Worlds of Design: Modern vs. Medieval Maps

Moderns are accustomed to cheap and readily available maps that show distance as well as road connectivity. That kind of map is rarely going to exist in a low technology/Medieval setting.

Two views of the same geospatial relationships (part of the Britannia game map)​

“An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time” Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn

Distance vs. Time​

Our opening quote describes how perceptions and experience can make so much difference. This time we're applying this to maps, where we see that people living in a huge (and mobile) country like America think 100 miles is a short distance, while those living in countries with a long pre-technological history may think 100 miles is a long way.

Travel times depend on the state of roads, and we have to remember that aside from Roman roads, roads in pre-technological times tended to be dirt tracks or (in early technological times) occasionally timber. In wet weather they were much slower than in good weather. I'm reminded of Google Maps, where travel times clearly assume that traffic is light and that you don't stop for traffic lights. Weather is assumed to be fine.

One of the keys here is that modern people are accustomed to cheap and readily available maps that show distance as well as road connectivity. That kind of map is rarely going to exist in a low technology/Medieval setting. In days before air travel and satellites, accurate maps of a modern type were a lot harder to make than they are now. What you're more likely to get, and what may be more practical for people of that era, is a map that shows times rather than distances. This would normally be a connectivity map: circles for locations, connecting lines with travel time listed (see illustration of a large-scale connectivity map, though without travel times).

How Accurate Are Your Maps?​

In non-technological times, maps may be quite inaccurate. If you've seen what some 16th century maps of the world look like, you know what I mean.

Some RPG adventure modules include both maps for the GM and maps to give the player characters. There's more detail on the GM maps, and there may be inaccuracies on the player map. The GM map will probably be in distances, perhaps with a hex grid, but the player map may be a connectivity map with travel times rather than distances.

Think of this in terms of a friend telling you how to get to their house. Some will give you directions, a sort of connectivity map: turn left here, turn right at the light, drive 5 miles, and so on. This kind of “map” uses obvious landmarks, such as “turn right at the Walmart”. Others will give you a scale map, whether a map someone else made or a map that they made themselves. Which would you rather have? I would much rather have the map, because if you lose your way and you have a (distance) map you can probably figure out how to get where you need to go. Whereas if you lose your way and you only have directions there's a good chance you won't be able to get back onto the right place in/for the directions, and you'll be lost. My wife, on the other hand, wants the other alternative, because so many “distance” maps don’t actually have a scale of distance on them, and because she judges actual distances (such as “three tenths of a mile”) poorly.

For ordinary people a connectivity map might be more useful than a distance map. If travelling by river, the connecting line would follow the river. For significant terrain you can color the connecting line accordingly, say black if the going is mountainous, blue for a river, etc.

Solving the Mapping Problem​

For RPGs, we can think of magical mapmaking devices easily enough.

• Perhaps one is a large flat piece of material that draws a map of the terrain of the area around you (you're in the middle). It would be blocked by stone underground.
• Another device could draw a map on paper or vellum as you travel.
• Another would track the exact distance you travel, whether by foot, horse, or boat.
• Another would make a map of where you’ve been, so that you can get back to your starting point.

I suppose we could say that “maps” can include connections, directions, timings, landmarks, distances, or all roads in scale (typical modern map).

There are lots of possible missions in hiring adventurers to make maps. After all, isn't exploring one of the fundamental activities in RPGs? Mapmaking is a good excuse to get player characters into overland adventures rather than dungeoneering. There might be skills that one of the party must know in order to make a map that corresponds well to the actual area. The area may be occupied by hostiles, or by strange encounters.

Your turn: Have you made an adventure out of hiring the adventurers to make maps (whether based on distance or travel time)?

 

[Blue Orange]

It's a nifty idea, and was a big part of CRPG gaming before the advent of the automap. Gives them an excuse to see the whole world, too.

 

[Ixal]

I would have expected some pictures of medieval maps...

Anyway, we vastly overestimate the usefulness of maps until way later in history then what D&D uses at base.
Try navigating to this (thats England if you can't recognize it)

And that assumes you even have a map.
Maps like the one above are works of art and not handed out to some adventurers. If they can procure any kind of map it will be even less accurate and useful to use it for actual navigation.
Later in history in the Age of Sail maps became much more important and accurate. But also closely guarded secrets.

Navigation was done going by landmarks. Town A, then town B, then town C.
If you go into the wilderness things get way harder. If you are lucky you have landmarks like keep the mountain on your right till you get to the lake.
If you do not have luck you only have time and direction like 3 days towards the rising sun.
The latter method is especially inaccurate. One day of heavy rainfall or running away for a few hours from an angry dire bear and your whole plan is screwed up and in the worst case you are lost.

Now D&D of course ignores all of that. Even in exploration themed campaigns the PCs always know exactly where they are and where they are going (most likely on a 100% accurate hex map), meaning they will never need a local guide or having to worry about finding the dungeon they are looking for and thus have to stock up on supplies for a longer search (if you would need supplies in D&D anyway)

 

[Marandahir]

Mapping routes for hyperspace jumps is a big part of the adventure of certain Star Wars stories (such as the Adventures in Wild Space series or The High Republic publishing initiative).

I feel like when you hand the highly accurate and detailed maps to the players on a silver platter, it hurts the Ranger most. There’s a lot of fun to be had in mapping the unknown. That’s a lot less offensive fiction than murdering Goblins or stealing Dragon’s hordes, after all, and still leans into the Age of Exploration / Oregon Trail tropes that inspired the creators of D&D.

I also think there’s room to have relatively accurate large scale maps and of cities and their immediate surroundings, while getting extremely inaccurate as you move inward.

