how can a map be 500 hundred years in the past if it's brand new? haha
but yeah, those are some good points
how can a map be 500 hundred years in the past if it's brand new? haha
but yeah, those are some good points
"My lord, the guild of cartographers have prepared this new map of your realm. They have carefully aged it to make appear to be 500 years old, just in case any time travellers from the present, 500 years from now, should happen to see it. We wouldn't want them to get confused and not realize that they are in the past."Originally Posted by NedS298
I don't understand, I'm sorry.
When making a fantasy or historical map, there's a tendency among MANY artists to try to make the map "look old" even if it's supposed to represent the map when it is/was new. So a brand new map of a pseudo-medieval setting will invariably be aged to look hundreds of years old, because the medieval period was hundreds of years ago for us. The map is shown as worn, tattered, brittle, faded, etc in order to say "this is not a modern map" to a modern viewer, even if the map is being represented in it's own time. This is even sillier when you consider that the actual CONTENT of such maps is invariably based on comparatively modern (if usually incomplete) ideas of what a map is. "Future" maps go the other way in "trying to look futuristic". The people who would make such maps would not think of themselves as being in "the future" and would think it was silly to make things "look futuristic" for the sake of people in the past. It would be like building cars with "futuristic" fins and bubble canopies in order to "look futuristic" to people from the 1950s simply because we are "the future" for 1950.
Ah hah! I understand. But, even if - as you've correctly pointed out - it doesn't make sense, surely there's some artistic merit in making a map look aged even if it doesn't make the map more accurate, right?
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