10-12-2019, 06:11 PM
I understand that our current Cartographer [nation]Sanctaria[/nation] is unwilling to set coordinates or a scale for the regional map, and his argument that this makes it easier to add more nations without limiting their sizes to ones that are as small IC as they look OOC, and I do have some sympathy with this reasoning.
Nevertheless, it remains a fact that without any such agreed coordinates and scale there are several aspects of nations that can not be determined consistently across the map: Each nation’s player could and quite possibly would still make decisions about those aspects of their own country for themselves, of course, but without a set of underlying guidelines for them to use this could lead to jarringly incongruous differences between adjoining nations such as an area of boreal ‘taiga’ forest or even tundra sandwiched between two areas of tropical rainforest (without that middle section being raised-up on high mountains and/or a large plateau which would make that situation slightly more plausible).
I am therefore suggesting these guidelines for use by those players who do want to design their nations’ details so that they fit in consistently & fairly realistically with the details of other nations designed on the same basis. They do increase the size of the region’s lands significantly from the original version, but do so without moving various nations for which I know significant amounts of detail had already been determined (whether by their players alone, or in consultation with me in my ‘Regional Ecologist’ role) into climates too different from those previously thought right for them.
Malabra was always more tropical than its location previously would have implied (since before I became involved with this region), an anomaly that was “explained” by ‘leakage’ from lands with a genuinely tropical location in a Parallel Earth: Its latitudes under these proposed guidelines would now require rather less of that ‘leakage’ to justify things. On the other paw, from what certain other nations’ players have said, at various times, I suspect that some parts of the former nation ‘Keeslandia’ — which was in our northern continent’s north-eastern corner — might be anomalously cold…
Players who want to use these guidelines for developing details of their nations, but who want to make those nations larger than this would do, would have either to invoke a ‘Tardis Effect’ that somehow makes them larger on the inside than on the outside (not unprecedented in this region, original regional cartographer Domnonia did so for their own nation; certain logical consequences of such a situation would have to be ignored, though…) or expand into “adjacent” areas on one or more [previously-uninhabited?] ‘Parallel Earths’. It is possible, although I will not confirm the fact here, that my Bears have already taken the latter approach…
I have already sent my basic suggestions for this policy, by TG to the players whose nations’ ecosystems I’ve already helped to design: Some favourable replies, and none unfavourable, have been returned.
(This article expands CONSIDERABLY on an earlier ‘Overview’ thread, now un-stickied, which you can find @ https://theidu.us/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1297)