Map as Caricature

[RPMiller]

Here is a fascinating map that was pointed on on the Hero Games boards. The idea is quite compelling and I'm curious if any of you more artistic types could do something similar with your own world maps.

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/12/23/227/

[Gamerprinter]

In order for political satire to work in a map, all the political issues and current events involved of a given world would have to be known by the viewer to be understood.

Any slice of history in the known world - our world would work, as in the sample map shows. It could work for say Middle Earth, as most people are somewhat familiar with the geography, as well as what's going on in Mordor, Minas Tirith and Rivendale.

It wouldn't work for my Duchy of Dernallion unless you understood my campaign world, its politics, mythos and current events.

Although it might work for an island shaped like a cat-dog thing!

[su_liam]

I disagree somewhat with GP on this. Of course this caricature wouldn't give much detail on the exact events of the time and it is in fact a pretty sketchy representation of geography, but I suspect an illiterate ignorant person could get some very basic ideas from this about where Europe was going. If you showed someone that map and then told him about the world wars, he would probably nod and say, "I get that."

I've been rereading a lot of H. Beam Piper lately. He liked to lift situations directly from history. It seems to me a caricature like this would be a great mental tool to sort of sand off the serial numbers of history. Reduce the actual states involved to gross caricatures, move them around a bit to scramble the geography, change the names, try to forget what countries provided the original model, then add your own details. This excites me. I wonder where I could find more stuff like this, especially from places and periods about which I am more ignorant.

[RPMiller]

I agree su_liam! I found the idea very much in the same vain. One can look at political cartoons from any year and get a pretty good idea of what was going on at the time, and I think carrying this idea over into a fantasy world could really make one think about politics and things in their world that they hadn't done before.

And with this post I am finally all caught up on posts so I shall move on to the other things I haven't had time to do such as mapping!