A tool of Possible Interest to Fantasy Cartographers.

[Maezar]

You may know about this already...
One of the most important aspects in determining how a population center thrives is how it aligns with patterns of traffic as shaped by the natural landforms.
Orbis allows us to study this phenomenon in amazing detail, with a look at the ancient world from the perspective of travel time and related phenomena.

ORBIS

I for one would like to know what the underlying map engine is. I'd love to play with is sans their data and overlays.

[crickleymal]

I got a "webpage does not exist" error but that could be the works IT system interfering. There was a program recently on the BBC about cities that were planned but never came to existance which was very interesting. One of the things was the City of London ion the aftermath of the Great Fire. Three architects (one was Christopher Wren) presented plans to the King and Parliament for the rebuilding of the city and the program had these plans analysed using modern traffic flow analysis. Christopher Wren's plan turned out to be the best with roads running between major centres of activity and so on. The other two plans were rather more on the grid system then natural traffic flow.

[S.Schloesser]

The link works for me. I'll look into it. Looks promising.

[foremost]

Wow, thats cool, thanks for sharing it with us. Does the map use appropriate travel methods for the time? I'd assume it would have to because the fastest route would almost always be by plane, straight.

[Bill Coffin]

This is awesome. THanks for sharing! A element that gets overlooked so often in fantasy map-making are the roads. The roads are everything, and they're never there. I overlooked them all the time in the dodgy little maps I used to draw for Palladium, back when I was writing for them. I think if you're doing a simple black and white map, you don't want any extra lines on the map, but nowadays, there really is no excuse not to include them. Plus, seeing where the logical place for roads to be makes for some interesting world developments to arise on their own. (e.g., Why is a road *here* rather than *there*?)

[Bill Coffin]

fig_intro05_800w.png

What I love about this map is how the contour lines are used to express travel time, in weeks. This does so much to put the geography in context to how the Empire operated. Such wonderful stuff, this.