Withholding the Map
Mapping & The West Marches
I think we often enter into a fallacy when writing a secondary world, specifically a frontier. We think that a map might help it feel real, so we provide one, even when it shouldn’t exist.
The mistake we make is two fold; Firstly, most audiences assume objectivity in the map (even one clearly hand sketched and artistically rendered) and two, they assume everything, at least, everything of importance to the story, is mapped.
Its an easy trap to fall into. For one, our whole world is mapped, we may not know the details of what lies beneath the canopy of the densest rain forests, or the interiors of caves in the Andes or Himalayas, but we can quite literally call up very accurate satellite images of our entire planet within seconds whenever we want to. This is an incredible luxury for aspiring cartographers, but it is also a tragedy if we consider the map as a story telling element - there is basically no mystery left in mapping. Furthermore, with our modern tools, it might be very easy to forget how people actually mapped places pre satellite.
Ancient maps led to countless massive mysteries and failings, even fictional islands, countries and continents. It wasn’t long ago that settlers were drawing California as an island and mis-mapping whole swathes of Africa while looking for a fictional mountain range.
Hy Brasil was a fictional island off the Irish coast, the myth of which likely stemmed from a certain angle at which the headland was reflected on the distant ocean. But it persisted on maps until the 1870s.
There was a even dominant theory in European geography that argued for the existence of an entire undiscovered southern continent. This theory was predicated purely on the idea that the world was probably balanced where land distribution was concerned, but was widely accepted for hundreds of years.
This essay isn’t just about leaving missing parts or mistakes in your maps. Its about mapping like you actually live in the world. Forgoing satellite and discovering your continent with whoever mapped it.
Why bother doing all this?
Because maybe then your maps wont be arbitrary, or regular. They wont cut off in neat lines at the borders or have continents shaped suspiciously like the pieces of paper you drew them on. Better - they’ll be able to tell the story of who mapped them.
None of this is really a theory, the evidence of it is all over old maps. But it is also very easily recreated in any even vaguely accurate simulation.
Take this “West Marches” game of Dungeons & Dragons that I ran. A popular style of play pioneered by Ben Robbins. There were around 12 players, with varying levels of interest and availability, playing in groups of 2-5 over the course of 4 odd months. The players’ only goals were to explore and acquire riches, how they did it was up to them.
This is the map I started with.
And this is the map I gave them.
You might think this is bad - there’s absolutely nothing there, no rivers, points of interest or guidelines on where to start. But I also handed them all a very liberal amount of clues and rumours. Things like “there’s a ruined tower over a mountain to the south”, or “there’s a sacred grove to the west”. Better yet - rumours which promised reward, stuff like “an enchanted ring lies at the bottom of a pool” or “a vast hoard of gold was buried at x location”.
This is pretty much how colonial mapping worked. Colonists talked to natives and heard things like “there are big mountains to the north” or “there’s a river full of fish to the east” and they followed up - but they followed up a lot faster when they saw the Muisca King clad head to toe in gold and decided there must be a lost city of the stuff (even if El Dorado never existed). Often the settlement of a region was entirely facilitated by these kinds of treasure myths. People found gold or opal or ivory, the word spread, and the region got mapped.
Madder still, people assumed there was treasure and went anyway. Once someone cracked open the first Pharaoh’s tomb and discovered the gold you can bet they were all getting robbed, even if the next nine were empty.
Once you have the promise of fortune, be it gold, fertile land, a new kingdom. All you have to do is simulate the environment in a plausible way.
With this hex map I set some very basic rules.
You traveled 2 hexes per day through all terrain except mountains (1 hex). And you traveled 4 hexes per day on a boat or a horse.
Horses were limited by terrain (can’t move through mountains or dense jungle/swamp). And boats were limited by the locations of rivers big enough to facilitate their use.
Additionally, with gold and time you could construct a road. Roads meant everyone traveled faster, they ignored travel restrictions caused by terrain, and they reduced your chance of encountering dangers out in the wilderness.
With the promise of reward and these very simple rules in place, I sat back and watched as my totally obscured map was revealed in very real time. Adding to the illustration after each adventure. Below are the stages of development.
