D&D at 50 (While it's still at 50)

The end of the year is rapidly approaching - this is not my annual year end/new year's post - this is to get in something about Dungeons & Dragons 50th anniversary before the chance is gone.

The game appeared back in 1974, those three little books in a box. Was it a big deal? In a modest way, I think it was, even in 1974. It was different - not a war game as such, though rooted in war games; a game where you played a person involved in some kind of hazardous endeavor, set in a fantasy world. From what I have read, the first people playing it were still thinking more like war games - only war games where you played a single person (who might lead an army) - doing things people did in most games. accumulating wealth, defeating enemies, and so on. There were differences - the game was explicitly cooperative (though still competitive) - you worked with other players, as much as against them. And the structure was there for a lot more - for playing characters doing anything - crawling through dungeons? fighting in wars? flying into space? surviving a zombie attack? gunfights on western streets? And for changing the tone - to more talk, more intrigue, more comedy or horror or whatever you could think of. Over the next couple years, games started to appear taking up these possibilities. Soon, there were role playing games everywhere, doing everything. But that's to come.

As for me? Like most people I started with D&D. In 1982, at college, Advanced D&D, playing Leif and Roulard, along with two or three other players, going through a generic dungeon. There was a magic pool, one of the other player's characters disappeared, and when he came back, he did something stupid that angered someone else in the party. We grabbed him - he kicked poor Leif where Leifson would would have come from - and rolled a 20. We all laughed, the DM rolled to see how bad it was - he too rolled a 20 to confirm the crit. That was the end of Leif's dynastic hopes.

I was hooked. I don't know about the other player, whose characters was promptly and horribly murdered for this dastardly deed - though this was the first time we'd played the game, no one was too attached, and we were all laughing our heads off. This was fun! When I went home from college, I discovered that my brothers had D&D books as well - we started playing, and kept on playing to this very day. Well - there have been some gaps in there. After college, I didn't play much at all; by the 90s, all of us had stopped, and didn't pick it up until 3rd Edition came out. We didn't play that, exactly - but I played with it - bought lots of books, made up lots of characters. Then 4th came out and we played that a lot (though without loving it) - and when 5th came out, we picked it up like it was 1984 again. 

And now it is 2024, there is a revised version of 5th out - I have the first two books, but beyuond playing around with the PHB when I got it, I have not touched it. I have a copy of the DMG and have not opened it. It is a fact that I don't care very much anymore about D&D. I discovered, and finally played, skill games - Traveller and Call of Cthulhu, specifically - and have not looked back. WOTC has done plenty to help thsi alienation along, but it's mostly the type of game and the genre - I don't like level/class games as much anymore; and I don't really care about high fantasy. So here I am. This is not enough to stop me from playing the game, when I am in a game; and probably won't last forever - but there it is. 

But D&D has been a big deal - for me, as well as the world. I don't write blogs very much anymore, and have not said anything all year - though I thought about it off and on. But I have time to fix it. So - happy birthday D&D! and - before I go - here is how I would rank the versions of the game I have actually played. That would be a bit of Moldvay basic, ADD, a bit of 2E. 3E, 4E and 5E. I have in fact played the 2024 version of 5E, though not enough to see how to distinguish it from 2014 5. So I will leave it alone for now. and so? here they are, ranked.

1. Fifth Edition - this is, in the end, the best they have ever done. A rare instance of an upgrade that really is better than whan came before. Rare for D&D, as you'll see in this little list. But even if I have soured a bit on D&D generally, and even if in getting huge it has engendered a lot of backlash - this is still the best version of the game there is. Easy enough to play, especially easy if you're used to the older versions, and - to me - gives the sense of playing those early versions, but done right. No more weird charts and tables - simple math. In truth, for us, 5E feels like how 1E felt - it plays like we played at the table. We dropped most of the oddball war game stuff - we played ADD like 5E. 5E just makes it all core to the game. It really is a good game.

