Mapping Golarion: Putting what we know to latitude and longitude

[John Mechalas]

Just a quick update for those following at home. I am getting closer to releasing my GIS data layers as ESRI shapefiles and KML. Progress has been a little slow this week in part because my employer expects me to work (the horror!) but it's coming along. However, I can share a little teaser: a vector map of the Inner Sea region. This map image is a week old (the river layer has made a lot of progress since it was generated) but that should show you where things are headed.

[William Ronald]

This may be of casual interest to some readers of the thread. Geologists determined that the island of Mauritius sits on the remains of a sunken continent.

[Garrett Guillotte]

Updated the interactive map with John's country borders layer (use the layers button at the top right), as well as new settlement and PoI data.

[Ernest Mueller]

I'm running a nautical campaign that is roving from Riddleport to sunken Azlant to Garund south of Sargava and this map is invaluable, thanks for doing it.

[BobTheCoward]

John Mechalas wrote:

Just a quick update for those following at home. I am getting closer to releasing my GIS data layers as ESRI shapefiles and KML. Progress has been a little slow this week in part because my employer expects me to work (the horror!) but it's coming along. However, I can share a little teaser: a vector map of the Inner Sea region. This map image is a week old (the river layer has made a lot of progress since it was generated) but that should show you where things are headed.

I was playing with the KML files in Google Earth (I have one of the free GIS programs to teach my dumb self how to load these in there).

The new protection of the inner sea looks beautiful and indirectly duplicates the historical event it is based on....The linnorm kings are significantly closer to Arcadia.

I understand that Absalom is on the prime meridian, but that is all relative. Maybe shift everything about 1200 miles to the East so it is mostly over Europe and Africa? That way we can look at the underlying countries. Since most players are in the US, maybe a new world version over the US and Mexico would also work.

Have you considered adding a darklands layer? I think"into the darklands" is still the main source for those maps.

[John Mechalas]

BobTheCoward wrote:

I understand that Absalom is on the prime meridian, but that is all relative. Maybe shift everything about 1200 miles to the East so it is mostly over Europe and Africa? That way we can look at the underlying countries. Since most players are in the US, maybe a new world version over the US and Mexico would also work.

Have you considered adding a darklands layer? I think"into the darklands" is still the main source for those maps.

I was using earth's continents as a reference when I was just getting started just to see how the two lined up. Once I get all the vector layers in place I may generate a couple of maps overlaid this way just for fun.

I don't have any of the Darklands supplements, but it's a good idea to get a Darklands layer. I assume the right one would be Darklands Revisited since it's PFRPG instead of 3.5. Anyone own this? Are there enough maps to make it worth the purchase price?

[Nathan Nasif]

You want Into the Darklands for this. Most of it is setting info, and it's been rules light book. But it has a map of each lair of the darklands overlaid on the inner sea map.

Darklands revisited goes into detail about 10 darklands species. No maps.

[BobTheCoward]

John Mechalas wrote:

BobTheCoward wrote:

I understand that Absalom is on the prime meridian, but that is all relative. Maybe shift everything about 1200 miles to the East so it is mostly over Europe and Africa? That way we can look at the underlying countries. Since most players are in the US, maybe a new world version over the US and Mexico would also work.

Have you considered adding a darklands layer? I think"into the darklands" is still the main source for those maps.

I was using earth's continents as a reference when I was just getting started just to see how the two lined up. Once I get all the vector layers in place I may generate a couple of maps overlaid this way just for fun.

I don't have any of the Darklands supplements, but it's a good idea to get a Darklands layer. I assume the right one would be Darklands Revisited since it's PFRPG instead of 3.5. Anyone own this? Are there enough maps to make it worth the purchase price?

Nasif is right that into the darklands is the best source. If you like maps, I think it is a great book.

I also like maps and have been hesitant to pick up the new qadira book. It looks like it adds about 100 miles east into casmaron?

[John Mechalas]

Nathan Nasif wrote:

You want Into the Darklands for this. Most of it is setting info, and it's been rules light book. But it has a map of each lair of the darklands overlaid on the inner sea map.

