#wonderful maps

[wuxiaphoenix]

Worldbuilding: Conquering the Map

Okay, someone needs to do a Grand Epic Fantasy where the Evil Overlord... has some trouble conquering exactly where he intends to, because he doesn’t have a good enough map.

No, really. This has happened. Probably multiple times through history. “Ramses invading Syria, that was an accident,” isn’t just a bit of dialogue from The Mummy.

If you read ancient history, there were claims of him “accidentally” invading that bit of territory. Right, right, and he accidentally had scouts sent ahead to bury water supplies in the desert so his guys could force-march through, could’ve happened to anybody....

But let’s take an example closer to modern time, with a bit more of an accessible historical record. Say, the Imjin War. AKA Toyotomi Hideyoshi deciding to give all of Korea six long years of Very Bad Days. Salt in the wound, there, was that he mostly wanted Korea as a stepping stone to invading and conquering all of Asia, and Europe on top of that. Well, that and seizing their ginseng and falcons. No, really, he had teams of samurai out capturing goshawks and other birds of prey everywhere the Japanese forces went. Takagari (hunting with hawks, or as we call it falconry) being important for samurai showing off to other samurai. And especially important given Hideyoshi had started out as a common soldier. You can guess that even after he became shogun, the other samurai never let him forget he wasn’t noble blood....

Back to the maps. And confusion thereof. Apparently Hideyoshi had been planning the invasion for well over a decade, but he had Problems. At least one of them being that he originally intended to invade Korea and China by way of Ezo (modern name, Hokkaido). Under the impression there was a land bridge that way leading to Sakhalin Island and Manchuria.

Reality? Noooot so much.

What’s kind of amusing is that he seems to have gotten this idea from a European map of the area. Instead of, you know, asking the sailors.

(OTOH he may have been studying his history, and the Ainu did invade the Yuan Empire in the 1300s. Thing was, they were living on the coast of Manchuria at the time!)

In the 1590s, though, Hideyoshi did visit Ezo, and spoke to the domain lords... who apparently very carefully set him straight on where the island did not lead to. The elder lord, Kakizaki Suehiro (they only took the family name Matsumae later, when they switched allegiance to Tokugawa Ieyasu) even sent sea otter furs from the Ainu to help keep invading soldiers warm.

Who knows? That made have made significant difference to which soldiers lived and died. Korea is a cold place to invade.

....It’s still not land-linked to Japan, though.

Come on, someone take this and run with it. “I shall invade the Kingdom of the Moon, wipe out their royalty, imprison their Chosen One, and Rule the World!”

“...Now, which pass did we need to take again?”

Enter the one that leads to a cranky dragon’s lair....

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 3 - Nobodies

[retrogamingblog2]

[archivebottles]

some splat doodles in between doing a bigger project for an irl thing

[IMG ID: Three images of various Splatoon characters. Image 1 features Shiver and Frye in alternative detailed outfits reminiscent of their in-game outfits. Shiver is holding her fan and Frye is grabbing her own arm.

Image 2 is a few various drawings of Frye. Top left is her as the 'sitting cutely' reaction image. Top right is tiny Frye dressed as a 'portly little sailor boy' with a lollipop. Bottom left is a tiny Frye doing a peace sign and bottom right is Frye when she sits down in her splatfest performance doing the finger gun pose.

Image 3 is a page full of Marinas plus one Pearl. Left is a fullbody of Marina in coveralls and a tanktop with gloves and a wrench in her pocket. Upper right is a drawing of Marina welding on the ground and kicking her legs. Below that is Pearl and Marina doing the tongue out hands on head anime pose with the label on Marina saying 'built a pipe bomb.' Pearl's label says 'funded it.' /END ID]

[seagreenlaurin]

🌻🩵🍃🌖

[harriertail]

not beating the cartographer allegations

[mapsontheweb]

Timeline and map of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Dates in bold green and dark red are those of their construction and destruction, respectively.

[melmedarda]

Having the time of my life cross referencing these right now. Great resource for fic writers.

Midtown:

Jayce's home

Viktor's home

Hexgates

Airship Dock

Clock Tower

Science Lab

Council Chamber

Science Plaza

Upper Piltover:

Caitlyn's Home

Great Guildhall

Arbor Botanica

Medarda Opera

Low Piltover:

Vi's Apt

Oame(?) Arcade

Sun Gates

Alcove District:

Brewery

Four Sisters

The Fissures (Lanes):

Vander's Bar (Last Drop)

Benzo's Shop

Hospice

The Pumphouse

Sevika's HQ

[nocturnalbunnyy]

thinking about resident evil protagonists having countless maps in their pockets. either folded neatly or just crumpled up.

leon gets lost for the 50th time that hour and scrambles to find the right map, getting out a compass and everything and starts strategizing to find the right path, meanwhile ashley is staring, wide eyed, at the ganados that just came to a freeze as soon as the maps left leon’s pockets

[wuxiaphoenix]

Worldbuilding: Visual Aids

If your characters are having an intense and possibly complicated discussion, don’t be afraid to have them break out visual aids. I know, that’s something more effective in a visual medium like TV and movies. But having them implies your characters have something they can all point to as they argue, and you can still describe the important parts of a diagram, diorama, blueprint, conspiracy board... or map.

