Worldbuilding 3a: Frontiers

This post is part of a series on worldbuilding; links for the whole series can be found on this page.

Following on the last post about rivers, let's look at a river basin map of the Mississippi River.

The above is the largest river basin in the world that (a) has most of its area in a temperature zone, and (b) flows from a land mass that sees snow in the winter.  The Amazon, the Congo and the Nile are all larger in area ... but they're predominantly jungle rivers, so most of their basins are impractical for high yield agricultural crops.  The Rio de la Plata basin is almost as big, but it also rises in the tropics; much of it's potential arable capacity is also lost.

The Mississippi-Missouri basin is nearly all owned by one country; and before 200 years ago, was virtually unexploited by any industrial society.  When people talk about America being the greatest country in the world because of "freedom" or the constitution, they're full of shit.  They have the biggest garden on the block, stuffed between two big mineral treasure troves — also utterly unexploited before two centuries ago.  A fantastic quirk of fate has enabled one political entity to gain hold of the richest, untapped 5% of the world, so it can lord over everyone else that it "deserved" it for "reasons."

This works as a template if the game setting features a "transplanted people."  If, on the other hand, there'd been easy access to North America 12,000 years ago, allowing transplanted crops brought from the Fertile Crescent and China, along with pre-historic farming-culture settlers, the basin above would have become the same balkanised arrangement of inter-warring states that dominated the European, Asian and African land masses.  Prior to European occupation, America was balkanised — by hundreds of individualistic, competitive native tribal groups, competing for territory and hunting privileges.  The entity that ousted them and occupied the land was also a composite of dozens of European cultures ... who had agreed to act in concert because, as Bill Murray put it, "... our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.  We are the wretched refuse.  We're the underdog.  We're mutts!"

This cooperation was an 18th century phenomenon, rising out of the Enlightenment, which itself was motivated by the brutal carnage of the 30 Years War ... when two sides decided to have a free-for-all drag out slaughterfest — one based not on territory, or personal power, or a Malthusian lack of resources.  Nope, these people decided to kill each other over ideology ... with both sides having been slowly fed for 150 years by a new communication medium, the printing press, which told Catholics to kill Protestants and Protestants to kill Catholics.  For reasons.  Eight million or so died, possibly as many as 25 million.

Today, we're watching people being quickly fed by a new communication medium, telling conservatives to hate liberals and liberals to hate conservatives.

But I digress.

Turning our attention to the map again: see how the river basin's perimeter creates a boundary of its own, made by the headwaters of hundreds of rivers and thousands of streams.  We recognize from our childhood educations that mountain ranges create natural boundaries — and we have two mountain ranges embracing the river basin on the east and west sides.  The Continental Divide of the Rockies delimits the rivers that flow east from it, and the Appalachian mountains feed all the rivers that turn west.

Note, however, how little of the Old Confederacy falls into the Mississippi Basin — and how the Achilles Heel of the South in the Civil War was the Mississippi itself, which the North occupied, and the basin of the Tennessee, which served as a highway to Atlanta and eventually the destruction of Georgia and South Carolina.  One of the reasons that Atlanta is there has to do with its access to the commercial and agricultural resources of the Tennessee and Ohio valleys.  Once the Confederacy was split in three, it crumbled.

In another example, remember that Texas began as a part of Mexico; and then existed for a brief time as an independent state ... and still tends to act like one.  It, too, mostly exists outside the Mississippi basin.

Finally, look at the map's top.  There it is, Canada.  There's no mountains separating Canada from the United States ... and yet the border between the two countries tends to follow the northern edge of the Upper Mississippi and Missouri watershed.  In fact, there was quite a bit of discussion of where exactly to draw the border before settling on the 49th parallel.  For a time, much of that territory north of the basin was claimed by the British Crown.

This helps suggest frontiers along a basin's rim, though I'm simplifying quite a lot.  What about inside the basin?

There's a famous quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, describing the two banks of the Ohio River prior to the Civil War:

"On the left bank of the river the population is sparse; from time to time one sees a troop of slaves loitering through half-deserted fields; the primeval forest is constantly reappearing; one might say that society had gone to sleep ... but on the right bank, a confused hum proclaims from afar that men are busily at work; fine crops cover the fields ... on all sides there is evidence of comfort; man appears rich and contented; he works.

