UPDATE 2 - Charting The Flanaess: a Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart

In May 2018 I began work on building a Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart for the Flanaess, but the project has lain fairly fallow until last month.

Since before the start of the year, our team of Greyhawk fan contributors have been working on material for the Greyhawk Seminar (details in last month's update), and I've been doing my part in that effort too.

As part of some of that work, I've realigned my mileage distances chart data to include only those settlements that appear on Anna B. Meyer's Flanaess map excerpt for the handouts.  In doing so, I removed a few cities from my original swag list, and added a few more, which meant that last Sunday I performed the rest of the Darlene map measurements to drive my distance calculations formulas.  

Here's where things stand at present:

grodog at work -
fitting the Flanaess into spreadsheet cells

With the change from some of the original settlements that are now out-of-scope for the map area in the new handouts, and adding in the new ones, I've now completed distances for 17 of the 130 locations, which is 13.1% of the overall effort.  A little progress goes a long way---although not so far in this case, since all of these settlements are in the Central Flanaess and are pretty close to one another! ;)

Allan.

UPDATE 1 - Charting The Flanaess: a Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart

In May last year I began work on building a Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart for the Flanaess, but the project has lain fairly fallow until recently.

Greyhawk Seminar at GaryCon 2019

A crew of six of us will host a Greyhawk seminar at GaryCon XI in March 2019, focused on the state of the state of Greyhawk fandom.  The seminar is titled "Celebraing Greyhawk: A Fandom Renaissance" and the event description is:

Greyhawk fans have been creating and sharing content online for 25+ years, across many platforms. Join Bryan Blumklotz, Mike Bridges, Allan Grohe, Carlos Lising, Anna Meyer, and Kristoph Nolen as we celebrate and showcase Greyhawk resources created by the fans who champion one of D&D's oldest settings. Reference handouts will be provided, and perhaps prizes if we get our act together!

• Bryan “Saracenus” Blumklotz – Bryan is the lead administrator for the CanonFire! A Greyhawk Resource! Facebook group and is creator of the World of Greyhawk Heraldry site.
• Mike "mortellan" Bridges – Mike publishes the Greyhawk blog Greyhawkery and co-hosts the weekly Legends & Lore show on the Greyhawk channel.
• Allan "grodog" Grohe – Allan publishes his grodog's Greyhawk fan site and is co-founder of Black Blade Publishing (OSRIC, Rob Kuntz’s The Original Bottle City, etc.) and The Twisting Stair mega-dungeon design zine.
• Carlos "caslEntertainment" Lising – Carlos writes and publishes OSRIC adventures set in Oerth and in Avremier via casl Entertainment and Patreon.
• Anna "GH Maps" Meyer – Anna publishes her Flanaess maps and founded the Flanaess Geographical Society Facebook group.  She also co-hosts the Legends & Lore Greyhawk show with Mike Bridges.
• Kristoph "Icarus" Nolen – Krisoph is leading the redesign of Greyhawk Online and showcases his artwork at http://wkristophnolen.daportfolio.com/.

Additional informationabout the seminar  (including a recording of the session and any distributed handouts) will appear on Greyhawk Online at https://www.greyhawkonline.com/seminar.

Charting the Flanaess Update

One of the seminar handouts I'm planing is a working prototype for the mileage chart,  limited in scope to the Central Flanaess in and around the City of Greyhawk, so I’ve been working on that recently by measuring out the distances from city to city on the Darlene map, in millimeters:

grodog at work -
measuring the Flanaess in millimeters

Once the measurements are complete, I enter the raw data into Excel in the first/upper set of cities listings.  The green, red, and yellow highlighted rows are my fact-checking:  I want to insure that the figures true-up across each row and column, and then in total as well:
 

grodog at work -
fitting the Flanaess into spreadsheet cells

The second/lower set of cities listings is where I convert the measured distances in mm into scale miles (I’ll eventually do kilometers as well), based on this data and formula logic:

1. One Folio Darlene hex = 55 mm across = 10 scale leagues/30 scale miles
2. Convert the raw distance between each city into a ratio relative to the hex sizes on the Darlene Folio maps:  (X mm/55mm). 
3. Multiple the ratio by 30 miles to derive the final distance figure

Like in the first/ upper set of cities, I also fact-check the figures to insure that they match properly. 
 
I think I’ve also found a good methodology for how to manually count out of the Darlene map mileage distances:  I’ll simply print a copy of the “Index to the Cities & Features of the Flanaess” page from the Glassography and measure out the distances for each listed city, one city to a sheet.
 

 
Interesting aside #1:  of the 130 settlements that appear in the Glassography index, about 50 appear in the general region of the Central Flanaess.  That’s 38% of the cities squeezed into an area only that occupies only 25% of the Darlene mapspace. 
 