Maps are incredibly handy. Especially when you’ve, say, dumped your characters into an unfamiliar country/world and the locals are trying to figure out where these new guys are from. In case, y’know, there are Unexpected Problems about to crop up. Because politics will kill you faster than monsters....

Maps are interesting because they depend a lot on cultural worldview. How you depict the world and places in it depends a lot on how you think the world should look. Say, putting Jerusalem as the Axis Mundi, or the Middle Kingdom, or the United States. All of these are different worldviews, and the maps can look very off from what we might expect in modern life.

Well. Except that last, likely, because it’s the product of the same Western cartography that mostly won out as “how we portray where things are with maximum accuracy”. Not that any flat map is ever totally accurate, because we live on an oblate spheroid and it is definitely not flat. But we try to minimize how much things are distorted. Which is why a good atlas has several world maps, each with different continents or spots on the globe as “center”, so you can see minimal distortion in any one place of interest.

Okay, you might say, how is this useful in a historical fantasy? After all, you have to go back to the late 1500s in most of the world for good maps, and centuries later in Asia....

Actually, not as late as you might think. Ladies and gentlemen, today I’d like to introduce you to the “Black Tulip of Cartography”, AKA the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (“A Map of the Myriad Countries of the World”).

This one was printed in 1602, put together by Matteo Ricci and a bunch of his Chinese associates. Ricci believed that one of the first steps to getting Christianity accepted in China was demonstrating that it could accurately depict the world. Hence, maps.

It’s got all the continents, including a fair depiction of the coast of Antarctica. (Even if a few bits of Tierra del Fuego got thrown in.) It’s got little tidbits of info on various places. (The map mentions feral horses in the Americas, and identifies Florida as Huādì (花地), the “Land of Flowers.”) And it more-or-less shows where China, Japan, and Korea are in relation to lands more familiar to Westerners. For the time and info available, it is a really good map.

It’s also one I can legitimately lift for Colors of Another Sky, because historically, at least one copy did get to Korea. Mwah-ha-hah....

[kataracy]

Kataang Week 2024 DAY 1 // Cultural Sharing

“I’m nervous. Am I doing okay?”

“You’re doing amazing Sweetie.”

[ilions-end]

in case anyone else is as bad at geography (especially ancient geography) like i am, wikimedia has an awesome map showing where all the notable characters in the trojan war hail from

this is just a section, click through for the much bigger map. (man, sarpedon and pyraechmes travelled FAR)

[phoenixcatch7]

Loz fandom stop being angsty and give the daydreaming kids on big fun adventures with a cool glowing sword some actual whimsy and joy challenge

[brontesauruses]

birthday boy got poisoned :(((

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde #2) - Heather Fawcett

[beepartcollection]

Did you guys know the concept of community added cosmetics was Bidwell's idea I like to think he goes through cosmetics himself, with occasional merc input

[wuxiaphoenix]

A Bit of Map Squee

This is not going to be a full book review of Korean History in Maps, edited by Michael D. Shin, because I just got it and have started flipping through it to read. It is going to be some gleeing instead. Because this is an example of a good worldbuilding source, with the kind of information you want to build a basic structure for your story setting.

This is a very recent book (just updated in 2022), meant to go along with courses in Korean history. So the history bits aren’t terribly long, about 10 to 20-odd pages per era depending on how much information we have from archaeology and the historical record. But it is condensed and useful information. What we know about the culture, agriculture, trade and wars of each era. If you wanted to set a story in any particular timeframe in Korea, this book would be a very good place to start building up, “what was it like to live in this place and time?” There are lots of photos of artifacts, including the “knife money” of Old Joseon and the Silla crown, and the maps....

Oh, the maps. Not just squiggly blob maps of “where this kingdom was, we think”. The maps include cities. Fortresses. Known market areas. There’s a topographic map of the peninsula, so you can see all the wrinkly mountains that make this an interesting area for would-be conquerors. There are maps of land and sea trade routes as far as we know them in each era, and what were major items of trade to and from each place the kingdoms interacted with. For the Joseon Dynasty we even have a map of which organizations of merchants traded in which parts of the kingdom. So if you wanted to, say, get a book on medical acupuncture from the Ming Dynasty to Hanseong (Seoul), it’d probably come overland from Shenyang through the Uiju merchants and either down the Korean coast by ship through the Gaeseong merchants, or overland through Pyongyang and then Gaeseong. If you wanted black pepper, though, it’d come in from Japan by way of Tsushima.

The section on Goguryeo (the era The Great Battle movie is set in) has some of the most info I’ve found on that kingdom in one place. Specifically it has where Ansi Fortress (Ansiseong) is. I’ve found other maps locating it before this, but they generally were set in part of the Liaodong Peninsula alone, and so not in scale with the Korean Peninsula. Making putting the two together a headache. This has it all together in the map of Goguryeo. So now I can look at that, and say, “Okay, I’m putting Daehan’s borders here. Which means the Jurchens are over there - north and west of the original timeline. And I have info on what they’d be trading, which helps explain why Nurhaci isn’t as mad at Daehan as he was at Joseon....”

Some of what they’d be trading to the Jurchens is salt, farm equipment, and cows. If you know history, you know salt is a big thing.

And trade flowing means information flowing, and at least a few people moving between places carrying those goods and ideas. If you want to have a feel for how your world works, knowing who is moving what where is an excellent foundation.