Great. Thank you.

BobTheCoward wrote:

I also like maps and have been hesitant to pick up the new qadira book. It looks like it adds about 100 miles east into casmaron?

Correct.

The map in there is actually kind of sloppily done IMHO, and not up to their usual standards. Lots of small errors. They are piddly things, but there are a number of them. Cities placed in the water, poor font choices, no scale bar, wrong markers for some cities and POIs, etc.

[John Mechalas]

First of all, thank you. You know who you are. You folks are all too kind.

I have just announced over in the Community Use Projects forum the availability of my GIS data layers for download.

[UnArcaneElection]

Cool project.

But do you have any way to make the map zoom granularity finer?

[Garrett Guillotte]

UnArcaneElection wrote:

Cool project.

But do you have any way to make the map zoom granularity finer?

I do, but my priority at the moment is incorporating the new data layers. Having better zoom granularity will make more sense when there's more to look at at higher zoom levels. Probably tonight, maybe tomorrow.

[UnArcaneElection]

I actually don't mean making the finest resolution finer, but having more intermediate levels of magnification in between the existing ones -- when I try to zoom, it jumps from super-close-in to way out or vice versa.

[Garrett Guillotte]

I've updated the interactive map, and the default view now uses John's continents data as its vector source. This also means we have dynamic labels not only for settlements and POIs, but also continents, nations, and certain bodies of water. As more data goes into those layers, more labels will be available.

If you have problems with the new data layers, let me know. You can switch to the older vector layer using the layers menu at the top right.

UnArcaneElection wrote:

I actually don't mean making the finest resolution finer, but having more intermediate levels of magnification in between the existing ones -- when I try to zoom, it jumps from super-close-in to way out or vice versa.

That's what I meant too--and I've doubled the number of zoom levels. Also, if you're pinch zooming instead of using the zoom controls or keyboard zoom, it'll probably be imprecise until I get a proper tile server up and running. Right now the browser is doing everything and working a bit too hard to also do smooth pinch zooming or flying movement, and Leaflet doesn't handle live zooming on data maps very well.

[UnArcaneElection]

Definitely an improvement.

[deuxhero]

Where is the Sea of Eels?

[Garrett Guillotte]

deuxhero wrote:

Where is the Sea of Eels?

Not all bodies of water are in the data set yet. If you need it, switch back to the older vector map in the Layers panel (the "Guillotte vector" map).

[John Mechalas]

The newest version of the map is lovely!

Labeling seas and oceans gets tricky because we don't really have official boundaries for them. Instead, it would make more sense to produce an annotation layer: basically, a layer that is just feature labels. This is what most digital maps do for large water bodies without defined boundaries.

It's pretty common to produce cartographic layers like this, which just consist of post-processed data. The raw data is for tracking the features in the database, and the carto layers are for rendering them in order to make pretty maps.

A good example is a shoreline layer (I have one right now, but am not ready to publish it yet). Adjacent bodies of water--oceans and inlets, or even just water spanning different data sets--would have false shorelines between them if you tried to render each water body individually as a filled polygon with a border. You need to union all the water together, then draw the shorelines.

[John Mechalas]

I have reviewed the maps inside Into the Darklands and there is a lot to work with here. Entrances, routes up & down and cities are obvious points of interest. Once tunnel routes are traced we will automatically have their distances. And then there are subterranean lakes, rivers and the Vaults. All good stuff. Just need to figure out the best way to organize it all.

This will come after I get the main features of the surface along the Inner Sea finished. I am still tackling rivers in the Inner Sea which is a tedious task to say the least. :P

[Garrett Guillotte]

John Mechalas wrote:

Labeling seas and oceans gets tricky because we don't really have official boundaries for them. Instead, it would make more sense to produce an annotation layer: basically, a layer that is just feature labels. This is what most digital maps do for large water bodies without defined boundaries.

That would be handy. My current hacky workaround for nation and continent labels is to programmatically isolate the largest shapes; otherwise, Leaflet throws identical labels onto every island. (Likewise, this is why Azlant doesn't yet have a label.)

