Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Ethnic Maps

Naming has become the great bane of my existence.  Trying to find names that are both good and consistent with the setting has taken more time than I care to contemplate.  To take a break from all that hooplah I decided to work on the Ethnic version of the Caliburn map.  It's general goal is to depict which groups hail from which areas.

The first version of the map looked like this...


The Cymrians have sort of been on the chopping block for a while.  First of all I was never sure that I needed six ethnic groups, it seemed like it was starting to be too many.  The Cymrians really aren't all that different from the Albonese, the most populous group on Caliburn.  If they aren't unique, they they certainly are superfluous. The straw that broke the camles back though was this map.  It has an odd symetry about it that just doesn't strike me as realisitc. You have two groups up top, two in the middle, and two on the bottom.  It bugged me so much that I redid the rough draft without the Cymrians.  It looks like this...


Overall I like version 2 better.  Immedietly one can tell that the Albonese are the most populous group, and one can easily infer that they populated the entire south until the Tytherian pilgrams came and settled in the southeast.  For draft 2 I'll need to go back in and use more detail.  The Nordish are supposed to have settled the east coast as far down as the edge of the Moontrips.  The Prydainians should have pushed farther south into the edges of the lowlands of Norgales.  Even with those and a few other changes to makes the map is not terrible overall and does convey the information I am looking for.

2 comments:

Greg Christopher said...

You should create some enclaves. Those groups shouldnt be contiguous.

Labyrinthian said...

These are the rough drafts, but I agree with you 100%. The way they are here is almost homogeneous, which just isn't realistic.

Look for more detail on the second draft including less continuity, as you suggested!