2. AD&D, First Edition - Gary Gygax unfiltered! It's what I learned on - whatever the difficulties fo the game, we played it easily enough - we were more than happy to fill in anything we were missing or change what we didn't like - I am always shocked to learn that critical hits and fumbles were not in ADD, because we always played with hem from the beginning. Things like that. As a game - 5E is a simpler, more elegant version of this. As a publication, on the other hand, this eclipses everything else by miles. Sure, it's what I learned on, but it really did have the best books, as books, the best art, the best ideas - everything. I can still leaf through those early books - the core books, obviously, but even later additions like Deities & Demigods or the Fiend Folio - just to look at the art. Just to look for the jokes. It was a great edition. 

3. Third Edition - truth is, I barely played this thing, but this was the great solitaire edition. It's publication drew us back to D&D; we never quite figured out how to play it, but I bought most of the books (3 and 3.5 both), read them, used them - and made up characters. This is maybe the only version fo D&D where making up characters is in itself a satisfying game - it's got a bit of that Traveller vibe, where building a character is a game in itself. Doesn't have the dice, but it has the options and the ability to craft someone you can believe in. If you divide games into games as games and games as models - this is the model version of the game. You could use it to make up people you could imagine being alive in a world. Even the best other versions don't quite make up characters that have all the details of a character from a book. You can almost get there with 3. I liked it, even if I didn't really play it.

4. Fourth Edition - the exact opposite. We played this a lot - because this is a really good board game. Is it D&D? I don't really think so - even in the broad sense that Pathfinder or Shadowdark or whatever are really D&D - this is something else. That kind of hrumphing probably needs some definitions - this might not be the time, but at it's core: D&D requires a fantasy setting (swords and sorcery, magic and monsters, etc), a D20 system - and role playing. And role playing for me means that you imagine yourself as a real actual person in a real actual world. And 4th edition did not deliver that. I could not imagine 4E characters as people; could not imagine 4E fights and encounters as something actual people were doing. PCs were pieces on a board. Now - you could imagine them as people, and you could go through the motions of a D&D game - but you can imagine the shoe as a real character in Monopoly - it doesn't make it an RPG. All told - 4E was a pretty good game, fun, easy to play - but it did not scratch the itch D&D scratched, and when 5E came out we dropped it on the spot.

5. Second Edition - these last two aren't really being ranked the same way. I barely played 2E - when I did play it, I took ADD character sheets, added THACO and a couple non-weapon proficiencies and played - ADD, as far as I could tell. So - all there is to distinguish the versions is THACO, significantly less interesting core products, a line of fantastic supplements (arms and Equipment, Castles and Strongholds, or whatever that thing was called, etc) - and some great settings, I never really played with. Very much an afterthought.

6. Moldvay Basic - the only basic I played, and this, again, barely, and as an adjunct to ADD. I had played ADD; my brothers had played Basic/Expert and had the books. WE ended up playing a ocuple dungeons using the basic books, and a hodge podge of basic and ADD characters. Then got the ADD books and that was all. I have no feel for what any of the basic games played like. If I had found them first, I might have loved htem - though not necessarily. I was more a war gamer than RPG gamer in college - my joy was in things like Squad Leader and Kingmaker and War and Peace - I liked big complicated things. ADD hit me square; I am not sure if a simpler version of the game would have. Still - this is just to say I have played something with these rules, nothing at all like a real assessment. 

And there it is. That's what I have played; that is what I think of them. I could add things like - favorite book - ADD Dungeon Master's Guide. Best art - I mean, again - ADD - especially the PHB cover, which is so fantastic. Favorite monster - shoot: drow? githyanki? might be. They were right there. Favorite character? Probably Theresa, my 4E ranger, who was a force of nature. Honorable mention to Josef, the Tempest cleric, as well as Violet, the 5E version of Theresa. Favorite scenario? I only played about half of it, but Curse of Strahd - that is fantastic stuff. Biggest missed opportunity? Denis, my 5E paladin with the 7 Dex who got wiped out along with the rest of the party in the cultist's lair in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Next character? Honoria, a ranger, the first character made for 2024 rules - hopefully they've fixed the ranger, and given me room to play a ranger without her turning into dear old Theresa. We shall see. 

