Fantasy maps on globes

[Werthead]

This entertaining site allows you to put flat maps on globes and turn your 2D drawings into 3D planets.

Naturally, I've applied this to a number of fantasy worlds.

So far we have ASoIaF (natch, but it doesn't work great because of polar distortion for the lands Beyond the Wall), Malazan (which works really well), Wheel of Time, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Conan the Barbarian, Dragonriders of Pern, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Peter F. Hamilton's Great North Road and Elder Scrolls.

[Rhom]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

This entertaining site allows you to put flat maps on globes and turn your 2D drawings into 3D planets.

Naturally, I've applied this to a number of fantasy worlds.

So far we have ASoIaF (natch, but it doesn't work great because of polar distortion for the lands Beyond the Wall), Malazan (which works really well), Wheel of Time, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Conan the Barbarian, Dragonriders of Pern, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Peter F. Hamilton's Great North Road and Elder Scrolls.

Fun!  That's really good stuff.

[Rhom]

I'm embarrassed to say that I was most interested in the Dragonlance map!   

So the vast majority of the stories happened on a relatively small continent.  I was familiar with Taladas.  I might have even read a terrible trilogy of books set there.  I am completely unfamiliar with Adlatum.  Probably introduced in one of the hundreds of tie in novels I didn't read or a RPG sourcebook I suppose.

[Free Northman Reborn]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

This entertaining site allows you to put flat maps on globes and turn your 2D drawings into 3D planets.

Naturally, I've applied this to a number of fantasy worlds.

So far we have ASoIaF (natch, but it doesn't work great because of polar distortion for the lands Beyond the Wall), Malazan (which works really well), Wheel of Time, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Conan the Barbarian, Dragonriders of Pern, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Peter F. Hamilton's Great North Road and Elder Scrolls.

As you alluded to, it doesn't work for ASOIAF, because on that map the North is barely larger than the Vale, while we know that on Martin's maps 300 miles at the Wall is the same scale as 300 miles between Deepwood Motte and Winterfell, and the same scale as 300 miles on the South coast of Dorne.

So you cannot crunch the North to assume that longtitudes remain consistent from North to South. If you were to place Westeros on a globe, the North would have to spread over more lontitudinal lines than the South, meaning it would extend farther to the East and West than the South does in longtitudinal degrees, while still remaining the same absolute breadth in terms of miles.

[Werthead]

Quote

As you alluded to, it doesn't work for ASOIAF, because on that map the North is barely larger than the Vale, while we know that on Martin's maps 300 miles at the Wall is the same scale as 300 miles between Deepwood Motte and Winterfell, and the same scale as 300 miles on the South coast of Dorne.

So you cannot crunch the North to assume that longtitudes remain consistent from North to South. If you were to place Westeros on a globe, the North would have to spread over more lontitudinal lines than the South, meaning it would extend farther to the East and West than the South does in longtitudinal degrees, while still remaining the same absolute breadth in terms of miles.

Yes. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy automated way of doing that. The only suggestion I've had so far has been to manually recreate the map on the glob (you can draw directly onto it), which would be difficult, or just fiddle around with stretch tools.

[Free Northman Reborn]

1 minute ago, Werthead said:

Yes. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy automated way of doing that. The only suggestion I've had so far has been to manually recreate the map on the glob (you can draw directly onto it), which would be difficult, or just fiddle around with stretch tools.

Yes. Quite difficult. Quite interestingly, what it means if you take it to its logical conclusion, is that a place like Bear Island is actually not directly North of the Westerlands, but actually located more to its Northwest. Similarly, Skagos is not directly North of the Fingers, for example, but actually situated to its Northeast. This becomes even more pronounced when you compare say the Arbor and Bear Island, or the tip of Dorne with Skagos. In reality, Skagos probably sits more or less North of Western Essos then, rather than North of the tip of Dorne as it appears on a flat map.

 

[Darth Richard II]

Global geometry is crazy!

[Werthead]

Added the world of The Belgariad/Malloreon to the original post.

David Eddings really did not intend to make his world work on a globe.

[Gasp of Many Reeds]

Not all the maps working but loving those that are. Didn't Feist do this for Midkemia years back also?

Agreed Eddings' continents are too fat at the poles for globalisation. Though given the inaccuracies in the maps from the Elenium/Tamuli (political boundaries missing or moving, lakes appearing and disappearing in Zemoch), this isn't his worst mapping issue. 

[Werthead]

I can't work out if the links are supposed to be temporary or not. They work, stop working and then start again. I've assumed it's just the site being weird.

Apparently Steve Abrams, the creator of Midkemia (he lent it out to Feist), really hates people drawing fan maps of the world. Apart from the authorised ones on Crydee.com and Elvandar.com, he tells all of the fans to get rid of theirs. There's a really awesome French-made map which survives as tiny tumbnails, but the full mega-resolution map was taken down a few months ago. Odd.

[The Marquis de Leech]

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

Apparently Steve Abrams, the creator of Midkemia (he lent it out to Feist), really hates people drawing fan maps of the world.

So does the Tolkien Estate.

[Werthead]

7 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

So does the Tolkien Estate.