[John Mechalas]

deuxhero wrote:

Where is the Sea of Eels?

Also I have a stomach flu right now so I just now recognized the Princess Bride reference.

[Drahliana Moonrunner]

Adam Daigle wrote:

I just wanted to pop in and say that I've been following this thread since it started and wanted to thank John and Garrett for the work they've done on this. Looks great!

A bit of love here please! Do you have any idea how much work it is to babble like idiots?!

[John Mechalas]

Drahliana Moonrunner wrote:

A bit of love here please! Do you have any idea how much work it is to babble like idiots?!

I think that is me on, like, every other thread around here. :)

[Garrett Guillotte]

I've updated the interactive map to turn Inner Sea country borders on by default. Settlement markers and labels now hide themselves on distant zoom levels based on the settlement's size. I've also added a Population layer that roughly visualizes population.

[John Mechalas]

Looking good! Just in time to add the new rivers layer, too. ;) Tian Xia water bodies and global shorelines coming soon...

[Garrett Guillotte]

Just added the rivers layer, which was easy. I think this level of detail is starting to hit the limit of what I can do purely in the browser, however, so I'll get to work on Tilemill tonight.

[UnArcaneElection]

Will the Mechalas Raster resolution be increased eventually, or is this limited for legal reasons?

[Garrett Guillotte]

UnArcaneElection wrote:

Will the Mechalas Raster resolution be increased eventually, or is this limited for legal reasons?

The CUP prevents resizing, cropping, or otherwise modifying the maps for Iobaria and the Inner Sea region, so things fall back to low-quality fair use images. It's unlikely that there'll ever be a high-resolution image using official maps.

[Garrett Guillotte]

I've got a second, tiled-image version of the interactive map up. This uses a Web Mercator projection, resulting in Inner Sea output closer to the official map and also doesn't distort the Population layer's circles, but has a more distorted Crown of the World shape.

It also adds some river labels and should perform considerably better on mobile devices (especially with the Settlements layer off).

[John Mechalas]

This sure looks nice. One of the other benefits of the tile approach is that the software supports wrapping at 180 degrees so Tian Xia is no longer split.

Down side is we lose everything above 85 degrees N latitude. I suppose if there were demand, creating a second map using the vector approach just for the north pole is an option.

I need to tweak the country boundaries layer so it's better aligned.

[BobTheCoward]

For the rest of us without any skills, I cannot understate how great these look when loaded into Google Earth.

[Garrett Guillotte]

I'm getting my feet wet in QGIS by adding forest data to the Inner Sea region. I'm hoping to have a more proper update tonight or tomorrow night, but you can already spot a few patches of green on the older interactive map in the northern Inner Sea countries.

[Branding Opportunity]

This just keeps on getting better and better. Congrats!

[Garrett Guillotte]

Updated the older interactive map with all major and some minor Inner Sea forests.

[Garrett Guillotte]

Before I tackle Tian Xia's forests,* I'm working on a very rough height map of the Inner Sea region for mountains. This is more fraught than forests, lakes, and rivers because mountains are often drawn on canon maps in a very abstract sense that doesn't line up well with how mountain ranges look and work in reality--I'm doing a lot more extrapolation from surroundings, and refinement will rely on going into the text for descriptions of ranges and applying my really basic knowledge of their real-world formation as much as drawing what's visible on the map.

* Rather like Texas, everything seems to be both more involved and larger in Tian Xia. The forests are bigger and more complicated, there are more islands with more complexity, and mountain ranges are larger and more difficult to parse, so simply out of practicality it'll stay a lower priority until I have a better grip of what I'm doing and how best to do it.

[chopswil]

i'm looking forward to the new Azlant AP and all the maps that will come of it.

[William Ronald]

In some geological news, there is now evidence of a newly discovered continent - Zealandia. Possibly 10,000 years ago, a rather low-lying continent was more exposed during an Ice Age. Then, due to the impact of Earthfall and rising seas later, much of the continent sank between the waves.