It's been a good 50 years for the game; a good 42 years for me playing it. 

Armor and Such

Lately I have been thinking about armor in D&D. The results of watching YouTube armor enthusiasts, Shadiversity and Skallagrim, that kind of thing, maybe, and idle time wasting.

I have been thinking about the ways D&D (and apparently every fantasy game ever made, from what I can see) distort historical armor. Studded leather! And how this matters, when it might matter. I have been thinking about how people might dress in a fantasy setting city - who would wear armor when? People going about their business in a city or town - how much armor would they wear? Adventurers going into dungeons - what would they wear? Full plate? Doesn't seem likely. I find the game unsatisfying in some ways. Mostly as a realistic simulation of medieval combat, and as a guide to how people would likely live in medieval (fantasy) settings. How can you fix this?

When does this matter? well:

1) This has nothing to do with the way the game (D&D 5th Edition, specifically) plays. It plays fine. There is lots you can say about D&D armor and hit points and the like, but I think the system works perfectly well for what it is meant to do. It lets you play fairly smoothly, it gives you variation among armors and abilities to get stronger, and all the rest. The level of abstraction in the game works very well at the table. I have no complaints there.

2) This matters for me because I do like realism in games - I like games that simulate reality. I would like to see a more realistic armor and hit point system than D&D. Should it use damage reduction? should armor offer something like hit points of its own? Possibly. I would like a game system that modeled real world historical armor, weapons, fighting methods and so on. I don't know if I would want to play a game like that - realism, accuracy and so on usually means complexity, and that is not always worth it for playing the game. I feel this way about 3/3.5 of D&D vs 5E - the 3's offer a superb simulation of character abilities, feats, skills and so on. But I found it almost unplayable, back in the day. 5E, while far more abstract, sometimes annoyingly so, is very playable, and all these posts don't add up to a real desire to change it. Maybe tweak it, though. And I wish a more complex and realistic game was out there to read.

3) Where this kind of thing really matters, I think, is in giving the game a sense of place. This splits in half, a bit.

First - in fiction, I do want to make the world as accurate and realistic and plausible as I can. To make everything deliberate, at least. Using games as a guide for fantasy stories has some uses - a kind of check on the possibilities in the story, a way to gauge how strong people and things are, a framework for adding magic to the world. In that context, though, you want to imagine how someone would really act in this kind of world - and if the game can't help you, or does something clearly wrong - that makes a problem. But this again doesn't really matter to the game.

Where this comes into the game, I think, is in the possibility of giving more flavor to the world. Specifically, to give it a sense of place. The abstraction of D&D can erase the variations in locations. In our games, we have campaigns set in large northern cities; in a desert with a definite North African/Middle Eastern tone; in the south seas; in the north seas, on the coast; in the jungles of Chult. As well as in mountains, moors, towns and so on, at times.

More variation in arms and armor, both in terms of the names of things and the mechanics, can create a sense of differentiation between them. The desert campaign should have different kinds of weapons and armor than the northern ones. Scimitars and lamellar or scale armor or whatever seems right; as well as the different environmental effects - heat and dust and so on. You want ways to specify the settings - the ways they look different, the ways people act differently - different clothes, different habits. A lot of this is just description - but sometimes, some mechanical differences are nice too. Some of this is purely cosmetic - the difference between a cutlass and a scimitar - even if they are identical mechanically. Some is more solid - there should be arming swords in this game. There should be stats for brigandine. Knowing how things work, how different things work, what choices people make, helps that. 

Anyway. All that said, I am not above taking a crack at redoing the armor tables to match what I think is more historically accurate. How about this?

Maintaining the existing categories and most of their rules...

