Troubles in Setting up to Map-make

From this premise of my being 9 y.o., and it being 1973, let me continue in discussing the game setting, which I said would most likely be the 17th century wilds of western Britain — for I would, unquestionably, accept the year 1650 as the game world's basis.  I've adopted that date for two decades now and am most pleased with it.

My habit with building a world is to start with a map.  Take note that in my case, I'm not leaning on the map to give flesh and substance to the setting.  I'm using the actual existence of Wales for that.  Rather, my intention is to provide those things for which we use maps everyday:  to enable the players to navigate the world; to provide spatial relationships between different locations, landscapes and features; as a means to enliven the player's consciousness about places they might like to go; and as a touchstone for how the Wales of the 17th century is different from more modern maps with which they're familiar.

Furthermore, the process of designing and sketching the map informs me about Wales.  As I lay out the topography and political elements in detail, I obtain a grasp on river courses and general drainage, travel routes, patterns of trade and communication between the sea and the hinterland, and of course those places where people live and where they don't.  I've been making maps of all kinds for so long that I've can't help perceive those cues that serve me well whenever I'm immersed in some geographical investigation.  Building a map provides me with more than a tool to be used in game.  It's like a massive, complex mnemonic, where rhymes are replaced with bending lines and markings.

Thus it follows that if I want to obtain the best education from rendering a map of Wales, a few expectations arise.  First, I want an accurate depiction of Wales.  An inaccurate depiction would fall short of providing me with an in-depth knowledge of the actual Wales, at least as far as I can obtain it without actually going there with a tripod and surveyor's rod.  I like gritty, but even now I don't have the time and being only aged 9, I'm going to find it hard telling my father that I have to drop out of school so I can make a map of Wales.

Secondly, I want my map to be BIG.  This is something I find fails to resonate with a lot of DMs, mostly because the creation of anything really large and complex takes an enormous amount of time and effort, and people don't have that in them.  But for me, assuming the various elements of not expecting to run a game world for three years, and wanting to have something that's going to knock the eyes out of would-be players who can see, at a glance, that I'm amazingly serious about this new game, I'd shoot for a map of Wales reaching from floor to ceiling.  Call it nine feet high, probably about three and a half feet wide.

Now, in my youthful circumstance, this creates a few problems.  My parents know already that I am deep into geography.  It was my first love affair; I invested myself passionately into the studying of maps and soon after the sketching of them, along with memorising statistics about the sizes of countries and cities, so that trivia-wise it was hard to stump me by 1973.  If this is 50 years ago today, the 16th of December, then in nine days I'm going to be given my first World Almanac and Book of Facts, for sale right here on Amazon today.  I don't know it's coming; my parents have figured out that this is probably something I'd like — and damn, were they right about that.  See where the print length describes the book as 1,040 pages?  This thing is a brick.  And not only did I read and view every page, but this thing became a bible for me over the next ten years, with me getting a new version every Christmas up until 1982.  After that, my parents and I agreed that I'd buy my own.

At the same time, my parents were also a bit ... shall we say, underwhelmed ... about the time I spent pursuing geography.  Specifically, to the detriment of my homework, which I didn't care about.  Whereas a giant map of Wales wouldn't be, per se, an eyesore they wouldn't let me put up in my room (as an example, here's what was on my room's wall in 1978), the time I put into it could have been seen as improper where my so-called successful future as an engineer was concerned.

Still, I'm sure I'd find homework a cakewalk the second time around, and something I'd be willing to do for the sheer pleasure of seriously investigating math or French for a change, instead of the burden I thought it was at the time.  There would be other considerable changes in my relationship to school and my teachers that I'll get into with a later post.  And overall, I think my process of making the map might have intrigued my father, especially in that I'd need him to get involved to some extent.

Having set the goal, the next issues are financial.  I need paper, pencils and tools — I'm sure my father had a T-square, though I'm not sure he'd let me use it — a map to work from and a place to work.  Physical maps take a lot of space to work on, and anything as large as what I'd plan would have to be made in pieces.  However, unlike the map I made in my early D&D years, I've learned a great deal about paper and how to lay them side by side to make the seams virtually unseeable.  That was a skill I'd mastered by the early '90s ... but I lost those physical maps forever through their being misplaced by my in-laws, whom I should not have trusted.

