For the Love of Maps

I need a break from cleaning up village maps and thought I'd do something slightly different.

I've always loved maps. When I went hiking as a kid I'd stare at the topomaps, when I went to Disneyland or another theme park I'd obsess over the map. I saw beauty in dungeon maps when I started playing Holmes back in the day and one of my first 'real' jobs was at a mapping company and I actually brought up D&D and the various maps during the interview.

When I was young I could draw pretty well, as the decades rolled on drawing morphed into photoshop and my hand-eye skills changed (I'm hoping to rebuild that skill with practice). So for most of the stuff on this site it's recycled Public Domain stuff from long, long, long ago.

Exterior maps are where I'm going with this, more specifically regional maps. I loved Darlenes map of Greyhawk so much I framed it and put it on my wall. It was a great large scale map with a sense of balance and beauty. I didn't like the slavish devotion to the hex standard though and it covered way to much area in insufficient detail but that was the DIY attitude of early TSR. Then I ran into Harn by Columbia games and their maps were amazing. Realistic but without going into the topo-lines that give me too much of a modern/sci-fi vibe. I framed Harn and put it up as well (and Ivania and others). But the kind of maps I found years later searching about on the internet were Hachure maps and Poetic Maps.

Hachure map

Hachure maps, are one of the earliest styles of topographical maps, before they settled on lines to show the vertical topography every x feet, instead they used lines that somewhat mimicked the verticals in a less accurate more stylized way. Although from post-renaissance in nature these maps feel they could have been drawn during the medieval period. They show most things without having to resort to symbols.

Poetic Maps (the term used by Columbia Games, I don't know the accurate name) date back even further. These are maps that draw out what you would see. They don't really need a legend as a hill looks like a hill, and a river like a river. The best known example would be the Middle Earth map. These can be hideous but I find most to be somewhat beautiful. Most maps created in the medieval period and the renaissance are Poetic maps. Most were done using metal etchings that could then be used to print books and occasionally they'd be colorized afterwards. The internet is full of badly colorized versions but the underlying maps are beautiful.

So doing my own maps I've been trying to settle on a style Ptolemy. Topographic maps were out as they were too modern. Harn style were difficult to get right, I'm too sloppy for that. I found a ton of Hachure maps and Poetic Maps and vacillate back and forth over which I prefer. It's likely I'll go with one style for one campaign world and the other for another, giving a very different feel to each. But which to spend time on now?