B is for Borders

The geography of this campaign world is what I started this blog talking about--how I took NASA's SRTM data and turned it into fictional, but realistic contours on which to then overlay fictional settlements, also based on real settlement data, and then followed a method to distribute infrastructure and human population based on those. The story can be read starting here and reading in chronological order.

There are other, easier ways to start a map. One can find any number of online map generators out there that produce really lovely maps. I've even taken the time to write my own and used it as a player in a Traveller game I've been playing for years with my brother and others, at times. Here's an example. This rectangular projection distorts the surface of the world least at the equatorial latitudes and the 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270° meridians, and most at the poles and away from these reference meridians. The data is built on a sphere, however, and I made a 3d viewer to look at it that way too.

 

Elevation

 

Climate

Climate Legend

But this, like all of the other online generators I have seen, is fake. We all use various mathematical methods to create random, seemingly realistic elevation data. In my generator's case, I also used temperature and wind data based on the planet's star type, orbit, and atmosphere to calculate moisture and thus climate. It was a very fun exercise and I learned some things from it, but at its heart it is fake. I haven't figured out a way to simulate plate tectonics to generate elevations in the first place, and so everything that follows is necessarily garbage.

Fortunately, I have excellent data for a planet that I'm sure is as real as it gets, because I seem to be standing on it.

I chose Ireland because it felt like a good size for a campaign start. It's big enough to provide some traveling and fighting room, and it's an island. It's on the edge of the known world, yet not greatly removed from it. And I don't need to give it edges, because I have data for the whole sphere. If and when characters go extra-planar I'll need an answer, but I'm kicking that can down the road for now. Ireland is about half the size of Honshu and perhaps 10% of its population in the year of fake history I've chosen. That leaves plenty of room for the non-human population. I mention Honshu because I wanted a campaign setting which bore some resemblance to Sengoku era Japan.

AD&D is a human-centric game. Dungeons, dragons, and typical adventure games exist only mostly outside the human world. I needed both room for these adventures to happen so that players are able to work up to name level, but still to have enough of the space be a human-centric environment for the real game. The war game. The game of thrones, as they say, no George R. R. Martin reference intended.

So we're playing in a fantasy Ireland, "Erin" as we call it, in 1478. Now 1479.