Gloranthan poster maps

[Tupper]

I have a copy of the Argan Argar Atlas.  It's a lovely book, but I find some of the smaller details (especially lakes and hills around Dragon Pass) quite hard to read.  Are the poster maps (24 map set of Glorantha or 6 map set of Genertela) any larger/easier to read? 

[tedopon]

I think it's the same scale as the book.

[Lordabdul]

The 24 map set of the entire Glorantha is at a much smaller scale than the AAA:

The 6 poster set of Genertela is at a very similar scale, just a tiiiiny bit bigger than the AAA.

More importantly, both map sets are printed with a better contrast than the AAA, which I find too dark (assuming I didn't get a bogus version.... I got it from eBay).

[tedopon]

I think I have only seen the 6 map version in person. How big is the 24 map one all laid out?

[Lordabdul]

26 minutes ago, tedopon said:

I think I have only seen the 6 map version in person. How big is the 24 map one all laid out?

You just need to do the math  

The Glorantha map set has 24 sheets measuring 30.5x42.7cm, folded in two. They unfold horizontally and get laid out 4 across and 6 down. So the complete map is about 183cm tall and 171cm wide. You can basically lie down next to it and it will be the same size as you!

I don't have a good picture of that one, but last year I posted a picture of the Genertela map set with the obligatory banana for scale. That one is made of 6 sheets measuring 61x91.5cm, folded six ways. They are laid out 3 across and 2 down. So the complete map is about 122cm tall and 183cm wide. Once again, you can lie down next to it!

Look at the picture below and imagine that the Glorantha map is more square but almost just as wide.

Needless to say, these map sets are huuuuuuuge!

I'm really looking forward to the new Sartar map coming up for the Sartar book (or is it the Starter Set?). I just hope Chaosium will think about us cartography nerds and do justice to what looks to be a truly wonderful map by selling it as a big poster on premium material (something better than what RedBubble offers, preferably). For instance, the legendary Harn map is available on vinyl and it's stunning.

Edited November 27, 2020 by lordabdul

[Tupper]

Thanks heaps for the pictures. That really clarifies the scale for me. Looks like it wouldn’t solve my readability problem. 

What I’d really love would be vector images of the maps... that way you could zoom in on some of the “busy” bits of the maps.  

[Stephen L]

7 hours ago, Tupper said:

vector images of the maps... that way you could zoom in on some of the “busy” bits of the maps

You know that the PDF of the The Argan Argar Atlas (an excellent mapping resource) is available from the Jonstown compendium:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/178723/Argan-Argar-Atlas

Which means you can zoom and print to the scale you want.

Did I mention, it's free.  

[Joerg]

2 hours ago, Stephen L said:

You know that the PDF of the The Argan Argar Atlas (an excellent mapping resource) is available from the Jonstown compendium:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/178723/Argan-Argar-Atlas

Which means you can zoom and print to the scale you want.

Did I mention, it's free.  

It still is only a bitmap, and a bitmap of so low resolution that you cannot even zoom the legend of the map into readability (which is why that was released as a separate image shortly after the AAA became available).

I have seen a glimpse of Colin Driver's original digital maps for the Guide and the AAA, and they have a resolution that you might print out in the same size as the Dragon Pass boardgame with hardly any pixelation occurring, if any at all. The tree symbols would still be quite oversized.

Getting these maps into a vector format and re-calculating those tree symbols into a forestation density map as a thematic layer in a GIS is one of my many long-term "I'd love to do or see this" projects. Clickable maps where clicking a feature or a label would get you to a gazetteer page or a selection of links to publications would be the ideal encyclopedia tool for Glorantha, backed with a database of maybe 100k entries with lists of text segments of the publications to date (as an extimate, probably at least half a million such snippets, or otherwise landing marks in published pdfs).