• Light Armor:

AC 11

Leather jacket or tunic - this is a reinforced leather jacket, maybe with a layer of padding inside. Mostly cosmetic - it looks good - with some minor protection. Very flexible - realy just reinforced clothing.

Light Gambeson/Arming jacket - the kind of padded armor that is worn under chain or plate mail. Less protective by itself though still useful.

AC 12

Leather breastplate - boiled leather, breast plate or vest, only the torso. Stiff, solid, but somewhat limited. 

Heavy Gambeson - padded armor meant to be worn by itself; this should be very common - this stuff is, by most reports, very useful in fact. 

Buff coat - this is something from later, leather hide coats with padding inside; but stiff and useful.

• Medium:

AC 13

Improved leather - meaning in this case a set of boiled leather plates - cuirass, plus arm and leg protections, etc. Better armor, more complete, but a good deal less flexible, harder to move in. This might include things like leather lamellar armor, which apparently existed in fact as well. 

Hide Armor - hardened rawhide. 

Jack of plates - this consists of metal plates sewn into leather or cloth jackets. This is cruder than brigandine, I think, though working on the same principal. Metal armor, in fact, so probably noisy.

Chain shirt - chain, only to the waist, maybe with sleeves. 

AC 14

Breastplate by itself - the book's rules are fine.

Scale Armor - keep the book's rules. One of the problems though is that D&D makes this universal, when in fact, it tended to be used in certain places and times. It would be more interesting to make things like Scale or Splint and Banded armors more exotic - from somewhere other than the places that use chain and plate and the like. 

AC 15

Brigandine - this is not in the 5E books, which is too bad. This was fairly common in medieval Europe, used by foot soldiers archers and the like. It's good armor - metal plates riveted to cloth and leather facing - flexible, protective, convenient. Usually opening in the front or the sides, so someone could put it on by themselves - a common soldiers armor and good stuff. Of course this ends up being more or less the same strength as half-plate in the book. 

• Heavy:

AC 16

Chain hauberk - strength 13; dis on stealth - the book is fine.

“Half plate” - I would put it here. I would say this is chain or brigandine with added plates at the shoulders, on the limbs. Or this might be what they call "munition armor" - a kind of mass produced plate armor used by soldiers in the late medieval, early modern period. 

AC 17

Splint or banded - 15 strength, dis on stealth, etc. These are again more likely to correspond to Asian styles of armor - strips of metal bound together, rather than big plates. 

AC 18

Plate Mail - what the heck? full harness! Though as gets pointed out - really good plate armor is more or less impenetrable. 

I would change a couple weapons as well. The most annoying omission for me is the Arming Sword - what they called a Longsword in first edition. Gygax had the types of weapons more or less right - he just called them the wrong names. Longsword - Bastard Sword - Greatsword - should be Arming sword, longsword/bastard sword/hand and a half sword - Greatsword. Just bring it back:

Arming Sword - one handed, does d8 damage - there you go. This could cover most one handed swords - Viking swords, arming swords in the crusading period, and os on.

Longswords are fine as they are.

Another thing I think makes sense would be to make things like Longswords and Spears into finesse weapons when you use them with two hands. Getting that extra leverage makes them very fast and maneuverable - makes it easier to get in a precise hit. Why should't there be finesse two handed weapons?

Anyway: that is enough for now.

Arts and Culture

I have been thinking a lot lately about how to use art and culture in D&D games. Or, maybe, in fantasy writing - but this has some of the same issues attached. World building, and what part the arts might play.

It should be there in D&D: there are whole classes built around art (bards), backgrounds (entertainer, at least.) And it you extend it to mean culture, in the sense of arts, technology, education and knowledge - even more elements of the game come in. The Sage - the Acolyte - the Guild Artisan - all do, or can, relate to cultural elements. How can it work? Part of what I am thinking about is the generic world building issues: what is the nobility system? what ranks are there, for real, in this world? What are the religions - not so much the deities, as the religions, the institutions, organizations, their sacred texts and images and how they function in the world? Technology - what is available? or maybe, what can you play with? Some of this, too, lurks in the corners of the game - gunpowder, notably, is one fo those things that is there to play with, though not quite part of the official game, quite - how do you deal with it?

