Friday, October 3, 2008

From the Attic: Maps from the Past

For you fans of hand drawn maps. I have a scan I did of one of the 17" by 22" maps I did during the late 80's and early 90's. This one of Central Flanass of the World of Greyhawk. It is drawn in Harn style. Unfortunately part of it got nailed by water at some point.



4 comments:

Joseph said...

It's a thing of beauty. I only wish I still had my old Greyhawk maps from the late 80's. Pretty much the whole Flanaess on a 5-miles-per-hex scale. I envy folks who had the foresight to keep their stuff. *sigh*

Tavis said...

That's awesome! It looks like it's drawn at the scale where each hex is 30 miles across the middle, like the Darlene map, no?

Hand-drawn beauty notwithstanding, the thing I find most interesting is the density of settlements; almost one every other hex at this scale. Some I think I recognize, like Elredd and Fax on the Wild Coast. Were you mostly mapping things that'd already been established in the Flanaess, or were you deducing settlements based on population density?

I've been thinking about using Google Earth or other real-world maps to try to get a sense of what terrain features can be seen at a 30-mile-hex scale vs. a 5-mile hex scale. Do you have a sense of what scale ratios to look for to approximate a Darlene-map view or a Wilderlands-map view?

I've been working on a page showing the relationships between different hex map scales. Have you ever made maps of the same region done up in multiple different scales, like a Greyhawk hex broken down into Wilderlands scale hexes, or the Outdoor Survival map "zoomed out" to the Darlene Scale?

Robert Conley said...

Tavis -

The region around the City of Greyhawk is a local map from a Greyhawk City Supplement. I used that and Harn as the basis for the additional settlements.

I will make a quick post to show you what in those yellow areas.

Remember I drew this map pre-internet. The only source I had then for Medieval demographics was Harn. I dug through the library enough to know that they were in the ball park.

PhaseStar said...

Is this map still available somewhere? The link above does not work.