They don't seem to enforce it though, if the several hundred Middle-earth maps that appear on a search are anything to go by. Either that or they just can't.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Judging by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth#Maps_of_Middle-earth they have pursued people for it.

[Datepalm]

On 12/14/2016 at 9:58 PM, Free Northman Reborn said:

Yes. Quite difficult. Quite interestingly, what it means if you take it to its logical conclusion, is that a place like Bear Island is actually not directly North of the Westerlands, but actually located more to its Northwest. Similarly, Skagos is not directly North of the Fingers, for example, but actually situated to its Northeast. This becomes even more pronounced when you compare say the Arbor and Bear Island, or the tip of Dorne with Skagos. In reality, Skagos probably sits more or less North of Western Essos then, rather than North of the tip of Dorne as it appears on a flat map.

 

Where do we have what projection the book maps are in? I, uh, assume they weren't drawn in mind with being back-projected to a globe. 

Let's see...we have 300 miles for the wall and 300 miles between Deepwood and Winterfell? For the 300 miles for the coast of Dorne is it sort of Lemonwood to the Western cape, where the coast makes a 90 degreeish turn north (to Starfell)? Where do we assume the Equator to be?

[Werthead]

21 hours ago, Datepalm said:

Where do we have what projection the book maps are in? I, uh, assume they weren't drawn in mind with being back-projected to a globe. 

Let's see...we have 300 miles for the wall and 300 miles between Deepwood and Winterfell? For the 300 miles for the coast of Dorne is it sort of Lemonwood to the Western cape, where the coast makes a 90 degreeish turn north (to Starfell)? Where do we assume the Equator to be?

George clearly just ignored projection altogether. Actually, that makes sense, since the maps of Westeros the maesters have created is stitched together from lots of local maps accumulated and improved over centuries (I also have a fanon theory that some maesters may have convinced bored junior Targaryens to take them up on dragonback to sketch coastlines from the air, back in the day).

So on the maps we have, distance is always a constant. Direction, therefore, has to be compromised to an extent.

On that basis the south coast of Dorne (300 leagues) actually probably should be the south coast of the entire continent, from the Broken Arm to Oldtown, or just west of Oldtown.

The best guess for the equator is that it runs through the southern-most of the Summer Islands, Sothoryos and Ulthos just south of Asshai.

Rather (a lot) more on this here.

[Datepalm]

So I took the map last week and threw it onto a plate-carree projection in Arcmap, and geo-referenced it ONLY with the wall being 300 miles and running exactly east-west along the arctic circle (just north of Pitea, because that's as grim a place as I've ever been - Sorry Galactus, you know it's true.) This got me Dorne being around Morocco, which makes more sense to me than the assumptions that have King's Landing at the latitude of Timbuktu, but now can't find the file for further conclusions :-(

[Werthead]

7 hours ago, Datepalm said:

So I took the map last week and threw it onto a plate-carree projection in Arcmap, and geo-referenced it ONLY with the wall being 300 miles and running exactly east-west along the arctic circle (just north of Pitea, because that's as grim a place as I've ever been - Sorry Galactus, you know it's true.) This got me Dorne being around Morocco, which makes more sense to me than the assumptions that have King's Landing at the latitude of Timbuktu, but now can't find the file for further conclusions :-(

The Arctic Circle can't be that far south, because the expanded Lands of Always Winter map (in World of Ice and Fire) would drag the North Pole down onto that map, which doesn't appear to be the case. If anything it should be considerably to the north of where I've put it, but that really stops the North making any kind of sense, climatically (it's getting borderline already). Sticking the Arctic Circle 300 miles north of the Wall seems to work the best all round, and also makes the treeline (the northern end of the Haunted Forest and in the valley of Thenn, both 400 miles+ north of the Wall) make sense.

Also, Timbuktu is 16 degrees north, which is quite some way south of King's Landing at 34 degrees That's the same latitude as Los Angeles and not too far south of Washington, DC. It does chive better with the TV depiction of the city as a Mediterranean location, and isn't too far off the book description.

[Datepalm]

Yeah, we can't really assess climate too well...the gulf stream does some funny stuff to Europe compared to other places at the same latitude. There might be a warm current running up the KL coast...or a cool northern one coming down. (Maybe that's the winter/summer thing. Not orbital mechanics, but semi-cyclical sea temperature changes...mega El-Nino/La-Nina events...)

[polishgenius]

9 hours ago, Datepalm said:

 (Maybe that's the winter/summer thing. Not orbital mechanics, but semi-cyclical sea temperature changes...mega El-Nino/La-Nina events...)

I'm not sure if you're 'seriously speculating' or just trying to make a world map work, but hasn't GRRM said that anyone looking for a sciency explanation of the seasons is out of luck coz it's pure fantastical all the way?

[Darth Richard II]

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

I'm not sure if you're 'seriously speculating' or just trying to make a world map work, but hasn't GRRM said that anyone looking for a sciency explanation of the seasons is out of luck coz it's pure fantastical all the way?

Yes, I believe the last time he was asked that question he said something along the lines of "because its fucking magic".