I find this stuff much too fascinating. It can suck me up into wikipedia and YouTube and actual books to find out what happened in the world, so I can use that in a game or a story. Lately I have had a binge of obsession with art - painting, how it develops and evolves, the forms it might take, how it varies across a world. Which leads you to history 9leads me to history anyway): how did painting evolve? how was Italian painting int he Renaissance different from North European painting? how did influence flow? what subjects were common where? how did the markets work? There is a lot there to play with, even if so far all I have ended up doing is grafting real world trends onto a fantasy world. It's there. And then add other things - maybe technology - maybe printing. Where is this world technologically? do they use printing? what kind? woodblock? etchings? do they have moveable type? is it metal or something more fragile? is it common? where does it come from? Is this technology emerging in the core area of the game/fiction? or does it come in? (Like technologies imported from Asia to Europe, and vice versa.)

There are lots of stories there. How technology, or even just artistic styles or media are perceived. If someone invented moveable type, how would it be received? as magic? as something supernatural? how does it relate to the general perception of technology? How would all this change if it were imported from somewhere else? Somewhere friendly vs somewhere hostile? What if it was invented by someone dangerous? a strange cult? a political rebellion? someone magical? what if it was used to print propaganda for revolution or a strange religion or magical scrolls - how would that change it? D&D gives you additional questions - what if printing is associated with dwarves? gnomes? drow? githyanki?

The best version of this I know of is in Terry Pratchett - this is probably the major theme of his work after the late 90s: he played with it in the earlier books (Moving Pictures and Soul Music), then started to develop it with the middle Guards novels (Men at Arms, Feet of Clay), then seemed to take it as the major theme about the time of The Truth and Going Postal. It is very lovely: the good and bad of technology, the importance of where it comes from - things with dwarvish origin take different forms than other kinds of technology - who uses it. The spread of technology, the way it changes the dynamics between groups, countries and so on - all that is in there, and endlessly fascinating.

I like the idea, very much - it is something I want in D&D games I play in, especially if they are going to be made into campaigns, if you want some kind of real story arc. Especially set in cities. It is an opportunity - to play with technology; to play with different kinds of cultural ideas; to play with different art forms - music, theater, literature. It creates story opportunities - backstage dramas, lost manuscripts (think The Name of the Rose), lost artifacts of course (Indiana Jones), but even non-magical knowledge sometimes sparks that kind of story. Playing with technology, art, types of writing, suppressed literature or artworks creates chances - industrial espionage! secretly publishing banned books! art theft and the art market! Sumptuary laws! possibilities for blackmail, advertisement, slander; invention of newspapers, communication technology, etc, on and on. All this can take fairly standard D&D forms too - think, of all things, about A Night at the Opera - rivals for control of an opera company, and rivals for the love or a girl, clash , and one group proceeds to sabotage the other to force them to give in - right? Lots of derring do and hijinks and blows to the head and music, all of it while the show is in the process of going on - potential!

All good. I don't know quite what I want to do with this, but it is something I like. I like writing about it, so it crops up in stories a lot - but it could make some interesting game situations too. It also makes for interesting world building - a way to distinguish cultures (or the feel of places, cities or kingdoms.) I am thinking about that too. It is, in other words, another of the things crowding my brain that I should post about but haven't as much as I should...

