The Campaign Builder's Guild

Years ago, I drew up a map for my setting: Endless Horizons. Nomadic gave me a lot of help figuring out river placement and climate/vegetation. While I like the map that I have, I'm striving for accuracy and I just got a new tool to work with.

My setting began with the idea of wanting to make a Future Earth setting. Like Terry Brooks's "Sword of Shannara", my fantasy world is Earth in the future. This gives me a structure to help me design (I like structure), but it also gives me a lot of freedom. You see, I have chosen to set Endless Horizons 50 million years in the future. This is nearly as much time away from now as the Dinosaurs were away from now. How humans are still around, and in the same state we are now, is part of the setting's history (what people think of as "Angels" are evolved humans). Many animals will have died off, and many more animals will have risen to take their place. Heck, new plants could have arisen too; did you know there weren't grasses and flowers during most of the age of the Dinosaurs? Later I will be starting a thread to come up with new animals and plants to populate the world, but for now I want to talk about the big picture: mapping.

This website helped me out a lot when I was first getting started mapping: Earth History. The trouble was that the map projections were difficult to work with. I later found out about the dymaxion map, or the Fuller Projection, which I have since fallen in love with. It really helps that it is a map projection on a d20, so it's very suitable to gaming. I don't know why WotC doesn't sell or include maps of their settings in card stock using this; I can imagine there are Forgotten Realms and Eberron players who would love to have a d20 globe of their favorite setting.

So, I dug around that Earth History page. It seems the site creator once sold sticker sets that could turn a styrofoam ball into a globe. I emailed him to ask if there was any way I could still purchase those maps.

Well, he emailed me the maps for free.

Now I have this nifty map to play with. I'm going to adapt it to the dymaxion projection and return to work on my setting. Woo.



So, now I have/get to rechoose the genesis locations of each race, the major nations/regions, and establish where the wilds still are.

Does anyone see any points of interest on the map?

I think the former Madagascar would be a very cool place for the genesis of a race. It could be either very isolationist or very focused on a navy tradition.

Thanks! I do have the Triton race; they are an amphibian race (though I think I'm going to have the evolve from a fish, so a new line of amphibians, since most, if not all, of today's amphibians are fresh water). Tritons' ability to swim and breathe under water would have allowed them to spread settlements across the world in the early days, meaning they should be wide spread now.

Have the settlements stayed 'true' to the original settlement or has there been divergence with them being so widespread? If they have stayed 'true' how so? Do they have a system of communication beyond messenger? If they have diverged, what are some of the differences? How deep down can they go? Would they have explored the various trenches of the deep sea? Discovered ruined cities, or even preserved ships, metal or wood, especially in very cold water which preserves wood.

There's been divergence. I've planned at least 4 "subcultures" per race, with only one of them being the progenitor (and, oddly enough, the progenitor group in almost every case is the more villainous group). Communication is by messenger for most people, but the wealthy can afford magic (sendings, teleportation, etc.). The dwarves can mine pretty deep, but there isn't an Underdark (in it's place is the Spirit World, which has it's dark and it's light places). They have not explored the deep sea (even Tritons aren't immune to pressure).

Ruined cities have been ruined for millions of years. They're sites of precious mineral deposits, what with the steel from buildings and ancient war machines to the copper from wiring.

Thanks for getting me thinking about these things.