Review: Guide to Mapping
This brief review concerns Expeditious Retreat Press’s free A Magical Society: Guide to Mapping which consists of excerpts from their commercial product A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture. It was first posted at RPGNow.
I’m very happy to see a book/pdf on world-making being made. It’s something useful to a lot of gamers, and so hats off to Expeditious Retreat for doing it. The name is a little misleading, however, since mapping per se is not the topic at all: this is a work on world-building (specifically the geographic aspects of world-building), making use of maps—but it’s not really about maps.
The book has a reasonable organization and decent writing—some much better than decent, in fact. The diagrams interspersed through the text are useful, as are the illustrative maps. The layout is a litle awkward though, and not really easy to read on-screen.
All of the content seems basically sound, and is presented clearly. One issue is that most of the information is readily available on the net, both from hobbyist “world-builders” and various scientific sites. This book does collect it in one place, though, and aims its explanations specifically at the gamer, so is useful for that. Its treatment of the various topics, from plate tectonics to atmospheric currents, is fairly introductory, but that seems to be the intention. (The author’s tone seems overly authorative for this, though.) More serious than the lack of detail is the amount of hand-waving: the actual process of creating a world is discussed only in broad, vague strokes. So, for instance, the reader will be told to place mountains according to some basic principles, but no “rules” or stages of process are discussed.
Overall, this will be useful for someone who is basically unfamiliar with world-building (or the geologic aspects of it) and who’d like an introduction and some basic advice in one package. Those who’ve already done some research online won’t find anything very new, though, and more detail will have to be sought elsewhere. The “9 steps” to world-building are potentially useful as an outline, but lack specifics. In the end, I liked the product, and am very happy to see it available, but I wish it did more. Its utility is decidedly as an introductory guide.