The Atlas (Where I'm Coming From, Part 4)

Yeah, that title's getting recursive. I should probably do something about that.

So in my previous post, I wrote that I rejected Greyhawk for being to, well, uniform in its "Europeaness" and the Realms for having too much meta-plot . . . and that this this led me to reconsider my old Kingdoms of Kalamar material.

In particular, the Atlas.

I'm one of the lucky ones who got a chance to buy the atlas before Kenzerco started publishing primarily through pdfs. It's a beautful piece of work, showing the whole world in a physical map at 25 miles per inch and at 500-1000' elevations. Not only the major cities and towns, but every single village with more than 500 people, every major road and minor path, every navigable river and major creek is shown in glorious detail.

Only the major geographic details (i.e., those shown and labeled on that original air-brushed maps) are labeled, so there are plenty of rivers and hills with no name, and plenty of potential small forests and swamps for the DM to place as he sees fit.

Basically, it's the same scale as the Forgotten Realms' maps of the Dalelands and the Sword Coast, but for the whole continent.

I've found two downsides to the level of detail in the Atlas. First, it takes a bit more work to drop in a pre-made module (other than those made for KoK, of course). I can usually find a place that looks close enough to the area described in a module, but it does take a bit of re-working, something changing distances or fudging what I see on the map to drop in a marsh or whatever. That's not terrible, but it does mean that I can't just drop in locales fresh "out of the box."

The second problem is that the level of "realistic" detail necessarily defines the sort of campaign you're going to run. This can be good or bad depending on what you want.

On the bad side, if you want to run a rather gonzo exploration campaign defined by epic and strange landmarks, KoK may not be for you. This is a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm on those days when I want to create a wierd hexcrawl campaign that runs on the same kind of logic as your standard megadungeon does, the rule-of-fun and rule-of-interesting trumping realism.

On the good side, if you want to run a campaign that proceeds from the versmilitude of a realistic setting, the Atlas combined with the Sourcebook does all of the high-concept work for you--including giving the broad strokes of the weather patterns, area resources, major trade routes, etc.--and then zooms in so as to do a lot of the local work as well. You don't have to come up with names for every settlement; the Atlas does it for you (which can be bad, but I'll deal with that in a later post).

So how do you fit that with the rather high-fantasy assumed in the B/X D&D books? Here, I think we need to look again at the concept of alignment, which deserves its own post, but also with a post over on the Greyhawk Grognard blog from a few years ago:

In some sandbox-type settings, the idea is to explore a wilderness and "clear it out", much like some players are inclined to "clean out" a dungeon or dungeon level before moving on. But the World of Greyhawk fantasy setting, much like the concept of the megadungeon itself (which largely had its genesis in Greyhawk) works a little bit differently. Those "empty" hexes are only empty in the context of adventurers looking for stuff to explore and things to kill. Simply put, in the civilized lands of Greyhawk (and even in the barbarian lands in the northern belt of the map) you're not supposed to go into a given hex with the idea that it is a new realm to be tamed, its inhabitants slain and its lands brought into the sphere of civilization. In many respects, it's just another part of the montage of travel, flyover country where you must travel by necessity in order to get to your ultimate destination. . .  [I]n a setting such as Greyhawk, the theme is not "exploring the wilderness, taming it, and bringing it to the realm of civilization". It's "there are elder places of deep and abiding mystery, which we reach by passing through relatively mundane spaces."

And so it is with Tellene. As it turns out, the maps have a surprising amount of area that is untamed, but even within major civilized areas like the Kingdom of Kalamar itself, there are pockets of wilderness that man has never been able to claim, or else has claimed and lost again to the forces of Chaos. These areas become even more evident with the Atlas's insistance on marking every outpost with more than 500 people--you can see exactly where civilization ends and the true wilderness begins.

In a future post, I'll talk about how I came about restructuring the nine-alignment system assumed by KoK (a holdover from D&D) into the three-fold structure of B/X, and how that impacts my understanding of the world of Tellene. But first, let me finish explaining why I came back to Kalamar.