Interesting aside #2:  looking at each page of the original maps to calculate the settlement density will also be an interesting exercise to go through, I think. 
 

Minor Complications

One of the major issues I’ll want to call out in the data is a possible discrepancy in measurement when the distances span both of the Darlene maps:  maps can shift around, the hexes could be misaligned, etc., so measuring across both maps will be more challenging and more prone to error than when measuring within either map alone. 
 
In my prototype data set, only Luekish, Radigast City, and Riftcraft appear on the right-hand map, so I calculated all of the left-hand map’s distances first, then measured the right-hand ones back to the left, and wrapped up with the right-hand-only mileage. 
 

Next Steps

Once I have a better understanding of the scope included in the map handouts that we’ll distribute at the seminar (and we will post all of the handouts to Greyhawk Online, and at minimum an audio recording of the seminar as well), I will update the list of cities to feature any other major ones that aren’t already included in the chart, which will finalize the initial prototype data set. 
 
Sometime after GaryCon, the rest of the long-haul work will begin, likely to occur in three phases: 

1. Count out all of the distances in the left-hand map.
2. Count out all of the distances in the right-hand map.
3. Count out all of the distances that span both maps.

I’ll continue to post updates here as I make further progress!
 
Allan.

Charting The Flanaess: a Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart

So, over 24 months ago I began a discussion in The Flanaess Geographical Society trying to locate a Greyhawk-specific distance/mileage chart for cities.  After some lengthy sleuthing, ideas bouncing, and general rummaging around in our collective memories, we came to the conclusion that such a chart didn't exist after all, so I suggested deriving and calculating the distances between settlements across the Flanaess using Darlene's and Anna Meyer's hex maps.  And, as with many things in internet discourse, that was that. 

Fast-forward to the present.  Given the approach of summer and the imminence of more-active campaigning in the World of Greyhawk (today was our two sons' last day of school until August), I've begun mulling this mileage chart over in earnest once more, and over the past week or two I've begun to build it.

So, I began with the 1983 boxed set's An Index to the Cities & Features of the Flanaess, from the inside back cover of the Glassography booklet:

An Index to the Cities & Features
of the Flanaess

I mined it for its 130 city names and their associated hex-coordinate locations.  Those formed the backbone for the spreadsheet that I began to build in MS Excel:

grodog's Settlements Metadata Worksheet

Once I had that, I immediately began to expand the baseline settlements listing to include known and named settlements not present the original list, starting with the classic 576 CY Gygaxian era of Greyhawk.  I've already re-combed through the 1980 Gazetteer and 1983 Guide and Glassography booklets, and started in on the various Gygax and Kuntz articles from The Dragon.  Through this mining, I've added a bunch of new settlement names to the baseline list---Blackmoor (the ruin), the free town of Deskpoint, and the small town of Dingaverge (in hex A4-54), to name a few---and I'm sure many more will follow in time:

grodog at work,
constructing Greyhawk

For this project, I have several (too many) goals in mind, of which, the first is probably the least important, despite being the most immediately-useful and -visible tool that will result from these efforts:

1. To create an atlas-style mileage chart that displays the distance between cities in Greyhawk;   something along the lines of this, from Call of Cthulhu's Sourcebook for the 1920s:

   

   Sample distances from Chaosium's classic
   Call of Cthulhu RPG

2. To capture the settlement-specific metadata that's embedded within Darlene's Greyhawk maps:  name, size, hex location, type (capital, walled, free, etc.), port type (sea port, river port, both), population, etc., as well as working to document or to derive additional, relevant metadata like settlement population percentage relative to total national population, settlement elevation above/below sea level, trading partners, et al.
3. To build a metadata model that describes the key attributes for Greyhawk's settlements so that they're clearly defined across publishing eras while also compiling the explicit information scattered across various canon and non-canon sources, in errata, etc.  This, right here, is the major scope-creep/feature bloat aspect of this project.
4. To marry the settlement-related metadata within this model to the robust metadata and information already captured within Jason Zavoda's wonderful Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index (easily the best research tool available to the Greyhawk fan community, and one that's unfortunately under-leveraged by most fans), and to use that to help build out the settlement metadata across Greyhawk's later publishing eras.
5. Laying a metadata foundation that could be leveraged by Anna Meyer during her next big Greyhawk mapping project.  

When I'm done, all of that metadata will be used to populate the Settlements Distance and Mileage Chart, which I've built a template for in another tab in Excel:

grodog's Settlements Distance
and Mileage Matrix Chart

This project will take quite awhile to complete in full, but I should be able to build out a basic derived distances mileage chart fairly quickly, using just the baseline 130 cities---or at least I think so, since I just have to count the number of hexes between two points on the maps and multiple that figure by 30 miles per hex.  It'll be easy, right?

Right???

Allan.

PS - 19 Jan 2019:  Update #1 is available.