One thing that you should be aware of is the amount of generalizing errror you get when zooming in too far into an overview map. Quite often the location of the icon representing a terrain feature is not completely in the same place as the feature would have in a more detailed map. Assigning tribal areas from a text label caused endless grief and wrong information back when the maps in Thunder Rebels and Dragon Pass: Land of Thunder were used by many a Sartarite campaign. The Balmyr label for instance goes left to right, while the tribal area goes mainly north to south. This led people to assume that the Locaem inhabited the lands around Wilmskirk. Quite annoying if you had a Balmyr campaign in that area, based on a map that matched the tribes to the hexes of the Dragon Pass gameboard, which in turn was derived from Greg's master map which had been unavailable at that time.

Greg Stafford was a master of layered mapping. He left an archive of transparent paper with all manner of thematic layers in a number of scales. If you own early editions of The Fortunate Succession or its beta release The Dara Happan Book of Emperors, you will recognize some of the thematic layers that made their way into the historical maps of the Guide to Glorantha. These layers exist for every fifty years of Gloranthan history, at least for western and central Genertela! Jeff chose those with the most pertinent changes to present the historical outline.

If you compare the new master maps that Jeff teased three years ago at the Kraken (one of the few conventions he doesn't need a plane flight to attend, which means he can bring over-sized luggage) and from which the new maps now presented as previews on facebook with the AAA you will find quite a few differences. As a rule, a detail map always trumps an overview map, as it has a lot less generalization errors.

When you create a detail map from an overview map, it is fine to re-arrange details a bit. Re-positioning text labels in a map of a different scale is pretty much a no-brainer, except for the runes that are actual terrain features (like the dragonewt rune created by the functional dragonewt roads in Dragon Pass). You just cannot make justice to every river bend, every bay, every local ridge, in an overview map. 

 

When it comes to printed maps, there is only a limited amount of thematic information you can cram into the map. Do you want area colors to signify territorial claims, or do you want them to mark terrain features, or elevation gradients? The AAA maps use solid color for elevation classes. The political maps in the Guide use different greyscale filling to define areas claimed by larger polities. The snippets of the new Sartar map use color to indicate forestation, arable land, or the Quivin massif.

Speaking of those snippets, I notice that these restrict all arable land shown in that map to the valley bottoms of Sartar. Given the distances between some of those settlements and the arable areas marked on that map, I wonder whether those areas mapped out as arable are actually under the plow, or under a temple blessing, and whether there are other field areas on fertile slopes that are not shown in the map. If you compare the Colymar history in the Adventure Book with the map of arable land in Colymar terrritory, there is no way to have any lost clans in the Thunder Hills or the Brambleberry Vale doing any agriculture on such land, but clans like the Karandoli or the Jenstali are well-documented (though not at all clearly located in the map).

 

[borbetomagnus]

I've been reading the AAA (Argan Argar Atlas) with accompanying maps as reference for the current RQG campaign I'm playing in set in Esrolia and it's a brilliant book and map set. It helps us to plan our adventures since at some point we will be venturing out to the sea and possibly tracing the route of Holy Dormal on his voyage when he broke the sea. We'll also be visiting the God-King since it's known that his body is beginning to age and the next match of the Masters of Luck and Death will be coming in the next few years.

We've been roleplaying through the character creation years rather than simply rolling the backgrounds since these player characters are somewhat specialized and the tables in RQG core can't accommodate the details and nuances that we want to highlight from our childhoods. We started as 10 year-old Esrolians and have had 1-2 sessions representing the year before advancing to the next year. We just finished year 14. And we're having a wonderful time.

[AlHazred]

I remember getting a poster map of the Lunar Empire when it first came out; it was about 3 feet by 4 feet or so. Lovely thing. Then I printed out Sartar to scale; it was a tiny square about an inch and a half by two inches. I pasted it to the bottom of the Lunar Empire map, to the accompaniment of my (Sartarite) players' groans and gnashing teeth.

Good times!

