Time and Space, Real and Fantastic

Lately I have been rather obsessed with world building. It would probably be more useful to work on building adventures - dungeons or town adventures or campaigns - but I can't help it. It's hard to say what sparked it - I suppose trying to imagine the transition from the old editions we played in to 4th edition was part of it. That and building a pirate campaign - that requires coast lines, shipping lanes, trade routes, and all the economics and politics that goes with it. And - when you start trying to steal pirate ideas, you generally find most of the existing material assuming something of a real historical setting - which means, Caribbean, colonial era. And that means - well, an invitation to imagine the world south of the usual campaign setting. It probably didn't help that one of the history channels was running a show on Krakatoa last week - oooh! ring of fire! there's an idea! And so - more maps ensue. Like this one:



So what does that mean? Well - you have the old setting where it always is, 40-60 north latitude, basically. Plus a great big bunch of desert, off to the southeast, a new, jungle continent to the southwest, and a string of islands, probably volcanic, between. None of which I imagine will ever have the least impact on any actual D&D playing, though who knows. I've always tended to get lost in the background anyway - I guess this is no different.

But - since I have been reading about the invention of the printing press - it got me thinking about other things. For instance - how many versions of that continent have I drawn in my life? Over and over - Waynesburg changing locations (relative to the geography, though not the latitude, usually) every year for 30 years. Now it's on a river - now on a lake - now on a small lake - now on a land and a river - now back on the big lake - now there's another town between it and Hillsburg - now the town is gone - now it's on hills, now in a swamp, maybe it should be on the ocean - on and on. And that's just me - you've drawn your own maps, going off mine or not, as long as I have.

But this is the thing that occurred to me, reading about the invention of printing: that was the normal state of things before the 16th century. There might have been good maps - but they were local and limited, even within the known world. If someone made a good map - it was unique, one object - that was either locked up and protected, or copied, by hand, with all the problems that attended copying. Knowledge, even very good knowledge, had a very difficult time spreading - a map (say) might be very carefully made, but only of the areas the mapmakers would personally visit and check. And it was very hard to connect one good map to another good map.

That all changed with printing. Now - maps were made and distributed. Maybe, at first, as many bad maps were made as good - but maps now could be used by travelers, checked by travelers, compared to other maps, their information correlated and corrected - and printed again, in a permanent form that could be distributed and examined in turn. It made it possible for their to be definitive maps. It made it possible (one of the points in Eisenstein's book) to identify the difference between real places and fantastic places - people stopped putting Paradise on their maps. (It's a great book - worth tracking down and looking at.)

Anyway - it's worth keeping in my head: that the variation in maps, in geography and boundaries, in histories and societies, is all perfectly consistent with the way the world was perceived in the age of manuscripts. And for the people living in that world - I'm not sure if you can make a distinction between how the world was perceived and what it was. For someone in Waynesburg or Oceanside, those islands off the southwest coast, or the jungle continent are as remote as Atlantis or the moon. And really - for most people in Oceanside, Waynesburg is as remote as the moon. Even the people who went there, would probably experience the journey as something occurring in time - 3 weeks ride - as distance. It's fascinating to think about...