Ascension's comments about how he's getting bored with his own maps led to my reaction here, although the reaction is general rather than having anything to do with Ascension's work.

I've been making and publishing RPG maps for a long time, but I'm still in my first year in the Cartographers Guild. I like being here, but when I look at some of the maps people post, I often wonder why they made the map to begin with. Cities, towns, villages, settlements, castles, monster lairs, etc., etc., all come to be for a reason. Something caused someone to start building there or settling in there, and once the site was claimed, things were built or refurbished to fulfill and satisfy the needs and goals of those who dropped their anchor there.

When I look at many although certainly not all of the graphically impressive maps posted and discussed here, I am left with the distinct impression that I'm seeing a generic object that the creator intended to be able to drop in anywhere. That's doubtless unfair to the makers of many of the maps that leave me with this impression, but the information that I would need to take my impression of a map from being purposeless to purposeful simply is missing. In some cases, quite frankly, I feel rather certainly that what I'm seeing is indeed a generic map. I wouldn't know what to do with one of them in our RPG material.

Other maps of cities and villages are unreal. Certain facilities are necessary for a city or village to function. Grain mills, sawmills, wainwrights and other artisans facilities are necessary, not just inns. Many otherwise fine-looking maps show no trace of most of these things.

Another problem is that people get too tied to their software's tools. Our project group's work in the Northern Journey adventure several years back suffered severely under that problem. We mapped NJ with CC2 and CC2 Pro. When I look back at those maps now, I'm embarrassed at the straight-jacketed generic CC2 look all of them have. I have the same reaction to most of the CC3 maps I see here. Many CC3 users seem to have great difficulty using symbols (objects) and fills (textures) from sources other than ProFantasy. Most CC3 maps I see here have a ProFantasy assembly line look to them. CC3 can do more than that. A lot of CC3 mappers need to go on a symbol-and-fill mining expedition in the Dundjinni forums, at RPG Map Share, etc. One needs to work with a palette of tools that one has assembled rather than just one manufacturer's stock graphics.

Dundjinni maps suffer less than those of CC3 users, mostly because the DJ community itself has made such an incredible number of mapping tools and shared them with one another. But there is a DJ pitfall that sometimes betrays which program was used to make these maps too. DJ despite all of its other qualities remains a tile stamper. Some DJ maps suffer from the use of textures with too little variety, creating fill pattern redundancies that identify the map as DJ work.

The best quality maps on this site in terms of being individual artistic creations seem to be those made with Photoshop and The GIMP. I haven't found anything that betrays to me which program was used to make these maps.

Our project group is not at all immune to the problems I'm mentioning. After finishing Northern Journey, we switched from CC2 Pro and (briefly) CC3 to Fractal Mapper 8. At the time of the switch we also decided to try to escape falling into the trap of our maps having an FM8 look in several ways, the most obvious of them being by seldom if ever using the symbols and fills created by NBOS. Instead, our maps work largely with objects and textures that we've created, supplemented by those we've found on our symbol-and-fill mining expeditions.

This attempt has not been entirely successful. We're now finding that our work is coming out of the mill with too much of a generic Vintyri Project look, which leads us to send things back for more work much more often than we would like. Thus is a disadvantage, because we really need to spend more time developing our gaming material and less time mapping. On the other hand, we don't want to worry about looking back after five to 10 years, as we did with our Northern Journey maps, and being embarrassed with what we see in retrospect.

I also see a bit of a problem within the Cartographers Guild itself. I have to try to avoid speaking with a forked tongue here, because our own tutorial material strongly recommends using elements of the real world as mapping prototypes. We think one should do this but not overdo it.

I have the impression that real world rules sometimes are overemphasized here. We also need to remember what we're mapping, why we're doing it and what the roots of our material are. Some maps on this site are from the science fiction realm and others deal with modern or early 20th century environments, but the great majority of the works I see here are pure fantasy RPG material.

Most non-cartographic fantasy RPG material grew out of the work of novelists - Professor Tolkien being the ultimate example - and most novelists' creations had their roots to some extent in the various mythologies of the real world - Professor Tolkien again providing an excellent example.

A great many of the mythologies describe a world that defies the real world mapping laws of the Cartographers Guild on one level after another. Our Jörðgarð setting, for example, has a huge area based upon the Icelandic Elder Edda, in which the world's 11 great rivers all flow from the spring Hvergelmir atop Upphaffjall Mountain. A trip to Hvergelmir would drive the river police insane. Fortunately, the river police have no jurisdiction in our setting.

The mountain police, if they exist, also would go up the wall (literally, perhaps) if they were to encounter Prof. Tolkien's Mountains of Mordor. Nonetheless, these mountains are a fantastically good element of Middle Earth.

The real-world-rooted rules set down here and the river police are both good and bad things. Both are excellent to the extent that they help a cartographer design a logically functioning area. They are bad in that they tend to constrain one's own fantasy in designing things for an unreal world that is, in the most literal sense, fantasy. These rules are a good starting point, but for some mappers, cartographic burnout might come less often if one established and clearly understood the logic of his or her own fantasy RPG world rather than trying to shape it according to the logic of the real world.