The Map Isn't the World and Why the World Matters

My general intent with this blog is to share the development of my TTRPG game settings in the hope that it some little nugget of information I post will be helpful to someone else; that I'll pay forward some small part of the debt I owe to others who have shared their work. This post is somewhat of a departure from that mission.

After sharing with friends a pretty picture of what I was working on I reflected on their reactions. I made this representation by selectively shading, and then deriving contour lines from, the Shuttle RADAR Topography Mission digital elevation data. I'm not really making a map. This picture is that, but it's not a picture that I really care about. It's the data underneath it, and the data that I wish to add to it, that is important. No picture is necessary.

I'm not sure how widely that is appreciated in the TTRPG community. Let me explain further. While the picture above helps the beholder to appreciate the shape of the earth there, there is much more data that could be here. That is there. That is impossible to show all at once. In an attempt to illustrate my point, I'll focus in on a smaller area and show the same information in a different way.

This spot is about 85 miles southwest of the center of the other image, but it's the same data. Instead of shading, however, I've represented the SRTM data more directly. The pink dotted lines, and numbers within them, are the actual radar height data, clumped by like values, which is why the little bit of the Atlantic in the top left of the image just has one "0" on it instead of one "0" every 3 arc-seconds.

The contours, same as the previous map image, were derived from those boxes. I've created more detailed information, in those contours, from less detailed information. The details were implied by the less detailed data, but nevertheless, and importantly, made up. They are not reality. For my purposes that unreality in no problem. Even if I use it to derive more data, exaggerating the inaccuracies, that's still no problem because I'm using this to run a game, not pilot an aircraft with black-painted windows.

Although it may sound like I'm advocating for one to ignore reality in the one's game setting, that is not my point. The realism is important. The specific match of these contour lines to the shapes of Maumfin and Tully Mountain are not important, but a reasonable, imaginable from common human experience, sort of slope is important.

I want my players to understand what it looks like approaching Maumfin from the west along the shore of Ballynakill Lough even though they would know them only as unnamed features in possible swineman territory. This is what that looked like one day about 5 years ago. Of course, there is no paved road nor even the single utility wire seen here when the characters see it.

It's important that I give my players a believable place where they might encounter swinemen even though encountering swinemen is not part of the common human experience. I have made so few departures from that common human experience in the setting otherwise, that it is easier for my players to incorporate this fantastical element into their imaginations. The swinemen are more real, and more threatening, because the countryside is so recognizable as a place my players might have walked or driven.

As evocative as a map like this is it can't compete with the emotional impact created by the vision the players create in their heads when I describe a dozen swinemen, in wedge formation, coming down the slope above Ballynakill Lough toward the PC's camp where they've spent the last couple of days catching, smoking, and salting fish to provide for the next leg of their expedition after having laid such a tangible countryside before them first.

Moreover, and back to the original point, at the end of the day, the map from the Hobbit, above, is only a picture. Those pink boxes near the beginning of this post, or rather the data they are displaying, will drive the placement of infrastructure expanding outwards from population centers, the course of streams the player's characters depend on for water while trekking as they are, and so much more than pretty pictures.