I've finished two so far.
Oronce Fine's 1531 "double cardiform" map

Martin Behaim's 1492 "Erdapfel" map

I was going more fantastic than that. Blood ocean. All blood, the whole thing of it.Sturm wrote: ↑Thu Mar 29, 2018 10:09 amIt's not even clear why the Red Sea was called so, algae, surrounding rocks, or maybe an ancient way of associating the southern direction with the color red. Anyway it would be interesting to have a fantasy world/alternate Earth with magical red floating algae..
Well both this and the sea of blood could be nice ideas for fantasy worlds
This is already how DND handles one of the Elemental Planes.
Something like this is also true of the Exalted setting. The four cardinal directions are associated with elements, and the world stops containing any other elements if you travel far enough in that direction. The south is fire, the west is water, the north is air (and also cold), and the east is wood. So if you go all the way south, you get nothing but a chasm of fire beyond the edge of the ground; if you keep going east, you eventually find giant trees growing infinitely up to the Firmament and infinitely down into the bottomless pit.Khedrac wrote: ↑Sat Mar 31, 2018 5:34 pmThere's always Glorantha...
Towards the south things get hotter and hotter - the sea that goes south starts to boil and on land it turns to desert before becoming really hot - the Gloranthan equivalent of an elemental plane of fire is just the far south (far north is ice).
Actual burning sea is covered differently - when at sea you do not want to run into a 'fireberg' (think iceberg but made of fire) which are the result of the Godlearners messing around while at war with a race of sailors.
You would love Earthdawn. The Death Sea (where the Black Sea is today) is a literal sea of lava.Ashtagon wrote: ↑Fri Mar 30, 2018 8:46 amWhen I was really young, I used to imagine the Red Sea was called that because it was literally on fire. Because fire is red of course, and it's hot, and that sea is in the middle of the world's two biggest deserts, which are also hot. And therefore the Red Sea's fires is what turned them into deserts.
Gotta love child logic sometimes.
I'll have to take your word for it, since you clearly know more about British geopolitics than I do, but I can see using similar logic in more familiar locales. If I were doing a fantasy Britain, the first thing I would do is make it physically larger, as it seems to have a far greater cultural presence than the tiny size of the island would indicate. I mean, if I were judging both England and Russia by their volumes of literary output and conventional folklore, I would think they were roughly the same size. (Of course, I only know them in terms of land area; maybe the population is so dense in England and so sparse in Russia that they really are comparably sized as nations. )Ashtagon wrote: ↑Thu Apr 05, 2018 11:31 pmThis map reminds me of a rather unusual factoid in early modern UK politics: Cornwall and Devon, which are drawn almost twice their actual size in the historic map, had a massive amount of political representation (44 and 26 MPs then, vs. 6 and 10 MPs now). While this was in reality a demonstration of rotten boroughs, what if in a fantasy world it instead represented an incredibly large and populous and politically active southwest of England? That would suggest tin (and perhaps coal and iron too) mining, plus based on location a healthy shipping industry (especially for Bristol, which was a potential contender for Liverpool in Atlantic shipping). This could change the dynamic of the country quite a bit.
Err, well, England is actually very densely populated these days, Scotland and Wales less so (in fact London now has a higher population that Scotland and Wales combined). If I remember correctly, England is getting close to the Dutch population density!willpell wrote: ↑Thu Apr 05, 2018 11:44 pmI'll have to take your word for it, since you clearly know more about British geopolitics than I do, but I can see using similar logic in more familiar locales. If I were doing a fantasy Britain, the first thing I would do is make it physically larger, as it seems to have a far greater cultural presence than the tiny size of the island would indicate. I mean, if I were judging both England and Russia by their volumes of literary output and conventional folklore, I would think they were roughly the same size. (Of course, I only know them in terms of land area; maybe the population is so dense in England and so sparse in Russia that they really are comparably sized as nations. )Ashtagon wrote: ↑Thu Apr 05, 2018 11:31 pmThis map reminds me of a rather unusual factoid in early modern UK politics: Cornwall and Devon, which are drawn almost twice their actual size in the historic map, had a massive amount of political representation (44 and 26 MPs then, vs. 6 and 10 MPs now). While this was in reality a demonstration of rotten boroughs, what if in a fantasy world it instead represented an incredibly large and populous and politically active southwest of England? That would suggest tin (and perhaps coal and iron too) mining, plus based on location a healthy shipping industry (especially for Bristol, which was a potential contender for Liverpool in Atlantic shipping). This could change the dynamic of the country quite a bit.
It's interesting to see the differences between Oronce Fine's 1531 "double cardiform" map and Martin Behaim's 1492 "Erdapfel" map. Did Martin Behaim make the land in his world slightly smaller, or is the map shifted a bit to the right (east)?Ashtagon wrote: ↑Wed Mar 28, 2018 9:17 pmSo among other things, I've been teaching myself to make maps. Specifically, I've been taking early renaissance maps and re-projecting to a standard projection (specifically, Kavraiskiy-7), to make them easy to compare with each other. Their views of the world were sometimes quite surprising.
Nice!Ashtagon wrote: ↑Fri Aug 03, 2018 7:08 pmNew map is up...
Deviantart Link: https://www.deviantart.com/ashtagon/art ... -757676232
You need to get yourself a climate map, change the projection and then overlay it on top of this map (and your other maps). That should give you most of the answers, as it will show the Hadley Cells and they influence the weather.
Inland seas could be fun for roleplaying purposes.Ashtagon wrote: ↑Fri Aug 03, 2018 7:08 pm2: Same question for NW America. In particular, that inland sea is troubling for geology purposes. It looks like the southern and possibly eastern coast should generally be unsuitable for harbours, possibly mostly cliff-like. Does that make sense given everything else? How would the radically different coastline affect vegetation and climate?
Use that one...if you can reconstruct the missing bits.