Edited October 24, 2022 by AlHazred

[Eff]

1 hour ago, AlHazred said:

I remember getting a poster map of the Lunar Empire when it first came out; it was about 3 feet by 4 feet or so. Lovely thing. Then I printed out Sartar to scale; it was a tiny square about an inch and a half by two inches. I pasted it to the bottom of the Lunar Empire map, to the accompaniment of my (Sartarite) players' groans and gnashing teeth.

Good times!

I've been working on a square map of the Lunar Empire and extending it to the southern border of Sartar means that there's a tiny corner of Dragon Pass and then a lot of Arstola and far eastern Ralios along the bottom. 😆

[Bill the barbarian]

On 11/26/2020 at 5:15 PM, Tupper said:

I have a copy of the Argan Argar Atlas.  It's a lovely book, but I find some of the smaller details (especially lakes and hills around Dragon Pass) quite hard to read.  Are the poster maps (24 map set of Glorantha or 6 map set of Genertela) any larger/easier to read? 

Austin Conrad (Author of Monster of the Months and many great works) and I have been squinting through many maps over the years and it can be quite difficult. Good luck!

 

3 hours ago, borbetomagnus said:

I've been reading the AAA (Argan Argar Atlas) with accompanying maps as reference for the current RQG campaign I'm playing in set in Esrolia and it's a brilliant book and map set. It helps us to plan our adventures since at some point we will be venturing out to the sea and possibly tracing the route of Holy Dormal on his voyage when he broke the sea. We'll also be visiting the God-King since it's known that his body is beginning to age and the next match of the Masters of Luck and Death will be coming in the next few years.

Agreed!

Edited October 24, 2022 by Bill the barbarian

[svensson]

Magnifying glass and diffuse light. Helps a lot.

[Bill the barbarian]

23 minutes ago, svensson said:

Magnifying glass and diffuse light. Helps a lot.

Even with the AAA, or do you have it?

[Ali the Helering]

46 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Even with the AAA, or do you have it?

Or an ever changing canon....

[Rick Meints]

On 11/28/2020 at 7:53 AM, Joerg said:

It still is only a bitmap, and a bitmap of so low resolution that you cannot even zoom the legend of the map into readability (which is why that was released as a separate image shortly after the AAA became available).

I have seen a glimpse of Colin Driver's original digital maps for the Guide and the AAA, and they have a resolution that you might print out in the same size as the Dragon Pass boardgame with hardly any pixelation occurring, if any at all. The tree symbols would still be quite oversized.

Back when we were doing the Guide to Glorantha project it was decided, for good or ill, that we would do the maps in Photoshop, not as Vector. Converting them to AI/vector isn't really an option, especially 10 years later. We are keeping this in mind when doing the newer maps for RQG.

[Joerg]

16 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

Back when we were doing the Guide to Glorantha project it was decided, for good or ill, that we would do the maps in Photoshop, not as Vector. Converting them to AI/vector isn't really an option, especially 10 years later. We are keeping this in mind when doing the newer maps for RQG.

Conversion might be an option.

As long as you have the original bitmap layers in your files, converting the map to vector automatically should be manageable (I personally would need to rehash GIS course material from a few years ago to do so, though). The stamped tree symbols for instance can be reduced to point data, which then could be assigned to a measurement of point density, or as point coordinates for the tree symbol which then could be adjusted to scale. QGIS has routines for recreating the isohypses (elevation lines) or the colored areas indicating an elevation interval as vector objects.

Alternatively, the vectorization can be done when zooming in to areas, both where there are more detailed maps available (like for the core regions of Dragon Pass and Prax) and where there aren't. I have developed other settings with such a method, manually back then, but one can have algorithms that undo the virtual smoothening that the transition from the (yet hypothetical) more detailed map to the existing map created.

[Rick Meints]

11 hours ago, Joerg said:

Conversion might be an option.

In short, you made a lot of assumptions to get to "might be". I stand by what I said in my post with "Isn't really an option".