Introducing the Prefecture of Eastsea

We are currently between Books 5 and 6 of the Kingmaker Campaign I am in. Because our GM has been tirelessly working on this campaign for over two years I thought it would be an excellent idea to fill in for a bit. This will (a) give him a breather and (b) allow him to experience as a player what he has worked so hard at as a GM. As we normally do side adventures between AP books I decided to take on the penultimate side adventure.

As there is very little published for 15th level characters in the River Kingdoms area of Golarion and since one of our characters wanted to "push east" to create a holding on the Castrovin Sea I decided to run with that plot line. The map for this area is based on the maps I made last summer. 

When designing that map, I just extended the local topography down, allowing mountain chains to trail off and taking what few cues I had from existing sources. That was the easy part. The hard part was coming up with a history and explanation for why this area was never settled. In my opinion, the closeness of a navigable trade route to Casmaron should make that area very popular. So, something must have happened. 

In the end, I decided that this once was a settled area. A thousand years before, on the eve of the first, great Kelesh - Taldor conflict, the Taldanes settled this area as their newest prefecture, Eastsea. The goal was to put a permanent Taldane settlement on the Castrovin Sea. But something terrible, terrible happened. Something so awful that sailors and Iobarians avoid this place completely and memory of it has almost been completely wiped from all of Avistan...

So, without further adieu, here is Eastsea as it appeared on the eve of its destruction (as researched by one of the party). 

The Prefecture of Eastsea - as a PC handout. 

Getting down to the roots of why the Kingmaker map doesn't fit.

I was looking through my data today and I had a sudden fear that I'd made a terrible mistake with the orientation of the Kingmaker map and I would have to start from scratch. I ruminated over this during dinner and decided that whether I had to restart or not I would at least get to the bottom of where the inconsistencies lie in a way that was graphically obvious.

So I took the maps I had and I started playing with them in illustrator - trying to fit one to another - and after several minutes realized that I wasn't making any progress. What i was doing was what everyone was doing: eyeballing it. What was needed was a statistical or unbiased approach.

This got me thinking about that oh-so-expensive piece of GIS software - ArcGIS 10. Within its labyrinthine menus and windows was the ability to georeference one map to another. Georeferencing is the art (science?) of fitting one map to another by matching individual points on each map. Get a whole bunch of points on map A, match em' to map B and let the software stretch and manipulate the A to fit onto B. The more points, the better the fit.

I started with two points - the top and bottom of Lake Hooktongue (Fig 1). With these, I was able to get a decent vertical fit. Lake Hooktongue is, i think, the most exactly drawn feature on each map, so it makes sense to start there. Having done that, its also apparent that problems begin. The Kingmaker map is very stretched out along the east-west (x) axis. The map goes almost to the city of Pitax in the west and Lakes Candlemere and Tuskwater are far too east to correlate. Already, we can see that if we want to keep something as simple as hex integrity intact we have to sacrifice something.

Figure 1: Georeferencing using two points (the top and bottom of the Hooktongue Slough). You should be able to click on it and it will enlarge in a pop up. 

Adding more points made matters worse (as expected). For Figure 2 I added three points in the east and two additional in the west for a total of 6 control points. 6 points is pretty good for control. A first pass on rectifying the two maps with these points gives us the best possible answer. Its equivalent to how well most people can eyeball the discrepancies.
However, note that none of the green and red crosses match up. If the points really were georeferenced they would overlap and there would be no blue lines connecting them. All those blue lines are error and its not just error in one direction, its error in several.

Figure 2: Georeferencing with multiple points but allowing for some error. 

 Since I wanted to see exactly how bad this error was, I decided to force ArcGIS to try and resolve these errors. The result is Figure 3. It's pretty much what I envisioned. The Kingmaker map is folded and twisted to try to shoehorn everything into a predefined space. Getting to this point took several tries, by the way, and I had to add additional control points to keep the edges from getting out of hand. But in the end all the points had almost zero error.

Figure 3: Resolving as much of the error as I could from Figure 2.

My conclusion from all this is that the answer in the map I'm creating is an acceptable compromise between different features. It is one solution among many. As such, I'm content to go foward now with only minor revisions to the map.

Postscript: I never used Rostov as a data point. When I examined its location on each map, I realized that it had been misplaced on one map (or the other). Going forward I will use the Kingmaker location because that is integral to the AP.

Progress update 7-26-2014

Hi all,

Its been a busy week and I haven't gotten as much done as I'd wanted. But I'd like to share where I stand.

Below is a portion of the map centered on the Hooktongue Slough. As you can see the terrain is in place for south Brevoy and the Stolen Lands, including the rivers. Right now I'm expanding terrain to include north Brevoy, the surrounding River Kingdoms and parts of Iobaria.

The current state of the map - terrain is looking good!

The symbols are mostly self explanatory. Smaller (or fewer) mountains have been denoted by the single mountain hex as opposed to the triple mountain hex. Triple mountain hexes are the particularly rugged core of the mountain chains. The same goes with forests - triple trees are dense forest whereas the single trees are lightly forested or scattered forested areas.

Green currently stands for plains. I kicked around a lot of possibilities for plains, but in the end I kept to the traditional green. If you could look to the Nomen area (currently off the map) you'd find a symbol for tall grasses or savannas. This is because I wanted a visual distinction for the 'great plains' to the east that are sometimes alluded to in Paizo products.

One thing I don't have a good handle on is how to make farms. I expect much of south Brevoy is farmed and i'd like to add that as part of the civilization layer (which I haven't begun on).

While I'm on things that need improving, I also want to improve on the brush-strokes that create rivers. I like that the rivers naturally shrink down to nothing, but the way the rivers widen and the ultimate width of the rivers needs tweaking. I'll get to that at some point too. Its somewhere in the settings, no doubt.

Speaking of rivers - the Slough. Note that the East Sellen River stops at Lake Hooktongue and doesn't continue south of the river. That's by design. The river essentially stops at the Lake and divides into innumerable channels with little to no current south of it. The current picks up again once you get closer to Mivon. If you look closely at the bottom of the map you map just be able to see the blue line starting up. Think of traversing this like traversing the everglades (although much colder). One of the things I'm looking for is a different symbol for swamp to reflect this more navigable area. There is a geological reason for this (and lots of other things), but I'm saving that for a series of subsequent posts I make describing the Sellen River and its tributaries (possibly as a travelogue).