Stage 1: The world is unknown.
People make beelines to rumoured points of interest, and mark out the supposed locations of more POIs on the map.
Stage 2: The local area.
People gain a relative understanding of their local region, they can accurately deduce where things like rivers come from.
Stage 3: Expansion
Horses are acquired allowing for further POIs to be located, easy modes of travel like river systems begin to be mapped, the first roads start to appear, connected to frontier outposts.
Stage 4: Branching paths
The paths of easiest travel are explored, as the map grows exponentially bigger, large blank spaces appear between things like river systems or safe travel routes.
I think, given time, this world would be mapped all the way to the borders while great blank patches of wilderness remained very close to established settlements.
I found that southern expansion occurred much faster than northern expansion, almost completely due to the northern Swamps and Marshes limiting the use of horses. River systems fascinated access to the Continent’s interior and were often mapped months before anyone bothered to go even a few miles inland from their banks. It also took a very long time for anyone to attempt to cross the southern Mountains, purely because there was always an easier path to choose.
When it came to establishing outposts the players favoured renovating existing ruins in the wilderness, as it was more time and cost effective. And so layers of civilisation and culture began to appear over each other, as the leftovers of dead civilisations were repurposed into forts, farming outposts and strongholds.
None of this is a revelation - it pretty accurately mirrors how real maps got filled in only a few hundred years ago. Whats cool about it is that its doable. You could run your own simulation on your own map tomorrow. You wouldn’t need 12 people and 6 months. You would need something simple like 2 friends and the promise of a beer or dinner.
When I handed out clues, about half of them were drawings, little sketches I called “scraps of map” with things like X’s marking locations. The players used these drawings when filling in the map, matching up the paths of rivers or mountains in order to cross-reference the locations of hidden treasure or settlements. I let them get very used to this approach, 8 or so different players probably did it at least once, each, over the course of 4 months. Then I pulled the first trick.
Like El Dorado or Hy Brasil I decided it would be cool if these scraps of map sometimes lied, or tricked you, or led you astray. Not just as a let down but as a real problem, a reminder that frontiers are dangerous, and that the only map you can trust is the one you actually create.
I started adding scraps of map that depicted the world as it was. I drew verdant forests that had long since been burned to ash, or shining cities reduced to ruins, I watched these players set out on time consuming journeys to reach locations that were fictional, or lost, or forever changed.
I did this because I wanted them to understand that the mapping was up to them, I had found that I had handed out so many of these scraps of map that a lot of the mapping was relegated to tracing existing sketches that they already had.
In the end we had both famous sites that it took months to uncover, and persistent myths, things the players clung to even after I thought they had become obviously false - things that as the game fizzled to a close no one ever realised weren’t real.
Players hated the idea that someone else (usually another player) had already uncovered the mystery of a lost tomb or temple. They hated it so much that they often talked themselves into believing there was some other, greater mystery just around the corner. Often when there wasn’t.
Conversely, we had mysteries that were never explored. Archaeological sites that were abandoned due to their remoteness, or their lack of treasure. Or secrets never found because I never handed out a rumour to them. Hidden rooms, doors, even entire regions of the map masked by obscurity.
I think mysteries are important because they create great depth. All it takes is one wall to reveal a hidden door, or one cave to lead to a subterranean city, and everyone starts wondering how many times there was a great secret within reach.
TAKEAWAYS
What are the takeaways? Well, to start, we know there should probably be big blank patches on our frontier maps. But furthermore, we know in which order places would have been settled. We know the oldest cities would be on the coasts and rivers, while the dangerous interiors would be home only to frontier forts, or more worryingly - ruins. We know people don’t always bother to build roads when they have a good river to use, and we know that you can be very close neighbours with someone and never know it if there is even one six mile hex of mountains in between you.
We know that civilisation becomes layered, because everyone, throughout history, usually agrees on the best places to build. And we know mystery and treasure beget exploration, and therefore more mystery and more treasure.
None of this is essential to mapping a secondary world, but having seen it play out over months, it would be very hard for me to not be influenced by it in the future.