"On the left bank of the Ohio work is connected with the idea of slavery; but on the right with well-being and progress; on one side it is degrading but on the other honourable."

Never mind which side is which; it doesn't matter.  Consider instead the possibilities for two cultures to be a mere 200 meters apart and yet starkly, culturally different.  De Tocqueville describes such a situation in a world where there's a railroad, a telegraph, photography, newspapers.  Take all that away and imagine the situation in a medieval world where no such communication or transportation devices exist.  For many game worlds, not even a printing press, so that a witness to the difference can publish a description for even hundreds of other people to read.

A distance of 20 miles, as much as a person could walk in a day, might thus be on the other side of the world, for all the news coming from that place.  Is it any wonder, then, that the much smaller basins of the Rhine and the Danube were filled with hundreds of micro-cultures, with individual languages, clothing traditions, means of picking their leaders, eating habits and artistry?

Just as the whole Mississippi-Missouri basin has a natural boundary that surrounds the whole, each part of the basin also has a natural boundary made by the main river and the headwaters of all its tributaries.  The Ohio is separated from the Tennessee, the Red is separated from the Canadian, the Platte is separated from the Smoky Hill and the Kansas.  Even if these places all produce the same goods, all possess the same dearth, all have the same homogenous DNA ... the way each group tries to solve the problems of survival, tribal cooperation, threats to their hunting grounds and so on changes how this group is from that group in a real, permanent way that lasts dozens of generations.

So in designing the frontiers of our game world, we don't want to just think of separating them by mountains and river banks ... but ALSO by the individual strategies that each culture has hit upon as it's moved forward in time.  This one has become more intensely religious, that one has hit upon commercial success, this enclave is xenophobic, that one is militaristic, this one is run by a king, that one is run by a Matriarchy, and so on.  The characteristics of the land bound by its natural frontiers matter deeply in this!

A commercial culture can only arise in places where movement and trade are easily accomplished, where lots of customers must travel through the town, such as is true of Antwerp and Constantinople, or on a smaller scale, in Arhus or Cadiz.  A militaristic culture requires much staple food, to produce many babies, who will be expended in war ... so cultures like this arise out of Sparta, Aragon, Rajasthan.  Places that are also naturally harsh and unpleasant, serving as an encouragement for soldiers to be fine with leaving home and plundering the "haves," as they see themselves as the "have-nots."

This means getting out the designer's paint brush and adding iron deposits to one hillside, where the people living there will make weapons and armour.  We add sheep to another plateau, so the residents will get rich supplying textiles and fine clothing, while making paper and contributing to the spread of learning and perhaps magic use.  We add a fishing ground to another place and encourage boatbuilding, seafaring and exploration.  This place has fine, unusual groves of rosewood and hornbeam, encouraging the creation of musical instruments, furniture and other fine crafts, with artistic traditions and the spread of pacifism.  This place is blessed with kaolin, from which they make porcelain and again, another artistic tradition rules over the place.  That place has deposits of tin and copper, encouraging metallurgy, fine instruments, scientific studies, universities.

And on the flip side, the "have-nots."  Regions that have nothing of note, except lots of babies and bitterness; or sub-groups who are refused the privilege of participating, who must instead re-invent themselves as traders and wanderers.  Mercenaries who work for hire.  Foreigners who come in and will take the lowest jobs, because they're the only ones who will do that work.  Familiar themes that reflect the real world ... but not everyone is born atop a gold mine.  Not everyone's home is adjacent to rich bottomland.  Not everyone has something to trade.  But everyone, everyone, has dearth ... and if they are to survive, they will do whatever they must.

So in setting up our frontiers, and our "nations" within the boundaries created by mountains, rivers and whatever other topographic boundaries there are, stratification matters as well.  Most societies, particularly those in the pathways of trade, aren't homogenous.

We have a lot of directions we can go from here ... and we will talk about stratification more, later on.  For the time being, we still have a physical world to make, so let's keep on with that for now.