Swordfighting in History and Games

It’s been a stupid week at work, so I have been spending most of my time at home watching sword fighting videos - historical swordfighting stuff. (Mostly, though not exclusively, this channel.) Interesting stuff. Lots of information on what swords were used and when, how weapons were used together, when they were most effective, now they work - what qualities make a sword cut better, why thrusts are better than cuts - that kind of thing. It's addictive. Once in a while, you come across things that make sense, but you maybe hadn't thought about before - like the fact that while in D&D swords are usually strength weapons and bows dex weapons, in fact, you have to be fairly strong to operate a real bow effectively (and very strong, and well trained, to operate a long bow), but you can operate a sword pretty effectively with fairly minimal strength. And - extending the contradiction - a long sword (that is, a two handed sword) requires less strength than a one handed sword (even something like a rapier.) Long swords weigh what - 3 pounds? But you operate them with two hands - rapiers and one handed swords are a couple pounds, not much less than a long sword (a rapier particularly, because the real ones are much longer and thinner than two handed swords, almost the same amount of steel pounded out into a long thin blade), though you have to operate them one handed. Now, I suppose the D&D rules are all pretty abstract - "strength" and "dexterity" are somewhat general terms for something not quite the same as what the real words mean - dex being more like hand eye coordination, strength being pure force - but it's still fascinating. Makes you think about who should be wielding what weapons.

All this started because I was thinking about the rules for D&D, particularly 5E - especially, the things that seem to be missing. There are a couple things that seem like they should be there - either as historical references, or because they are staples of previous editions of D&D, or even fantasy/adventure stories. Some of the 5E options seem too broad, too generic - like 2 weapon fighting. This is either difficult, if you don't have feats or the right fighting style or the right weapons (impossible without the right weapons, if you don't have the feat) - or two easy. If you take the feat - you can fight with any two one-handed weapons, more or less equally. And it seems to me that the rules ought to be more nuanced. They were in 3E - there were limits on what kinds of weapons you could use in the off-hand (without feats) - but you could use a dagger or short sword with a long sword without special training. That seems logical to me - even with training, you would be better off with a smaller weapon in the off hand - and I think that is the far more common historical style. Sword and dagger, especially rapier and dagger, seems to have been a very common style of fighting. But that isn't really there in the rules - I mean - the specific combination is not there. You can either use 2 light weapons, or you can use anything you want; the most common actual combination is not optimized in the rules.

On the other hand: watching these videos got me thinking about the rules as they are - and makes me think that the rules in 5E are not half bad. The main reason for using 2 weapons in fact is defense - specifically for defense in circumstances where you do not want to carry a shield. Shields are better defense - but shields are big and bulky and you can’t walk around town with them. (And there are circumstances where a shield would be inconvenient - like on a ship.) Swords are easy to carry - you can sheath them and hang them from a belt very easily. Having two gives you defensive advantages. The 5E rules for 2 weapon wielding works nicely for that: it allows you to get one extra attack (or a better extra attack), but doesn't really double your attacks. The fighting style doesn't help with defense (which might be a problem) - but the feats do. The 2 weapon feat specifically gives you +1 for having the second weapon - that's about right: it is about as useful as having a small shield. (Big shields are +2; bucklers aren't in the rules but would probably be +1. Bucklers should be in the rules - they seem to have been very widely used. They are, like swords, quite portable.) The defensive duelist lets you use any finesse weapon as a one time shield (with your reaction) - which also seems very realistic.

Though that raises an interesting technical question: how narrow is the definition of wielding? if you are holding a dagger in the off hand - presumably you can use it for defense (if you have this feat) - though does that break the Dueling fighting style? That gives you a bonus for using just one one-handed weapon - but does holding a weapon in the off hand break that? or do you have to use the weapon on the off hand - and does defense count as use? I have to say - this piece of the rules is one of the harder ones to swallow. If holding a weapon in the off hand is enough to break the style (cost you your +2 damage) - it implies that you can, in fact, fight better with, say, a small live pig in your off hand than with a dagger. It is a puzzle.

In the end - D&D is a game, and has to work as a game. But it is also a game meant as a simulation of a kind of reality - so it's interesting to see how it compares to reality. And the game itself is more interesting when it can serve as a model for the real world.

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...