Guided Tour of Meryath

Welcome to the Kingdom of Meryath!  As promised, I have created another video tour to preview and explore +World of Calidar's second poster map, the Kingdom of Meryath hex map.

This map was the result of a stretch goal in the Kickstarter campaign, in which it was available as an add-on.  Very soon now it will also go on sale on eBay.

It was a pleasure working on this map with +Bruce Heard, who has always been a master at this style.  We developed a new set of hex art, including settlement symbols by Bruce as well as terrain by myself.

The video also explores the topographical style of map, which we used for Meryath's map in the book itself.

Enjoy!

In Stranger Skies: An Insider's Review

First draft cover design, with art by Ben Wootten

A few hours ago, I completed and submitted the last tiny diagram for +Bruce Heard's Calidar: In Stranger Skies.  In Stranger Skies is the name of the first book for the +World of Calidar — hopefully the first of many more to come.  The layout phase is drawing to a close, and any day now Bruce will submit the book to the printers.

Now that my work on this book is done, I'd like to share my impressions of the project — an insider's review, so to speak.

I've seen a draft, and I have to say, it looks wonderful.  More importantly I have read through everything three times while proofreading, and the truth is that this is why I am so excited about the project: the writing.

Yes, I have been a fan of Bruce's writing and maps for more than twenty five years, and a member of the Mystara online community for seventeen of those, so sure, I'm biased.  But I'm also a picky and discerning reader.  I know what I like and what I don't like, and by extrapolation what is good and what is not.  (As always when it comes to opinions, your mileage may vary.)

Calidar is good.

I always enjoyed the Voyages of the Princess Ark series.  Every month I looked forward to its release, and indeed I bought Dragon solely for that one article.  The months when it didn't feature, I was not happy.  To be fair, I was also looking for articles for BECMI, but the Princess Ark was always my favourite.  Bruce's quirky humour and very current genre references made me smile every time, but the stories also served a purpose in introducing new areas.  The fiction brought everything to life, allowing readers to sample the flavour of a culture, which made the gazetteer sections all the more interesting.

I guess you could say I'm a fan of this rather unique pairing of fiction and gazetteer.

Well, the thing is, Bruce's writing style has matured and improved over the last twenty years.  In Stranger Skies is very much the spiritual successor of the Princess Ark, and there are many similarities.  Some will undoubtedly call it a reboot, although I wouldn't go that far myself.  You see, it's much more than just a reboot: it's a whole new thing of its own.

With Calidar, Bruce has created a whole new universe with its own themes and tropes.  It has some very interesting themes and plot devices built into the story and the setting, such as the Vortex, which allows a limited form of travel between realities; world souls as a source of magic and life; skyships and space travel, including multiple ways to travel the Great Vault; as well as some rather interesting dynamics which shape the relationship between mortals and their gods.

An excerpt from the Great Caldera poster map.  Bruce came
up with a new language, Kragdûras, for the names.

You can see some of this in the short stories which Bruce has already released — and if you haven't already read them, you should — but it'll become apparent just how much there is when you read the main story and its gazetteer.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention another of Bruce's talents: he is great at coming up with names.  Any Mystara fan can attest the linguistic richness and logic of place names in Mystara.  It's no secret how he does this, by adapting real world place names, but it's also something that's very hard to get just right.  For me, as a Tolkien fan as well as a Mystara fan, I have been completely spoiled with great place names, and it's something that continually holds me back from enjoying many other fantasy worlds.  I'm sure I'm pickier than most in this regard, but suffice it to say that Calidar's names just fit.

So yes, the story is wonderful, and the gazetteer section is great.  In fact my only complaint about them both is that they're too short, and left me wanting much, much more!

Art by John Dollar showing the ship's cook — sure to be a fan favourite.

Moving on to other parts of the book: the art is sumptuous.  A total of four artists contributed to the book: Ben Wootten painted the cover art; John Dollar and Savage Mojo did interior art; and Pierre Carles drew the astrolabe which has become the Calidar Publishing logo.  All of these artists have contributed wonderfully to the look and feel of In Stranger Skies and indeed the whole World of Calidar.

My new topographical style in its most zoomed in form.

Obviously when it comes to the maps I am totally biased, but I hope you will enjoy them, too.  As my blog's subtitle suggests, I have made every effort to make Calidar's maps as accurate and consistent as possible.  Every town and city has its own latitude and longitude coordinates, and there is even a special coordinate system for each planet in the Soltan Ephemeris.  I have tentatively called Calidar's "Calidar 2014", although perhaps "Calidar 1512" would have been more appropriate.  You can see these things in the maps with graticules (latitude/longitude grid lines).

I have also developed my own original style for Calidar's topographical maps, which you can see on the Great Caldera poster map, as well as the in-book Kingdom of Meryath map, and the local map of Glorathon's Royal Domain.

Close-up of the Meryath poster map, with all new hex art.

For fans of hex maps, the bonus poster map shows the Kingdom of Meryath in glorious hex format.  It's 100% compatible with all the other maps.

I chose an appropriate projection for each of the maps: Stereographic for the Great Caldera, to show its shapes undistorted; Equirectangular for the world maps, to provide a familiar view; Albers Equal Area for the Meryath maps, including the hex map, to facilitate demographic calculations; and so on.

