions, but there’s no way to make everything align perfectly.  In any case, the 8 mile per hex map is clearly the superior source, so the 24 mile per hex map will require some fixing.

Hule

X5’s Hule is the only official source for the area, bare as it is.  It actually fits quite nicely with X4’s Great Waste, with a clear overlap, although there are some changes to the mountains in the northern part of the overlap.  Nothing major, though.

Time to deal with the first few issues on the list in the first post of this series.

The Great Waste

The primary issues with this area are:

1. Differences between the original X4 map and the Champions of Mystara map.
2. How the 8/24 mile per hex Known World, and the 8 mile per hex Gulf of Hule, links up with the area.

A secondary issue is how this all relates to the 72 mile per hex portrayal in Poor Wizard’s Almanac II, but since that source doesn’t provide any new information on the area, I’m not really interested in resolving this; rather I will simply redraw a new 72 mile per hex map to better match my updated 8 and 24 mile per hex maps, and ignore the official hex map from then on.  Besides, the 72 mile per hex scale is so imprecise that it doesn’t really matter.

In this series of posts, I’m going to work through all of Mystara’s overland maps, connecting them up and resolving problems.  Also responding to feedback from the community and adjusting as necessary.  The end result will be a coherent set of maps that fix the respective locations of all the land masses on Mystara, as well as locking in latitudes and longitudes, global dimensions, and the exact location and composition of the polar lips between the Outer and Hollow Worlds.  This will enable the georeferencing of Mystara, which opens up lots of fun possibilities for future maps.

First let’s take stock of the known issues.  Resolved issues will be struck off with links to relevant articles as we cover them.

• How 8 mile per hex maps interlock with 24 mile per hex maps:
  • Known World/Great Waste (Lining Up Mystara II)
  • Great Waste/Gulf of Hule (Mystara Reborn post)
  • Serpent Peninsula (Lining Up Mystara III)
  • Orc’s Head Peninsula (Mystara Mapping Issues, Orc’s Head Peninsula and Trident Bay, Savage Coast Trail Map)
  • Isle of Dawn (Lining Up Mystara III)
• How 24 mile per hex maps interlock with each other:
  • Known World/Great Waste (Lining Up Mystara II)
  • Great Waste/Hule (Lining Up Mystara III; for link with 8 mile per hex maps, see Mystara Reborn post; also see Piazza post about Great Escarpment)
  • Isle of Dawn/Alphatia (Lining Up Mystara III)
  • Isle of Dawn/Ochalea (Lining Up Mystara III)
  • Isle of Dawn/Pearl Islands (Lining Up Mystara III)
  • Isle of Dawn/Alatian Islands (Lining Up Mystara III)
  • Norwold/Known World & Northlands (Lining Up Mystara VII)
  • Davania (Lining Up Mystara XII)
• How 24 mile per hex maps interlock with 72 mile per hex maps:
  • Known World, Isle of Dawn, Alphatia, Ochalea & Pearl Islands, Alatians, Serpent Peninsula (obsolete; use 24 mile per hex maps)
  • Alphatia/Bellissaria/Esterhold (Lining Up Mystara IV, Lining Up Mystara V)
  • Davania (Lining Up Mystara XII)
  • Norwold (Lining Up Mystara VII)
• How 72 mile per hex maps interlock with each other:
  • Overall (Lining Up Mystara V)
  • Davania (Lining Up Mystara XII)
• How the world map lines up with the hex maps (Lining Up Mystara XI, Lining Up Mystara XII, Lining Up Mystara XV, Lining Up Mystara XVI, Lining Up Mystara XVII, Lining Up Mystara XVIII)
• Latitudes (Lining Up Mystara IX, Lining Up Mystara X, Lining Up Mystara XIII, Lining Up Mystara XIV)
  • Position of equator (Lining Up Mystara XII, Lining Up Mystara XIII, Lining Up Mystara XIV)
  • Exact latitudes of major cities (Lining Up Mystara XII, Lining Up Mystara XIII, Lining Up Mystara XIV)
  • Definition of latitude on Mystara (Lining Up Mystara XIV)
• Longitudes
• Axial Tilt (Axial Tilt thread at The Piazza, Lining Up Mystara IX)
• Polar Openings
  • Location of start of Polar Lip (Lining Up Mystara IX, Lining Up Mystara X)
  • Latitude within the Polar Openings (Lining Up Mystara XIV)
  • What land falls within the Polar Openings (Lining Up Mystara IX, Lining Up Mystara X, Lining Up Mystara XIII, Lining Up Mystara XIV, Lining Up Mystara XV, Lining Up Mystara XVI, Lining Up Mystara XVII)
  • How to map these regions
• Global dimensions (Lining Up Mystara XIII, Lining Up Mystara XIV, Lining Up Mystara XIX)
• Hollow World: (Lining Up Mystara XIII)
  • How Iciria’s 40 mile per hex map corresponds to the Hollow World map (Lining Up Mystara XVI, Lining Up Mystara XVII)
  • Georeferencing the Hollow World

Did I leave anything out?  Some of these are already resolved, or very nearly resolved.  But I’d like to publicise my thinking behind each one, so I’ve included them all in the list.  The only thing I’m really leaving out is how the 8 mile hex interlock with each other, which I think is mostly already resolved — the Known World by TM1 and TM2 trail maps; the Savage Coast by Red Steel’s poster maps.

Let me know if you can think of any other issues to add to this list.

3rd February 2016 Update

The list is slowly being whittled down, and the project is nearing completion.  It’s been a very productive time, but the repercussions of all of these decisions will take a lot longer to process and incorporate into the maps.

In the midst of this project, I have launched a new site for the Atlas of Mystara project, which has taken up a lot of time.  This, of course, is where the eventual results of this Lining Up Mystara project will be published.

I stated in various places that I would wind up this project by mid-February, and I think we’re on schedule to do that.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that the fallout from all of these articles is likely going to take a long time — many more months or years, in all likelihood — to deal with.  I’ve already started doing this, but it’s beyond the scope of the present project, and I need to concentrate my attention on that for now.

To put it more succinctly: this project deals with the major issues of Mystaran cartography, but the nitty gritty details will remain, to be dealt with after this project is finished.