As my game is set in northwestern Nottinghamshire, northeastern Derbyshire, and the southernmost portion of the West Riding in Yorkshire, the maps featured here depict parishes, settlements and structures from this region. Eventually, I hope to produce plans of all the significant communities within a few miles of Wallingwells Priory, which serves as the focal point of my campaign. (For this purpose, I define a community as "significant" if it is comprised of ten or more households, or if it features a church, monastery, manor house, castle, or other structure of note.)
Note that at this time, I do not have a map available showing the locations of the various settlements within the region, though I hope to produce one fairly soon. In the meantime, if you are interested in where each of the communities is situated and how close it is to its neighbors, you can take a look at this map of Nottinghamshire hosted on Andy Staples' website, the result of one of our collaborative efforts. Be forewarned that the image may take a while to load, as it is 719 KB.
All of the maps offered here are fashioned using ProFantasy Software's Campaign Cartographer 2 [1], a CAD-based software application designed expressly for the production of gaming maps. To achieve the desired results, I pair CC2 with the CC2/Hârn Mapping Project's Mappa Hârnica Toolkit. Together, these tools allow me to create maps that I would not have the patience to draw by hand.
Each map is represented by a small preview image and a brief description of the subject. The drawings are available as both GIF and FCW files, the latter packaged within ZIP archives. If you have CC2 or ProFantasy's free printer/viewer application, you may prefer to download the FCW file to view or print the map. Be aware that if you go this route, but do not already have Mappa Hârnica installed, you will need to use a custom palette file compatible with Mappa Hârnica drawings. The palette is available for download here as a ZIP archive, complete with instructions on how to install it.
If you do not have CC2 and do not wish to download the printer/viewer, or are using an operating system incompatible with ProFantasy's software, you may view the maps as GIF images. The GIFs have been rendered at 150 dpi; if your software allows it, specify this resolution when printing so that the hardcopy will be produced at its intended paper scale.
Note for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x users: If you are using this browser to view the map GIFs, the latter may be displayed at incorrect sizes and exhibit poor quality. This is because the IE6 "automatic image resizing" option, which is turned on by default, reduces the size of standalone images (as opposed to those embedded within web pages) so as to ensure that said images are fully visible within the browser's window. You may still view the images at their proper size and quality using IE6 in one of two ways. First, you can hover your cursor over the GIF until the browser gives you the option of reloading the image at full size, and then do so. If instead you would rather disable the automatic image resizing entirely, open the "Internet Options" dialog via IE6's "Tools" menu, click on the "Advanced" tab, scroll down to the "Multimedia" section, uncheck "Enable automatic picture resizing," and press the "OK" button.
Maps are broken down into categories based on their scales. Within each category, consistency in style and symbology is maintained. In other words, the same symbols mean the same things on all maps of a particular scale. Thus, a solid black shape on a local scale map always represents a building made predominantly of stone; a series of diagonal lines filling a wall on an interior scale map indicates that the wall is made of wattle and daub; and so on.
For the most part, the styles used for the different scales imitate those used in Columbia Games' Hârn [2] supplements. My maps feature a number of minor stylistic variations, however. Some of these differences result from the fact that as a vector drawing tool, CC2 cannot easily duplicate the subtle color variations found in Hârnic maps. Others are intentional departures from the Hârnic standard, motivated by a desire to note features such as fish weirs and to differentiate between overshot versus undershot water wheels in grain mills. A map key is provided for each scale.
Each settlement that I have chosen to map almost certainly existed during the late twelfth century. Historical records such as the Domesday Book, which William the Conqueror ordered compiled in 1086, list thousands of English communities, along with hints concerning population sizes, information about the presence or absence of woodland or meadow, and so forth. However, knowing that a village or monastery was around circa 1190 A.D. and having a rough idea of its composition is one thing; knowing how it was laid out is another issue entirely. Virtually no primary sources exist that would provide us with plans of settlements from this period. A well-funded, comprehensive archaeological project could probably tell us much about a particular place, but such efforts are a bit beyond my means [3].
All that said, I try to make my maps as realistic as possible. I check nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps to get a sense of how the land was contoured, where the streams and rivers may have flowed, and so forth. Generally, I determine a community's population by multiplying the figures taken from the appropriate entry in the Domesday Book by 150%, unless I find evidence that the settlement's rate of growth would have yielded a different result. I read up on the local church, if any; if it includes twelfth century stonework, then I have a good idea of where the community's church was sited during the period of interest. I search for tidbits of information about the map's subject wherever I can, from monastic cartularies, to tour guidebooks, to online material. Sometimes my search turns up almost nothing, but occasionally it yields something of use.
In the end, however, my maps are based mostly upon a huge number of semi-educated guesses, and certainly an element of artistic license. For example, I don't know that woods existed to the north of the village of Shireoaks, but the presence of such seemed reasonable, and the visual effect was pleasing, so I placed trees there. It is my hope that viewers will keep this in mind, and will see these maps not as snapshots of how these communities and buildings actually looked, but rather as plausible examples of how they might have looked.
2. Hârn is a trademark of Columbia Games Inc.
3. If anyone is interested in mapping Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, they're in luck; decades of research in this deserted medieval village has yielded an enormous amount of information. Now if only archaeologists had the funds to engage in similarly comprehensive projects throughout England...
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Copyright © 2002 Christopher Golden All Rights Reserved. Last modified 9-4-02 |