World Mapping Overhaul

Some people will get tused to that style of planet quickly, and others never will never get used to it. I don't think it makes any difference, unless there is a lot about things in different directions. Larry Niven used "spinward and anti-spinward" in Ringworld, and that was fine.

You rotated a map; you didn't change the cardinal points. Why does it matter? As soon as you put a compass rose on the map everything will make sense--that's why a compass rose exists.

Though I have to question, what's the use of rotating the map in the first place?

Osulagh said:

Though I have to question, what's the use of rotating the map in the first place?

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This. Strikes me as utterly inconsequential to your story.

As an aside, back in the earliest days of map-making, some maps were made with an orientation other than north at the top. The convention we now use started with Claudius Ptolemy, I believe, whose great geographical work was lost for a millennium or so, until being rediscovered by a monk in Constantinople, and sent to the Vatican, where it ultimately became published and disseminated.

Today, with Google Earth and many other map-viewing technologies available, any variety of viewing orientation can easily be accomplished, and for a variety of purposes, is commonly done.

caw

King Neptune said:

Larry Niven used "spinward and anti-spinward" in Ringworld, and that was fine.

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And, of course, there's always Pratchett.

caw

I think tilting your map won't get rid of your underlying issue (plus people will see through it in two seconds flat)

Maybe instead of a superficial fix, you should look more deeply at the problem.

So you rotated your map. Big deal. If the Known World is still in the west, the barbarians in the north, and the hordes in the east, it doesn't matter whether your map has east at the top, bottom, left, or right -- east is still east, and the hordes are still living there.

The aesthetics of your map, including its orientation and decoration, are irrelevant to the issue that originally provoked the change. Unless you're self-publishing it's highly unlikely any reader will ever see a map you've drawn yourself. So worry about the bigger issues in your world-building, not the way it looks in a picture you're making for your own use.

Don't rotate your map by 90, rotate it by 180. The Arabs, for example, used to map out the world so that South was on top of the map until very recently.

And the funny thing is, unless you agree on which pole is the north and which is the south one, you can't know it because there's no intrinsic value that makes one north and the other south. The only thing you know for sure is that both are opposite of each other.

But in the end, as many here already pointed out, you won't change much with the difference in map orientation. You need to understand that the geography of a word is the primary factor that influences how civilizations evolve.

Hordes in our world, for example, have come from the east because there is a really giant landmass of steppes there. City-based civilizations can't form and control the steppes and the horse-based tribes there because of that vastness. Central Asia has been the source of so many scourges because the technology needed to defeat the hordes wasn't available until the 17th century, when the Russians finally eradicated the Horde threat.

Until then, most civilizations that bordered the steppes resorted to bribes or sporadic military campaigns that failed most of the time. The Chinese build a great wall against them, but it didn't do much good vs the Mongols.

Barbarians, on the other hand, came from the north because northern Europe is heavily forested, which is the reason such cultures formed there. Remember, the Chinese had no barbarians per see, just hordes they had to deal with.

And the reason the western and eastern civilizations formed where they did was because of the great rivers and the number of plants that could be domesticated available in those regions. The mediterranean was a crucial factor on why the western civilizations evolved slightly differently on both sides (Rome fell, the Chinese dynasties on the other hand remained in tact after unification).

Thus, your geography is incredibly important. All the people in the world are the same, no group is smarter or faster or whatever trait you can think of, only the land where they reside differs.

I remember reading a novel where the world map at the front of the book was rotated, so that east was at the top of the map (I think). I don't remember why this is, as it never came up in the story. But I didn't pick up on it for a while, so I was totally confused by the reference to climate and so on in different places on the map.

The decision that north is "up" on world maps is arbitrary, obviously, and ancient maps often did vary, but north is up has been pretty standard in the modern world. The map included with a novel is really there for the reader. So unless it's meant to be an exact replica of something one of the story's characters is using, or if the east is up orientation is critical to the reader's understanding of the story, I'd personally choose to be conventional.

As for the Barbarians being from the North, the known world being in the West and all that, it's obviously a holdover from the times when Europeans thought Europe was the center of the world, and of course, with the way Eurasia was oriented to begin with. You could change this without altering the map's compass points, though. Or maybe I'm not understanding what your issue is. If you want the hordes to come from the west and the barbarians from the East or whatever, you need to design your continents so that the relevant people would be in those locations relative to the people at the story's center.

A further thought

Do you in fact need the map?

Does your story range over the entire area? Do your characters move from city to city, traversing plains/mountains/deserts and actually quite nice bits of temperate areas as they do so? In which case a map might help

If they don't -- you don't need a map.

That still doesn't answer the point about barbarians from the north etc, but then it's easy changed. Barbarians come from the west, which is only described in the story as and when needed, soo...hordes come from some nameless plain to the south. When people die they go east over sea....

Superficial -- you'd still need to address the whole taking things from this world wholesale, but...maybe you could use it to inspire further worldbuilding?