Of course, none of this matters if you just want to enjoy the maps for what they are.

Looking at everything together, I truly believe that Calidar: In Stranger Skies is a great product.  I am seriously looking forward to talking Calidar with all of you in the coming weeks and months.

You can bet I'll keep you updated on the release schedule.

Thanks for reading!

A Study in Scale: Meryath

My article on scale was perhaps lacking in clear examples, so I have prepared some more images to show visually what I described in that article.

To recap, I have been developing the +World of Calidar on three different scales:

• World Map, 2 km/pixel
• Continental, 0.5 km/pixel
• Local, 0.125 km/pixel

The step down between each scale is a quadrupling of the previous one.  So a single 100 x 100 pixel area of the world map would become a 400 x 400 pixel continental map, or a 1,600 x 1,600 pixel local map.  It's important to understand that these scales all show the same area.

Kingdom of Meryath Scale Comparison

Here's what this looks like for Meryath.  Note that the full resolution local map is far too big to display at full size here, so I have scaled all the maps down to fit.  They are still in scale with each other, regardless of what size they are viewed at.

The point to take away from this is perhaps rather obvious, but its implications are not.  Clearly, higher resolutions show more detail.  Moreover, erosion produces more realistic results at higher resolutions/larger scales.  What's perhaps not so clear, but crucially important for cartography, is that the smaller scales are not meant to show things in great detail.

What this means is that even though the local scale map is much more detailed, it doesn't mean that it's better than the other maps.  Although it could be used to make the other two maps more detailed, you have to ask yourself if that's necessary – or even desirable.  Will it actually show more detail when reduced down so drastically?  There's a real possibility that it will in fact do the opposite, obscuring the important details with a mess of barely visible tiny details.

This is the crux, which I forgot to state clearly in my article on scale: world maps need only show world level detail.  Continental maps need only show continental detail.  Local maps are where you can go all-out on fine detail, but even then, if you feel like you're crowding things in, perhaps it's time to move down to another, larger scale still.

Finally, here are the three images in the scale comparison all scaled to the same size.  The local map has been shrunk down to less than a quarter its full size; the continental map is just a little smaller than full size; and the world map has been almost quadrupled from its native (rather tiny) size.  Bearing in mind the purpose of each scale, it's interesting to compare the difference in detail shown on each map.

Local Scale	Continental Scale	World Map Scale

Calidar Kickstarter Has Begun!

+Bruce Heard just hit the big green button, signalling the start of the Kickstarter.

This is it, folks.  This is what we've been working so hard over the past six or seven months to bring to you.  You can make it possible.

But let's not stop there: let's make it a massive success!  I want to still be reading new Calidar stories from Bruce ten years from now.

Vote with your feet, and opt in to the World of Calidar now.  We're counting on you.

Here's a freebie for you to enjoy - my latest test map of the Great Caldera.  You can see it on the Kickstarter page, too.  The final format has yet to be decided, but these one of the possibilities for the Great Caldera poster map.

The Great Caldera Topographic Map, Stereographic Projection

And here's a crop at 2/3 resolution...

Close-up of Araldûr from the map above

 The full size file has so much detail.  It's going to be a gorgeous poster map.

Close-up of Meryath from the map above

Thanks for supporting Calidar!

Map of the Day 16: Meryath – the First Hex Map

Today we take a slight detour from our Calidar world tour to present something special: the first work-in-progress hex map for Calidar.

This is Bruce's original first draft of Palatine Island, the main island of the Kingdom of Meryath.  It was revealed today on the Kickstarter draft page.  (The project is not live yet, but you can now see the page and check it out.)

In terms of art, it's bare bones stuff - it's pretty much just the default hexes that come with Hexographer.  I am hard at work on a new set of hexes for Calidar, which will eventually replace these.

But in terms of development, everything you have come to expect from Bruce's hex maps is right there.

By the way, the projection this map is based on is called Albers Equal Area.  I chose this projection because it accurately depicts the area of the region.  This will make Bruce's demographic calculations all the more accurate, since they are based on hexes.

Another policy note about hex maps: you won't be able to join up all Calidar's hex maps into one massive trail map, I'm afraid.  The reason for this is simple: hex maps were never intended to cover large areas.  By definition they imply constant shape, direction, area and distance – which is an impossibility for any map of a sphere or ellipsoid.  At larger scales (i.e. showing things up close or zoomed in) the distortion is manageable, if not insignificant.  But at smaller scales (zoomed out), the distortion becomes so extreme as to make the hexes meaningless.

But don't despair!  That's where other cool map styles come in.  If you're a fan of hex maps, you can rest assured that Calidar will have many wonderful hex maps – Bruce is after all pretty much the king of hexes.  The only thing that will change is that there will be more other styles of maps in addition to the hex maps.  It's the best of both worlds, really.

An expanded version of this hex map, including the other islands of Meryath as well as some other things, is one of the stretch goals in the Kickstarter.  If we get that far, you and I will all be able to hold this map in our hands.  Let's make it a reality!

While we're on the subject of hex maps, if there's anything in particular that you would like to see in Calidar's hex maps – a new kind of hex, a certain way to use a symbol, or anything like that – please let me know.  Now is the time to make such changes, while I'm working on setting the style.

Tomorrow we will get back to looking at Calidar's western hemisphere.