ARCHIVED: Steampunk Worlds - Map Creation Thread

[Balthasar]

Well you still didn't name it. All kidding aside, I look forward to seeing these ideas develop, as you seem to have put a great deal of thought into it. I will certainly be willing to contribute whatever I can.
I like the second mod idea as well, and see alot of possibility in it.

I guess I've always been a sucker for retrofuture. My father was a Sci-Fi fan since childhood, so I grew up with Amazing Stories and BiggerLittle Books close at hand. Though my taste in Sci-Fi developed from that to Asimov to Heinlein to Harlen Ellison and beyond, I still have a soft spot for good old ray-gun Space Opera.

P.S. you are the king of images.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Well you still didn't name it.

something something Planetary Romance something something
or
Lost Worlds (Gadzooks! That one's taken!)
or
A Tesliad (in opposition to the Edisonade)
or
The Great (Space) Race
or
Sceptre & Orbs
or
The Strange Case of the Round-Robin Double-Elimination Name-The-Mod Thread

All kidding aside, I look forward to seeing these ideas develop, as you seem to have put a great deal of thought into it. I will certainly be willing to contribute whatever I can.

Actually, knowing I work so slowly, I'm hoping both the straight, Earth-only version & your Lost Worlds version come to fruition first. My intention is to tweak rather than reinvent.

I like the second mod idea as well, and see alot of possibility in it.

It's one of those back burner things. There was a great tv program called Meeting of Minds. Then too much coffee & late nights thinking about a conversation between Athanasius Kircher, Hagbard Celine, Bob Dobbs, Frank Zappa, Thomas Mandeville, et al, that has Eco'd down through the years...

I guess I've always been a sucker for retrofuture. My father was a Sci-Fi fan since childhood, so I grew up with Amazing Stories and BiggerLittle Books close at hand. Though my taste in Sci-Fi developed from that to Asimov to Heinlein to Harlen Ellison and beyond, I still have a soft spot for good old ray-gun Space Opera.

I'm just about the perfect age for a "scientifical romance" fanboy. On the third Sunday in July, the year I was 12, I ran outside to stare at the moon for 19 minutes straight, having just seen a very blurry tv image from Tranquility. Around the same time period I got to see a Rocket Belt demonstration, and actually stood next to two debutantes & two swinging bachelors sitting in a Ford convertible that had been adapted to float on a cushion of air. Unfortunately it only moved around as fast as you could give it a push to get it going.

And what an age of space opera we've got now, between Ian Banks, Alastair Reynolds, and others of that ilk. On the gripping hand, we live in a Night Fly, Where's My Jet Pack? world.

P.S. you are the king of images.

Thank you. Like Picasso, I had a Blue Period. The occupation listed on my public profile is not an idle boast. My (incomplete & abandoned) dissertation was along the lines of "cross-cultural semiotic analysis of concrete initiation spaces to develop a schema for the design of virtual educational environments". If that's too scary to parse, think of it as connecting the dots between Songlines & Cathedrals in order to wield Second Life.

 

[Balthasar]

Interesting. I never read your public profile before. Turns out you, I, and King Arthur are all about the same age. You and I both like King Crimson (I suspect we both like alot of the same music), and apparently Umberto Eco. You might like this tidbit: I've met and had conversations with Peter Max and Adrian Belew (both by accident) and was given a copy of The Foundation Trilogy by Roger Dean (who did the Yes covers). How all that translates into a common interest in Civ and Steampunk might be the subject of a dissertation in itself.

 

[Blue Monkey]

7Ronin, who sadly is inactive now, is another member of our club. I know you've had the experience of younger people disbelieving that you could have done "all that" simply because they can't imagine a longer life. I understand the ennui of Louis Wu, although I don't share it. I suspect that you'd be another one (like me) whose "What excuse can I come up with for these weird units I like" mod would be very interesting to play.

As to Dean: I'd love to see some"Dean" terrain. & that great worldshard towing space frigate ought to be in the SP mod.

 

[Moosezilla]

No Excuses!

 

[Blue Monkey]

No Excuses!

So which existing or planned mod's internal logic would justify the inclusion of this unit as well as these?

 

[Balthasar]

Actually, the beaver worker might work for the Mahar in the Lost Worlds Mod....

 

[Blue Monkey]

The point was a mod, other than an "excuse for including all the weird units I like" mod - since Moosezilla wants no excuses.