Maximiljen said:

1. There are no compasses in my world, so I won't put one on my maps, either. I will, however, put a full stylized sun at the top of the map and a half sun at the bottom, suggesting sunrise and sunset, East and West. It should be enough to visually explain the cardinal points. Travellers would use the constellations and other, alternative means to determine direction.

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Around what level of technology are you basing your fantasy world in? Because the concept of finding magnetic north with a lodestone came about 2300 years ago, and compasses started to be used in navigation about 900 years ago. I would guess that, even give or take hundreds of years of variation, that human beings at a certain technological level similar our own would figure this out at some point. Unless there was something that kept them from finding it--more on this later.

2. This system would affect others, as well. Take religion, for a short example: for a society worshipping a Sun God, East and Up is where the Sun is born, while West and Down is where the Sun dies, to be born again in the morning. Extending this, , Hell would be somewhere Down Below, where the Sun sets. Perhaps anything coming from that direction should be considered definitely evil. Winds, too. The Breath of the Otherworld. Of Ice. Alsp a whole bunch of rituals and other religious paraphernalia could be born out of this. Building blocks for a fictive world.

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If you take an astronomy class, you'll learn that a lot of religions and cultures have a stemmed a whole lot into astronomy, the moon, and the sun. Compasses and directive maps have done very little in comparison. That's why I don't see it as something you should knock down trying to be different--for example, your example--if that's from your story--you talk about hell and it being below; why below, why hell? Those are things that point out that you're stemming your story from our world, not from theirs.

3. Simply aesthetics and one more reason for the readers to get the feeling this is truly another world, not Earth at some unknown point in history. I mean, we draw weird maps, randomluy putting a city here, a river there, we play with pen and paper, why wouldn't we be able to take this further? Some SF writers use more than one Sun and a handful of Moons when picturing their world, I don't see any reason not to change perspective on a map.

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I could see playing with navigation and possibly how the world works in order to the system around it, but maps are a very small detail that's added in as more of a trope rather than to really help the reader. I've never paid mind to maps, and altering one would not phase me at all--in both good and bad ways.


Let me put a spin on this: I'm fine with turning a map sideways--many maps are made that way. I'm fine with you changing the cardinal points around and not including compasses in your world. But all of that doesn't seem to be enough if you want your world to feel like an alternative world. Take for example you talk about making other uses of navigation. Great--that might add some interesting points to your world. But why use ways that our world established for navigation like constellations and directions? What I would say would make your world unique is incorporate a specific system of navigation that only your world uses. Find one of the specifics of your world and try seeing how you can mend that into something that would help people navigate. Then, you could uncover that our means could be unreliable. For example, I return to my "unless" statement; what if your world's magnetic field or the area your characters are in makes finding magnetic north or any magnetic point hard, and thus is a reason for being unreliable.


BUT, I return to the major question that comes in world building: Does it matter to the story? Fine, it's an aspect you can use and might find useful later, but if it's a small detail it might not be worth covering. For example, if you're writing a story about some warrior seeking revenge in a small city, and he never travels or looks at a map, a lot of this might be worthless. But if your character is a sailor, then a ton of this might be relied on by him.

Maximiljen said:

This "convention", using the East as the fundamental direction, will define all other directions. And will influence the very lives of those who live by it. Building, worshipping, navigation, landmarks. Just an example: cities would be constructed on an East-West axis, with the rich living in the Eastern Quarter. It's just an example, but you must see what I mean. Isn't this worldbuilding?

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Yes, it certainly is Worldbuilding.

As long as you make it believable enough. But i still wouldn't put east on the top, and the reason for that is simple: the north star.

It's the main reason why most maps of our world point to the north on the top, it has been the most reliable navigational tool for millennia and when people drew maps, they almost always came to the conclusion that the top should point to the north star for since knowing where east and west are in the night was very difficult.

Having an eastern star is impossible, and a south star wouldn't be visible on the norther hemisphere (and vice versa).

Then there's the fact of population distribution:

http://cdn.example-infographics.com/assets/infographic-world-population-latitude-longitude.jpg

It's the reason maps are wider, just like our monitors that have been 4:3 earlier, then 16:9 and 16:10 now. Our eyes are designed to see more horizontally than vertically.

Anyway, if you can overcome those problems well enough, then by all means, do it.

IMO, this matters not at all. It is a non-issue, a time-consuming non-issue.

WriteMinded said:

IMO, this matters not at all. It is a non-issue, a time-consuming non-issue.

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I agree. Such an insignificantly minuscule number of your readers will even know about it, if any of them. And who cares anyway. You could argue that almost every fantasy story has swords in it, (you could always do a find-and-replace with bananas), but sometimes tropes aren't such a bad thing. They help ground the reader in the familiar. Anyway it's an interesting little factoid, but if that's the worst problem you have, then I say you're doing pretty well.