Committed Hero
Hero
I was enamored with Hyboria as a teen, but as I accumulated information I realized he just grabbed place names from all over.
Why the focus on *geography* in RPGing?
- Thread starter pemerton
- Start date
Crimson Longinus
Legend
I think it has been pretty well established how geography and maps create constraints, predictability, structure and verisimilitude. And I like those things. However, I have been thinking about this recently, when I've been trying to sketch a large scale map for my current world. I feel that in putting things on the map something is also lost. There is certain mystery and wonder in vagueness. "Beyond the Shifting Sands lies the fabled Shimbal, the City of Sorcerers."
By putting things on the map, you're making things more concrete. And in so doing you are also implicitly saying something about what's not there.
I don't know, I have hard time articulating my point, but it seemed to be tangentially relevant.
By putting things on the map, you're making things more concrete. And in so doing you are also implicitly saying something about what's not there.
I don't know, I have hard time articulating my point, but it seemed to be tangentially relevant.
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To me it seems directly relevant.
Your example made me think of In A Wicked Age. But any system that relies on fairly rapid-fire scene-framing and a lot of flexibility in respect of the fiction when it comes to establishing consequences is going to benefit from a more relaxed and sometimes "impressionistic" approach to where things are in relation to one another.
hawkeyefan
Legend
Draw maps, leave blank spots?
Manbearcat
Legend
I think it has been pretty well established how geography and maps creates constraints, predictability, structure and verisimilitude. And I like those things. However, I have been thinking about this recently, when I've been trying to sketch a large scale map for my current world. I feel that in putting things on the map something is also lost. There is certain mystery and wonder in vagueness. "Beyond the Shifting Sands lies the fabled Shimbal, the city of Sorcerers."
By putting things on the map, you're making things more concrete. And in so doing you are also implicitly saying something about what's not there.
I don't know, I have hard time articulating my point, but it seemed to be tangentially relevant.
Great post.
In the two most recent games I’ve GMed (Stonetop and Torchbearer), what you’re citing above are features for players and GM alike when beholding the maps.
“Oh there is this huge mountain range separating the land? No known settlements or ruins (et al) on the map on the East side? Just roughly surmised topographical features. No civilization…no contact with anyone/thing?”
“Woah…what_the_hell_is_over there.”
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Exactly. Blank space on maps is a very useful thing.
The one really BIG caution I'd like to throw in here, however, is that if-when putting major new elements (e.g. nations, cities, cultures, etc.) into blank space as the players/PCs learn of and-or discover them, make sure there's a logical in-game reason to explain why nobody's heard of these elements before.
Side story:
In a long-ago game one PC (not mine) took as his mantra "Where the map is blank, I'll go". Through a series of solo adventures he ended up forcing the DM (not me, fortunately!) to map out his entire world in varying degrees of detail - the DM had originally only mapped one continent and only part of that in any depth.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, THAT is easy, because wargames go all the way back to the Ur game, the original Kriegsspiel, which was intended to allow you to play out realistic battles on a tabletop (think basically Chainmail, but written in 1819...). So, from that starting point, where the 'map' was a real genuine military topological map from which the sand table was configured, wargames have almost always had maps! There's a direct line from KS to FKS, which was the practiced version of KS that was used by the Prussian General Staff for officer training. It included a referee with the power to essentially make any ruling, and players who assumed the roles of officers both in the field and at headquarters.
This lead, through some iterations of military training techniques to Wesely, who developed the Braunstein scenario, which he ran with Dave Arneson in which players were given specific character roles. That was elaborated by another guy (who's name I now forget) who created 'Brownstone', which was the same idea translated to the old west, except he introduced one critical new thing, the characters were persistent! All of these still had military dimensions and used maps (in Brownstone I guess it featured fights with Indians and Outlaws, etc. there's not a lot of info online about the details). Arneson then took THAT game and made Blackmoor out of it (critically retaining the persistent characters that you played game after game) and famously grafting on the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement rules to run the fights.
Again, Chainmail, like its great great grandfather KS, depends utterly on maps (or at least setups of tables that act as maps) and because Blackmoor and the C&C Society campaigns that used Chainmail were CAMPAIGNS where the armies moved around countries (this is where The Great Kingdom and such come from which appear in Darlene's Greyhawk map) and you needed campaign maps to play out things like "I'm marching across the Abor Alz with my orc army to get between the Knights of Furyondy and the Elves!" or whatever.
The point being, all wargames use maps (AFAIK, granting there is probably an exception somewhere) and D&D was DEFINITELY a wargame, or at worst a part of/adjunct to a wargame.
Here's an interesting point. The other day I watched a Youtube video of an actual Free Kriegspiel. They didn't call it that, but it was CNAS organized study of a conflict between the US and the PRC over Taiwan. There were two teams, Red representing the Central Military Planning Committee of the PLA and Blue representing the Pentagon/NSC. It had a GM (some PhD from CNAS) and the two teams consisted of a couple of US Congressmen, a couple ex-generals, and some various experts on relevant topics. They had a hex map, units, and everything, though I got the impression that the 'game mechanics' were fairly loose, and they only described each sides actions at a pretty high level. Still, it was absolutely FK! (much refined presumably) and maps were one of its central features.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
The AD&D 1e DMG absolutely has a fully fleshed-out system for making hexmap terrain (written so as to be used in the process of a hexcrawl). It is at least as detailed as the system Traveller has, which itself is VERY high level (It generates basic physical parameters of a 'planet' and really basic generalized social/technical/legal data). So I agree, most RPGs don't have these kinds of mechanics, but both D&D and Traveller do, and its mighty interesting in that these 2 games were the 900 lb gorillas of RPGing c 1977! Each one was built from the ground up around the concept of campaign maps as a central theme, and felt it was so important that they had to give GMs a 'quick start' option of random generation!
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
4e REQUIRES a mapped out encounter space for there to be a fight, though not really so much for any other reason.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
The version of Braunstein I played under Wesely didn't have a map. Sure it used in-fiction locations, but as it was being run as a quasi-LARP those locations were arbitrarily set as being specific places in the condo we were playing in e.g. the University was the kitchen, City Hall was the sofa, etc.; and to talk to another character we had to physically go to that character's location, or send a messenger. There was no sense of actual distance or travel time, both of which a map would usually both show and enforce.
No yelling across the room allowed!
I think Arneson brought back the mapping aspect.