Tian Xia does indeed seem to have very impressive mountain ranges and forests. However, Avistan has some impressive peaks - such as the Emperor's Peak in the Five Kings Mountains at 18,365 feet above sea level, Droskar's Crag in Andoran at 28,822 feet, and Mount Antios in Taldor. I would argue that Golarion is very active geologically. We know that when Earthfall happened, several active volcanoes erupted in Tian Xia - in what was dubbed the Age of Ashes that lead to harsh winters around the world as ash blotted out the sky. (James Jacobs has called Earthfall as a near extinction-level event.) I suspect that Avistan has much higher mountains than Europe. In the case of Droskar's Peak, this is likely due to volcanism.

[John Mechalas]

William Ronald wrote:

In some geological news, there is now evidence of a newly discovered continent - Zealandia. Possibly 10,000 years ago, a rather low-lying continent was more exposed during an Ice Age. Then, due to the impact of Earthfall and rising seas later, much of the continent sank between the waves.

This is pretty cool. This sounds more or less like what happened to Azlant.

I am not enough of a geology enthusiast to comment on the rest, other than to say it sounds plausible, especially since Golarion civilization was around for the impact and thus recovered in thousands of years. Earth's event was much farther in our past, giving the planet plenty of time to settle down before we came along.

[John Mechalas]

I am hard at work on Tian Xia. I've made enough progress that I can share an in-progress vector map made from the data. This includes a made-up region in the upper left to get Paizo's Crown of the World and Tian Xia maps to "line up". That's the only real liberty taken so far.

[Garrett Guillotte]

The relief map mockups are coming along pretty well.

[tonyz]

Oooh. I like the idea of Azlant being buried partly by sea level rise and not just by the Earthfall impact...

[John Mechalas]

The relief map is pretty cool. I am kind of amazed that this is even possible.

I have posted some Tian Xia layers. I am going to take a break from the tedious task of tracing rivers (you have no idea) and move on to one of the Darklands maps. It's more tracing (boo!) but it's also a change of pace.

[John Mechalas]

The Darklands are going to take a little bit of time. I need to go back to the Inner Sea and detail the countries/regions that contain Darklands entrances so that features don't have to move later.

One thing I've learned is that a lot of the map features between Paizo's varios maps just don't line up. The illustrated map backdrop of the Inner Sea is mostly fine, but the placement of cities and points of interest, and the placement of borders, is pretty haphazard (borders, especially, show wild variations between the detail maps and the Inner Sea poster map).

Where the Darklands are concerned, it's the POI's that are the issue. Some of them are out of alignment between the Into the Darklands maps and the Inner Sea maps by a hundred miles or so, and some features are just missing from the latter (Kravenkus, for example...anyone have Dwarves of Golarion? Might there be a map in there that shows the location of the Sky Citadels?)

I'll get it, though. It's just going to take some prep work first.

[Zaister]

Hmmm all these maps, especially the elevation stuff, almost make me want to do a Crusader Kings II mod...

[John Mechalas]

John Mechalas wrote:

Some of them are out of alignment between the Into the Darklands maps and the Inner Sea maps by a hundred miles or so

Did I say 100? I meant 230. The Earthnavel moved 230 miles between Into the Darklands and the ISWG. :(

Edited to add: Normally, I won't get worked up over this sort of thing, but if you look at the maps of Orv it puts the Earthnavel entrance on the other side of an underground river.

[Shadow_Charlatan]

Mythic Realms has a map on page 35 that includes the Earthnavel

[John Mechalas]

Shadow_Charlatan wrote:

Mythic Realms has a map on page 35 that includes the Earthnavel

I don't own that supplement. Can you answer this for me: is Earthnavel up near Tolguth, or down by Hillcross?

[Shadow_Charlatan]

i'd say it's about 11'oclock of Tolguth, with a distance of 36 miles (straight from tolguth)
or 18 miles west and 30 miles north from Tolguth according to the scale for the map
hope that helps

[Robert Jordan]

This thread is magic to me.