To buy this paper, 60w "satin," or "semi-gloss," as well as 40w flat-matte for the original map sketches (to do things right), and all the other stuff, I need money.  That won't come from my parents, specifically my father.  My mother has no say whatsoever about money; she doesn't even know, which seems amazing to me, how much my father makes for a living.  I myself never learned ... though I have talked to numerous engineers in his field and I have a reasonable idea.  Getting money out of my father, who had a Scottish mother — sorry, but that's not a joke, that's a definition of a once-upon-a-time attitude towards how money was respected and handled — would be by no means an easy task.  It was not a matter of going round the house and doing chores, and getting paid for them, as many of my friends could count on.  My father did not pay for chores.  I asked him about this once, carefully, when I was in my late teens, in the manner of, "Dad, why was it you never gave us money for chores?"  His answer was, simply, "You were paid.  You were paid in food and clothes and having a roof over your head, and being given an opportunity to make something of yourself."  My father could be a peach.

It was completely acceptable in my father's universe to earn money from other people, so long as the chores at home were done.  I couldn't have taken our snow shovel out that December, but I could have knocked on doors after a snowfall and offered to shovel other people's walks with their shovel.  I didn't have the nerve for that when I was nine ... but I've worked door-to-door sales in my life, I've done phone soliciting, I've sold all sorts of products in retail and I've worked in trade shows.  The trick to getting over the fact that you're nine, and little, and probably not able to shovel a very heavy snow, is to work the words, "Can you help me earn some money for Christmas presents this year?" into your first sentence.  Then, even if you can't actually do a good job shovelling, you have to be earnest and give it your all anyway, because it gives the homeowner a warm, fuzzy feeling that they've helped out a kid who has the chutzpah to go far.  That's something a 9 y.o. wouldn't normally know, of course, but time-travelling me would hammer that button as often as I could.

It's fun to imagine the look on my father's face when I come home having spent my earned money on my own snow shovel, one I can carry with me when I go looking for work.  He'd wonder if aliens hadn't come and stolen away his son, replacing him with one of their own.

So we earn some money.  The first thing I need is a map to work from; not an atlas map, or some vintage historical map (which would get a lot of details wrong), but a thoroughly reliable, highly detailed layout with all the information I'd need.  As I learned in the days long before GoogleEarth, the best and most reliable map to work from is a Michelin road map.  I'd want one that was virtually the same as that sold today: Wales and SouthWest England, 1:400,000 scale.  I can't seem to find the dimensions of the map; the folded product dimensions are 10 in. by 4.5 — but I've played with these often enough to know it's fairly big, probably about 32 inches by 40.  That's a guess.  Wales is 150 miles wide, so in the scale described it would be 2 feet wide on a map; I don't know how much environs the map would provide all around Wales.

Mapmaking must be done on a very smooth, even table ... and obviously when working with large scale maps, a pretty big table.  In 1973, my parents had a kitchen table with two leaves and a big dining table with one; the latter being preferable, but it had rounded ends and in any case, absolutely out of bounds.  The kitchen table was mine to use, but the sides were also very slightly rounded, so a T-square would have been useless if the goal was to draw straight lines.  And our first goal is to take the road map and segment it throughout with half-inch squares.  I did not get into the use of wholesale hex maps until computer graphics came along, and that's more than 20 years hence from our time period.

Now, there are suitable tables in schools, public libraries, at the university (which would be a trip, showing up there at 9 and having perfect knowledge of the place and its facilities) and even community centres and my own Lutheran church ... any one of which I might be able to arrange if I build up a relationship with a teacher, librarian or my minister.  That last one's tricky; but I haven't said the things I'm going to say to him yet, so I might win him over.  Mrs. Zachariah, my 3rd grade teacher, might have understood.  I never really knew the librarian at the Georgia-Thompson public library, as it was a long way from our house (I could walk the distance in about 16 minutes as an adult — but that library is gone, at any rate).  A new, closer public library won't be built until I'm 12.  That one is still there.

I think I'll leave off here, before getting into the particulars of actually making the map.  I sure am having fun with this.