Some map programs like Inkwell Ideas’ Worldographer let you create both scaled related maps (for continent or provincial scale versions), as well as turn on and off layers. There should be a fog of war layer, but I may just save a copy of my map and make it extremely inaccurate outside of my city placements and mess with the scales… working on that now that I’ve locked down my world’s climate models and placed cities and kingdoms etc. I also recommend Jester David (of 5MWD, and sometimes veteran member of this forum)’s Guide to Worldbuilding.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Years ago, when I had much more free time on my hands, I'd made a nice big hex map of the campaign area for one game that I ran, and then gave the players a side quest where they were getting paid to draw maps of their travels by a coalition of several local business and government parties as part of a kingdom-wide mandate for each city and town to provide the most accurate map they could manage to produce.

The party started out with a decently accurate map of the small port town on the coast that they were in and a handful of smaller towns/villages along a couple of roads out of the port, maybe thirty miles in any direction. The only map of the greater campaign area they had access to was something that looked like a six-year-old had drawn it with crayons and resembled the flow-chart map in the original post more than anything. Their only roughly accurate measure of distance was comparing the accurately charted nautical distance between the port and the capitol city with the week and a half of land travel it took to get there.

The party was entrusted with one of a dozen or so magical mapping devices similar to Skyrim's local map option, which would map a half-mile radius around the party as they traveled and track their distance and direction. However, it could only hold a limited amount of information, so for every roughly twelve hours of travel time they would have to stop and transfer the information on the magical map to a series of regular maps they were compiling. Since they were getting a certain amount of gold (and occasionally a minor magic item or some in-game narrative perk) for each road and city/town/village they mapped, they had a fair bit of incentive to wander pretty far afield of their main objectives for the other stuff they were involved in.
Over the course of the unfortunately short campaign, they actually managed to draw a pretty decent map of the kingdom they started in and even open up a useable trade road between it and another nearby kingdom that had previously been considered unreachable from there by a direct route.

 

[Stormonu]

In my homebrew, there is an organization known as the Klinnian Mapster's Guild (Klinn being a country, though the guild has storehouses across the continent). They purchase and reproduce maps for sale to others - traders, adventurers and even nobles or other countries. The more detailed, accurate and rare the map the greater its value. They have but one decree - by order of the greatest kingdom of the land (The Kingdom of Vall Vega), they are not allowed to reproduce maps for sale that show an area greater than a single kingdom (though for their own records they have extensive multi-kingdom maps, including the infamous "two halves" map that details the entire continent). This is meant to be "protection" to prevent enemy kingdoms or organizations from having a single picture of the known world from which to conquer other realms. Individuals however, have cobbled together their own multi-realm or near continent-spanning maps - but are careful not to let such precious maps fall into the hands of others and guarding their existance with abjuration magics or other methods. The Kingdom of Vall Vega even employs diviners whose sole job is to learn of the existence of multi-realm maps and the Kingdom then deals with such individuals as they are discovered - by fines, destruction of the maps or assassination as needed.

Guilds, trading cartels/coasters and sailing ships often have extensive connectivity-based maps for their own uses and jealously guard such maps from being viewed, copied or even used by other individuals. These maps may span multiple realms, but because they generally only note cities, border crossings and other direct-path-of-travel details, they are not subject to the multi-realm map laws of the Kingdom of Vall Vega. These maps often have secret or guarded storehouse (or contact) information noted upon them or may show secret or specially tolled routes through certain areas. These groups have been known to hire bounty hunters or assassins to retrieve such maps, preferably sight unseen by those sent to retrieve them.

All of these at one time or another have been used for the basis of adventurers - characters hired to map an unknown area, turn in a map of an area they adventured in or hired to hunt down to retrieve or destroy maps held by enemies.

 

[Hussar]

There's another thing to think about here, from a maybe slightly higher altitude perspective. Is you map something that the characters in that setting would see or is it something you are using as part of the game? Because how you draw your maps and what you give to the players should really depend on the answers to that question.

 

[Hussar]

But, in any case, so long as you put north to the top of the map, everything is good.

 

[gamerprinter]

First you have to consider that even in my earliest days playing the game (late 70's), because I was an artist, I was always the party mapper, and our particular DM at the time, called out exact distances. Now I'm a pro game cartographer and author/publisher. That makes me a corner case, unique even, for any discussion on what the majority perceives in the maps for their games. Unlike some pro cartographers, I am very detail oriented, have a keen sense of spacial geometry, and an understanding of architecture - I'm not just an artist, my wider knowledge and imagination applies to all my map designs. I try to make my maps tell stories.

Regional maps always have somewhat vague qualities to it - there's forest here, but you don't necessarily know what's in it, except for it's major features. My regional maps don't screw over the rangers in the party for explorations. Encounter scale maps, I put no mystery. I do make maps sometimes with traps and secret doors made into layered PDF so you can show or hide the secret passages from players to be able to see.

To answer your final question, having been the party cartographer, I did it back then because it interested me. Nobody else needed to worry about mapping and they didn't, so I cannot remember an adventure or campaign specifically designed as a mapping mission, although sounds like a viable intro campaign for new players. No, I haven't done that.

As an aside, at this very moment, I am working on deck plans for my custom Spelljammer ships...

 

[aia_2]

There's another thing to think about here, from a maybe slightly higher altitude perspective. Is you map something that the characters in that setting would see or is it something you are using as part of the game? Because how you draw your maps and what you give to the players should really depend on the answers to that question.

Key question! This is definitely essential: precision (for a GM) vs realistic imprecision (for a PC)?