Hidden island size and mapping questions

[Arnden Quartzspar]

I'm trying to find out what the size of the largest island could be and still not show up on a common world map. Thinking about the recent Skothar mapping endeavors, I'm trying to place my island nation of Wa large enough and close enough to Skothar, that the maps wouldn't show it off the coast.
Any ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thank you.

[Morfie]

Skothar is a 72 miles per hex map, so a 24 mile hex of an island wouldn't show up.

[agathokles]

Not necessarily -- it would not show as an entire hex, but might certainly show as a smaller element.

For instance, look at Mark Howard's renditions of the Sea of Dread in 8, 24 and 72 miles per hex.
You'll see that, e.g., Sclaras shows up in 8 and 24, but not 72 miles per hex. To the contrary, White Island shows up in all of them. Now, White Island is about 3 8-mile hexes, whereas Sclaras is more or less 1.5 of an 8 mile hex.

I suppose the limit is somewhere in the middle -- maybe 2 8 mile hexes, or 333 sq miles (i.e., about the size of the RW islands of Chios in Greece, Basse-Terre in Guadalupe, or Sado in Japan).

That said, the Skothar map should be taken as an approximation, since it is based on the limited information we have on that continent in canon.

GP

[mah9]

Not necessarily -- it would not show as an entire hex, but might certainly show as a smaller element.

For instance, look at Mark Howard's renditions of the Sea of Dread in 8, 24 and 72 miles per hex.
You'll see that, e.g., Sclaras shows up in 8 and 24, but not 72 miles per hex. To the contrary, White Island shows up in all of them. Now, White Island is about 3 8-mile hexes, whereas Sclaras is more or less 1.5 of an 8 mile hex.

I suppose the limit is somewhere in the middle -- maybe 2 8 mile hexes, or 333 sq miles (i.e., about the size of the RW islands of Chios in Greece, Basse-Terre in Guadalupe, or Sado in Japan).

That said, the Skothar map should be taken as an approximation, since it is based on the limited information we have on that continent in canon.

GP

From (a rather faded) memory, I think Sclaras was just on the borderline of being 1 pixel. But that was just based on the size of the hexes I was using, and doing it all in MSPaint, rather than the more scalable efforts of Thorf.

[agathokles]

Of course, in vector graphics you could be arbitrarily precise at any scale. Still, when viewing/printing hexes at the usual size, you'd still drop to near 1 pixel.

BTW, very cool maps in spite of the tools!

GP

[Thorf]

My perspective is simply to look at the largest islands around Skothar — probably Zyxl in particular — and consider anything less than that to be quite acceptable.

Don't forget that all the official maps we have of (most of) Skothar are world maps. At that scale, very few islands are shown at all. Generally it's only the most major ones. Compare what's shown of known areas in their familiar large scale maps with the super-small scale world map and you'll see that a lot was left out for the world map. All of that sort of stuff can be freely added to Skothar and Davania without "going against canon".

Mark — great to see you here again.

[Arnden Quartzspar]

Thank you, everyone for the suggestions. I think that I'm going to look at the RW suggestions and go from there.

[Raymond]

If you haven't already, you might want to check out some of the posts on this site:

http://www.thorfmaps.com/lets-map-mystara-1981-ii/

The author talks about issues with islands showing up on one map but not another. I didn't find the post right off but I think the link above gets you near that topic.

[Arnden Quartzspar]

I've been thinking of a followup question. Could there be areas of Mystara that haven't been mapped? Looking at the migration maps from http://pandius.com/stmfrend.html I see that during the Tangoro migration of 1600 BC there is mention of a possible island situated between Skothar and Davania. Would this island be too small to be seen on the 72 mile hex map or could it be larger and just not mapped?

[agathokles]

Either possibility is acceptable. Furthermore, an island could have been present in the past, but not in the present time.
GP

[Arnden Quartzspar]

I think that I have a backstory to how and why the island would be hidden.
I haven't stopped working on Wa's history. It can be used as a secret society that controls things behind the scenes.
Kinda like a "Secret History of Mystara."