Long ago, at the dawn of this blog, I declared Darlene's exquisite map of The World of Greyhawk to be "the best map ever." To be fair, in the linked post, I qualified my hyperbole somewhat, saying that no "map for a fantasy RPG setting has ever captivated me the way" this one had – and I stand by that. Darlene's map of the Flanaess is one of the greatest maps ever made for use with a fantasy roleplaying game. It's beautiful simply as a work of art, eminently usable, and, for me at least, almost as iconic as Dave Trampier's AD&D Players Handbook cover.
However, there is another map of which I am equally fond. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's this one:
I apologize for its small size. The original is quite large and the width of a blog post is inadequate to show its true glory. The map depicts the portion of Charted Space in which the Third Imperium and its interstellar neighbors exist, along with a couple of important astrographic features, like the Great and Lesser Rifts. Each of the rectangles represents a single sector, an area of space equal to 32 × 40 parsecs. Some of the sectors are named, like the Solomani Rim, the Beyond, and the Spinward Marches, but many of them are not.
The map was, I believe, originally produced by GDW as a freebie to give away at conventions and to mail order recipients. I received mine in a large envelope after I'd written to the company to request their latest catalog. I was ecstatic to get it, because I'd previously seen a black and white reproduction of the map in a British book about RPGs whose title escapes me now (a No Prize to anyone who can tell me which one it was in the comments). I liked the map so much that I hung it on my bedroom wall, belong the Darlene Greyhawk map and there it stayed for years, even after I'd gone away to college. Unfortunately, the map was lost when I removed it from the wall some years later.
Unlike the Greyhawk map, this one is simple in its presentation and lacking in detail. Nevertheless, I'd still say it's quite beautiful. There's an elegance to it that I have always found incredibly appealing, an elegance that's very much of a piece with the elegance of Traveller itself. It uses only three colors – black, white, and red – just like the original Traveller boxed set, which I think contributes to rather than detracts from its attractiveness. In science fiction, minimalism is often a very solid esthetic choice and it's one that classic Traveller embraced from the very beginning (more on that particular topic in a future post).
The map's not without a couple of problems, the first of which being that it's a flat, two-dimensional depiction of three-dimensional space. That's an issue Traveller has always had and there's no easy way around it, though some fans have tried over the years. I've never been much bothered by it myself, since properly 3D star maps tend to be very complex and difficult to use in play. The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that most sectors of Charted Space are claimed by one or more large interstellar empires, which makes it feel fairly cramped rather than wide open. For many types of sci-fi campaigns, this is fine. If you're looking for one in which exploration is a central activity, it's less ideal, though there are some ways to fix this.
Even so, this remains one of my favorite RPG maps and one to which I regularly return for inspiration.
Great post. Fantastic map. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I also had the fortune of being inducted to an AD&D campaign by older teenagers and a few young military men, including our Dungeon Master. My first character, a 1st lvl elven thief, was assassinated by the local Thieves Guild for operating without their authority. I had stolen a pearl from our adventuring party and tried to sell it to a fence in town. I was found face down in the sewer, no die roll, nothing. Haha, talk about a rude awakening and "welcome to the club". I was 13 and wouldn't change that memory for the world.
After rolling up a new character, a human magic-user named Blif the Impotent, and a long a magical campaign in the Kingdom of Nyrond, the older players decided we were going to play Traveller. One the military men unfurled a gigantic hand-drawn Imperium map, one in which he'd meticulously copied and painstakingly labeled every system and sector in many coloured inks. I loved maps and still do. It was a sight to behold.
During some game session, my friend made me laugh so hard that Coca Cola sprayed from my nose and I spit brown soda all over the map like some giant liquid asteroid belt. The cartographer was pissed!
The first time I saw that map it was on the wall of an FLGS above the shelves they stocked Traveller itself on. I spent quite a while staring at it enviously on multiple occasions.
ReplyDelete3D star maps are hard to do. Though I am compelled to mention the one in the ever-dear-to-my-heart UNIVERSE by SPI which I found instantly compelling when I saw it. And there was a very similar one in ICE's Space Master. However, I will concede your point that they are difficult/complex since they both rely on x-y-z co-ordinates and doing more math than many people might be comfortable with.
3D space maps could be a place for computerized aids to come into the game; you could have a 3D star chart that looks awesome for bringing up on a screen, along with calculators that can give you travel times
DeleteThe sci-fi map that captured my imagination back when I was in high school in the early 90s was the star map that came with TSR’s Bughunters by Lester Smith (1993). It was the second campaign setting published for their short-lived Universal RPG Amazing Engine System. The (anachronistic) elevator pitch for the setting would be the movies Soldier (Kurt Russell,1998) meets Aliens with a touch of classic Traveller thrown in. The PCs are all synthetic human soldiers cloned from willing civilians bopping around the galaxy protecting human colonists from scary alien xenoforms that may or may not be intelligent.
ReplyDeleteThe book’s credits acknowledge the stellar grid chart from SPI’s Universe as the inspiration for the star map included with the product. It depicted a 30-light-year radius sphere around Sol with X and Y coordinates. Each primary star depicted was color coded to show what class of star it was, any companion stars in the system were also color coded, and each listing also gave the Z coordinate. My recollection was they used a simplified method of calculating distance, but after paging through the book again I discovered they actually give the 3D distance formula (D=√[(x2-x1)² + (y2-y1)² + (z2-z1)²]) along with an example calculation.
The game uses jump drives for the FTL method, but it is a bit more math heavy then Traveller’s jump rating equals number of parsecs travelled. Each ship has a speed rating derived from its mass and jump rating, then you divided the distance by the speed rating to determine how long it takes to travel between any two stars (it does have some handy charts for some of the major stars showing travel times to all the other stars within 11 light years of it).
I want to say my copy of the Charted Space map came inside the 2nd edition box set (along with the three original LBBs), but I can't be totally sure. It was a long time ago. The box also handily fits both the Traveller Book and the Traveller Adventure along with the folded map of the Spinward Marches.
ReplyDelete