Mapping cliches

[Hai-Etlik]

I don't understand, I'm sorry.

When making a fantasy or historical map, there's a tendency among MANY artists to try to make the map "look old" even if it's supposed to represent the map when it is/was new. So a brand new map of a pseudo-medieval setting will invariably be aged to look hundreds of years old, because the medieval period was hundreds of years ago for us. The map is shown as worn, tattered, brittle, faded, etc in order to say "this is not a modern map" to a modern viewer, even if the map is being represented in it's own time. This is even sillier when you consider that the actual CONTENT of such maps is invariably based on comparatively modern (if usually incomplete) ideas of what a map is. "Future" maps go the other way in "trying to look futuristic". The people who would make such maps would not think of themselves as being in "the future" and would think it was silly to make things "look futuristic" for the sake of people in the past. It would be like building cars with "futuristic" fins and bubble canopies in order to "look futuristic" to people from the 1950s simply because we are "the future" for 1950.

[Larb]

The "making it look old" thing transcends cartography though and is particularly prevalent in things like cinema, video games, and stuff. Buildings, statues, and everything else will all be weathered or worn and neglected, rather than painted, plastered and lived in. The timber is never freshly cut, clothing often looks like it hasn't been washed for weeks, and parchment and vellum looks like it was made centuries ago. Of course there will be danish landrace pigs and holstein cattle in the pens and fields - we can't use unrecognizable breeds! =P

On a side note - I did do the hexagon thing on one of my sci-fi-ish maps. But I like hexagons and honeycomb patterns. So I'll do it again!

[Azélor]

I don't think that making things look old is silly in general. But in cartography it's different because the map needs to be as good as possible and aging it will only make it less useful. A useless map is usually useless unless it's for artistic purposes.





I saw that a large number of maps tend to have torsions in them like if they were rotating or as if the mapper used a distorted map projection.

Or maybe they just use projections like this one : Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[NedS298]

Ah hah! I understand. But, even if - as you've correctly pointed out - it doesn't make sense, surely there's some artistic merit in making a map look aged even if it doesn't make the map more accurate, right?

[Beomir]

I believe that the world of Dragonlance (I honestly can't remember the name) is in the southern hemisphere. I'm not 100% on that though.

More on subject, I agree. It does seem as if all continental maps are north = cold, south = warm. I believe that this stems from the fact that Europe (which is what most stereotypical settings are based upon) is in the northern hemisphere.

[arcanyx]

That is correct Beomir, the world is called Krynn, and most of it is in the southern hemisphere.

[JefBT]

That's awesome, Hai-Etlik, I never thought that way.

[Jan van Leyden]

Here's one I'm exceedingly guilty of: Naming things after their appearance on a map. Sure from a top view it might be shaped like a wolf's head, but does it really look anything like that o the people down living next to it at a reasonable scale?

Oh yeah, that's a pet peeve of mine. Do the beings of the fantasy world have access to sattelites or how do they know how a geographical feature of several hundred miles would look on a map?

[Slylok]

Oh yeah, that's a pet peeve of mine. Do the beings of the fantasy world have access to sattelites or how do they know how a geographical feature of several hundred miles would look on a map?

They could rename it after they map it out and see that it looks similar to wolf's head regardless of if they did it accurately or not.

[Wulgaru]

Ah shoot. I'm guilty of this. I offer my head as sacrifice.