Some Old Maps

In a recent podcast, I had talked about finding older maps from long dead campaigns in the garage - while re-organizing my desk, I had found some more and thought it might be fun to share. It's not the dagger world I mentioned - but instead it's a middle map - one which represents both amazing amounts of prep but also actually did make it to the table - both in the form of players and of fiction prose.

I found this map deep in the back of a notebook I'm trying to repurpose for analog gaming going into 2024. The first thing I noticed was the label - "Middensphere" - which is a total lie: the original "Middensphere" looked more like a flooded North America: but the name was cool, and whenever you have a cool idea - take it with you to the next game! That said, I recognized the map immediately from the shape. Taken from a trace that I had made when coming across the concept of Pangaea Proxima for the first time (then Pangaea Ultima), it was an Earth-to-come, an Earth-after, and a really interesting map. Central ocean, mountain patterns, island chains, detached island continent - plenty to work with thinking about how to game with it.

"But what are those colors?" you ask. 

Well, see above.

After having traced it and flipped it (can't have it too recognizable by the players), I set to work defining where bands of latitude were. Knowing that, you can then think about where ocean currents flow - taking warm water into cold regions and cold water into warm ones - and identify climate bands.

On the interiors, in the shadow of massive mountains lining where the tectonic plates connected, deserts form - as well as in certain places where the current would take moisture away from the coast rather than inland from it.

Looking at it now - I kind of want to run a game in the southern reaches: the island to the south (the conglomeration of Antarctica and Australia in a far flung future) with its sea-capability, its multiple proximitous environments, and its obvious trade routes. But was that where I actually went, way back whenever this map was made?

Of course not.

You'll recognize this region from the North-East of the flipped supercontinent - an extrapolation of where bits of the US and Canada would have ended up, smashing into each other as the molten mantle conveyed them along an inexorable collision course.

Zooming in - I can see a dozen kingdoms: four of which are done in incredible detail. A long forgotten code of "x"s, dots, stars, and hatching coupled with colors and labels denote the wild lands and the settled, the adventure sites and the safehouses, and where cultures mixed or met.

In particular, my mind is drawn to "Alara" - a nation named after Alaric I, barbarian bane of Rome in its early decline - and the home of the tall, strong, warrior race that all fantasy settings seem to invariably crave. That's a name that has made its way into several campaign maps during my college period where I couldn't seem to settle on one world to just play games using.

And then to the north - some Aztec names. 

Arctic Aztec ancients, if I remember correctly, was the plan - though the campaign never went that far: so those lands, back in 200X through to the publication of this post - remain shrouded in unwritten mystery and half concepts, waiting for a party long graduated, diaspora from the old comic shop in new and allopatric hobby dens.

This map would go on to be forgotten as a young me put two and two together, noting that, in order for this continent to form, the pattern of separation across the Atlantic would have to cease and reverse - something that didn't sit quite right for me: going on to discover Novopangaea - which sat much better. But regardless of the eventual fate of the map, part of the reason I wanted to share: this one, I found along with page after page after page of hand written formatted notes identifying all the places marked on the map. It represented a veritable treasure trove of campaign material: easily enough to write a novel in - and obviously enough to have been influenced by a continual progression of play.

-- Update --

Some folks have expressed interest in the content of the old notes I pictured: which... admittedly, in retrospect does seem somewhat of a tease. So I've started the work of digitizing those pages into readable web format and posting them to the blog in a separate series of notes. The WIP list of posts that provide for this is here:

• Ehrn: the Domain of Horse and Stone

I'm not sure I would want to run a game exactly in this world again - the hexes are entirely too large, noted at 30 miles each on the key - but it has been a lot of fun looking through these notes: each page of which contains the name of the peoples, the populations, the distribution of that population among varied towns, the military capability of each area, striated across the breadth of settled space, and a list of ruins and adventure sites: calculated based on the length of the "castled age," but then detailed individually to drop into a living campaign.

I will attach a scan of the original trace - which I appear to have photocopied, over and over, onto hex paper when making nested maps - in case of someone else thinking this was a fun map, likewise.

I hope this has been as interesting to you - the reader - at least in passing as it has been to me, rediscovering this material hidden next to some floppy disks and mechanical pencils. In chatting about it on Discord or in other forums, I'd gotten some feedback and interest on the material - so I'll try to glean out the interesting and useful parts to post as the weeks roll on and time permits.

Either way - in the meantime - delve on!