Reply With QuoteMade some progress with base colours, some labbels, and territories.
And here is the conceptual map for a quick overview of what's going on around the place.
The South Indies: Mu and the Hivan Archipelago
Hello once again!
As part of the series of regional maps I'm making for a homebrewed RPG set in a fictional XIX century (the most recent entry being Lemuria), I've begun working on the seventh of such pieces, this time focusing on the eastern half of the so-called South Indies: the legendary islands of Hiva and the mysterious, nigh-inaccessible continent of Mu.
Hiva is vaguely based on the Polynesian legends of their mythological birthplace, sometimes also called Hawaiki. In this particular version, Hiva is not just real, but a thriving subcontinent populated my multiple realms, currently caught in a sort of cold-war caused by a succession crisis and the alarming sinking (as in "going underwater right this moment") of a very important territory. While not entirely unknown to the outside world, contact with Hiva only truly began with Cook's expedition in the late XVIII century, so there's still a lot of doubt and guesswork surrounding these civilisations.
Mu, on the other hand, has two overall subdivisions: the parts that can be visited, and the parts no one has any idea how to access. Immense sections of its mainland are walled-off by seemingly impossible mountain ranges, and whatever is going on beyond them is anyone's guess; those who try to reach it tend to disappear, with only a few exceptions speaking of changing landscapes, distances that don't seem to make any sense, and time that behaves in manners altogether unnatural. That Cook returned from a trip into the mostly-uncharted Gulf of St. Gaspar in southern Mu carrying what appeared to be both Mesoamerican and Nubian relics hasn't really helped at all.
Despite this, the western, nicer reaches of Mu are populated by a wide selection of Polynesian cultures, though many are starting to bear the brunt of the Great Trading Companies' voracious hunger, which have taken advantage of the political turmoil caused by the crisis up in Hiva (from where the pre-eminent regional powers hail) to start playing the smaller local realms against each other.
Okay so, this is the first draft of the continent, which occupies a big chunk of the South Pacific. Hiva is the multitudinous archipelago around the top, while Mu corresponds to the larger chunks of land that extend between that and Antarctica. The consensus is still out there regarding where one ends and the other begins, since most of this land remains unexplored, even to the locals.
Since this part of the world had very little real land to begin with, most of the territory is made up from scratch, but trying to preserve the few islands available (most of New Zealand can be spotted in western Mu).
I tried to somewhat simulate the distortion caused by this projection by making the southernmost coastlines simpler and more elongated along their east-west axis. I'm not sure how it'll look once I add more emphasis, though, so I'll have to keep an eye out for that.
Does it seem to make sense?
Made some progress with base colours, some labbels, and territories.
And here is the conceptual map for a quick overview of what's going on around the place.
The fiction you've written about this area is awesome! Reminds me a little bit of At the Mountains of Madness. I'm a big fan also of "Apocalyptic Mechanical Hellscape".
The coastlines in the south look pretty natural to me.
Much appreciated, my friend!
The main concept for the southern chunk of fake land was "out-of-place civilisations, failed utopias, and reality having a fit", to contrast a bit with the western half that is Lemuria, which is more about ancient mysteries and exotic nature. It's meant to be a mysterious place for taking players into adventures of a more unusual fashion, but also where the most obvious examples that not all is well with the world can be found (the setting has a big time-travel related plot, with its corresponding associated calamities).
Some more progress today, with territories, labbels, and Terra Incognita added.
Got most of the western side of the map done today, and will hopefully be adding the finishing strokes tomorrow.
Last edited by Klaus van der Kroft; 02-23-2020 at 07:13 PM.
I always enjoy worldbuilding, and the geopolitical map of "what's going on" is quite interesting.
I'm curious about the ghasts in the SE corner though; do you have something planned for that/ whatever's causing things in Antarctica to go awry?
Map finished! I still need to fix the scale surrounding the frame, since I re-calculated the pixel-to-km ratio and found out I had it wrong, but for all practical purposes, the map should be complete. Took me a while, but finally got all seven continents of this setting mapped.
There is a whole lot of stuff going wrong in the bottom of the map, since Mu is supposed to be "the weird continent", but there are three main plot-points that affect this side of Antarctica:Originally Posted by Coggleton
Temporal Tides: A central part of the setting is that time travel was invented in the first half of the XIX century, but people abused it so much the entire timeline had to be artificially collapsed and the Earth recreated uncounted number of times; the one in which the game is set is the first Earth that didn't fall apart or develop weird laws of nature. This doesn't mean the planet came out completely perfect, and there is a series of soft-spots in reality, the most dangerous ones happening in Mu (central Mu is where this went completely bananas). People tried to control this, and one of the results was the "Time-Shifting Waters": natural philosophers attempted to materialise aether into a liquid substance and use that to stabilise the temporal soft-spots, but after their facilities collapsed (in the "Failed Chrononautical Utopian Society") the substance permanently altered the nature of the sea. As a result, pieces of other chronospheres (ie, alternate time dimensions, heavily used in the setting. Think of it as sort of planes, but with more dinosaurs and machinegun Aztecs) fade in and out amidst the waves, making sailors very confused and more often than not very permanently lost.
Failed Utopias: Once Earth was successfully re-created, many of the survivors from the original timeline were desperate to settle back in. However, the thing about time travel is that most people in this current version of the world have no idea that it exists, thanks to the continuous work of the Department of Suppression, an organisation created by the Great Powers to keep the technology from becoming too widespread (though even they don't know the Department was formulated at the behest of automatons tasked with doing their best from avoiding time travel to happen in the first place, originally created by those who lived through the collapse of the original timeline). So to keep everything as hidden as possible, these people settled in the lands of Mu. As they had already been living for untold generations scattered in bases and facilities across the Ultramonde (how the sum of all other chronospheres is known), many had developed weird societies and ways of living, so the settling process tended to result in all sorts of experimental colonies, which charismatic leaders proposing their utopian ideas which inevitably led to all sorts of horrors. All the wandering automatons, self-aware analytical engines, and mechanical nightmares came as a result of these social collapses.
Unnatural Beings: While some of the odd creatures that inhabit the lands of Mu are direct or indirect results of technology (strange mutants borne out of experiments, chimeric entities produced by fluctuating realities, and impossible beings affected by the Golden Substance and Slag that ooze out from the 15,000-year old constructs that were once the cornerstone of the mythical Golden Age), others are the result of strange evolution and in some cases outright supernatural forces. The area marked as "Ghastly Demihumans & Other Calamities" is crawling with these two kinds, some being distant cousins of humanity that developed monstrous physiognomies, and some being related to ancient legends, curses, and witchcraft.
Cool, I like that terra incognita concept with the crazy things going on "underneath". And nice overall shapes of the land masses/coasts.
One thing that's bugging me a little bit is the "scan-line" texture in the sea. It acts a bit strange on my monitor depending on the zoom level and makes the labels in the water a bit hard to read. Otherwise it is interesting how these lines completely vanish when I zoom out (it's one thing I'm annoyed by when I'm playing around myself with such scan-lines).
Overall, without a doubt an interesting, unusual setting!
Thank you for your kind words, Yrda.
Regarding the scan-lines: do they look odd in the full-size zoom, or when zooming out?
Posting Permissions