 

[Balthasar]

Uh... oh. Okay. I didn't understand the 'no excuses' remark in the first place, nor could I figure what it was referring to. While I do appreciate Moosezilla's enthusiasm for this project, he needn't worry. Lost Worlds will have plenty of unusual units, and for legitimate reasons!

 

[Moosezilla]

Sorry for my inherent obtuseness but what I meant was no excuses are needed. It goes along with my overall strategy of "I don't know notin'!" (first postulated by Sgt. Shultz) This makes ftf opponents wonder...

 

[Blue Monkey]

Sorry for my inherent obtuseness but what I meant was no excuses are needed. It goes along with my overall strategy of "I don't know notin'!" (first postulated by Sgt. Shultz) This makes ftf opponents wonder...

Don't worry about being abstruse. We need a good OT breather every once in a while.

 

[KingArthur]

@Moosezilla - just to reiterate Blue Monkey's sentiments: post more!

Same goes for all you lurkers and infrequent posters. I know I don't get around to replying much but input is always welcome and this scenario is very much alive.

 

[Virote_Considon]

I thought I'd just drop in to say this is one of my favourite forums, even though I'm not much of a fiction reader myself. I do have a slight soft spot for Steampunk, though

 

[Blue Monkey]

Not sure if any of you are familiar with Arrowsmith, or if it's even SteamPunk, but here's a scan of the map that may provide some food for thought. Apparently Lawrence Watt-Evans was hired to develop a thousand years of back story.

thumbnail

 

[Blue Monkey]

Pellucidar isn't finished yet, but features prehistoric trees to go with the Dinosaurs.

Wandering around late one night I bumped into these (virtually). Looking at their surrounding terrain (marshy) it struck me (p.i.) that they might make an interesting forest/jungle for both Pellucidar & Amtor. They're a species of baobob peculiar to Madagascar.

thumbnail

 

[Blue Monkey]

Despite a couple of hours worth of setbacks - both my main graphics programs repeatedly crashing because of large clipboards - I've got a new version of the "Sceptre & Orbs" map design. The map will have a few things that don't show here - Hawaii, Easter Island, Skull Island, & some sort of Lemurian remnant in the Indian Ocean, for example.* If it passes muster then I'm ready to move on to the slow process of building the actual map.

The first image is at 25% scale:
thumbnail


for those who want to get a feel for the hugeness of the map here's a 50% scale version with a tile grid superimposed. Warning: the image is very large.
thumbnail




* I've also been pondering the idea of putting a couple of those legendary African seas on the map. Then maybe Mokèlé-mbèmbé would be happy enough to make an appearance. Like this, for instance:
thumbnail

 

[Blue Monkey]

This is a very rough & ready biq. Basically just a quick conversion via bmp2bic & maptweaker. No terrain details at all yet. I'm only posting it for feedback as to basic size of the whole map & the individual planets / Earthly continents. coastlines will definitely be changed.

My tentative plan is to limit Earth, Amtor, & Mongo oceans to the "coastal" terrain. I will use/adapt/modify something like Lukrees Space Terrain so that "seas" are atmosphere & oceans are "space". I know that this will cause the quirk of the arid planets having coasts. The only alternative I can see would be to use embryodead's scheme for creating LM terrains with a hex editor.

Here's the zipped biq.
View attachment Sceptrebiq.zip

 

[KingArthur]

That's massively impressive Blue. I like the way the Earth turned out - plenty room for exploration of Darkest Africa

You can use the MapTweaker program (in the Utilities section of the forums) to adjust individual tiles to get the effect you're after.

 

[jlvfr]

Wow! Maaaassive! Just like I like to played it!

But where are poor Greenland and Australia?

 

[Blue Monkey]

That's massively impressive Blue. I like the way the Earth turned out - plenty room for exploration of Darkest Africa

Thank you! What do you think of my idea ( a couple of posts above) of giving Africa some small interior seas/swamps for a bit of "lost worlds" territory?

You can use the MapTweaker program (in the Utilities section of the forums) to adjust individual tiles to get the effect you're after.

From this stage I prefer working in the C3C Editor. I'm more comfortable making local adjustments of several types concurrently in it, because I can better see what it will look like during play.

But where are poor Greenland and Australia?

Greenland is the curvy bit NE of Canada - at the same latitude as Scotland. Australia is on the extreme Eastern edge of the map, just below the equator. Those are two of the several parts of the world that were reduced in size relative to areas like England. Size & position = relative importance, not geography, in the mod.