: Well, now that you ask, I was right about to post one.
: GURPS tells us that the Faraway is a western continent of
: peace and concord and eternal spring, which basically
: means, if you ignore SD's "peace, concord, and
: eternal spring of EVIL!" theory, that it's a land
: of pure light.
But I like my theory! Look, you have to admit that no one who was really good could spend their life in pure happiness in the Mythworld. Even if their country was pleasant, what about the rest of the world? When Myth's poor inhabitants aren't being made into Thrall or devoured by Myrkridia, they're dying from the Black Plague, the common cold and all the other health problems of the medieval world. In Light Ages the Dark living races are miserable; in Dark Ages the Light races are. Every champion and every archmage seeks desperately to carve something lasting out of his world; then it gets torn down and rubbed in the dirt a thousand years later. Face it, if you can observe such a world with total peace and concord, you're either stupid or a big freakin' sadist. :-)
: We are also told that to the southeast are the Untamed
: Lands, and to the northeast are other dark lands.
: We have been discussing recently how Dark forces tend to
: be extremists; pure chaos like the Myrkridia, pure
: unthinking order like the undead. Meanwhile, Light is
: the tendancy toward balance between chaos in order,
: that temperate zone in which life is possible.
: So I though, if the Faraway is pure light to the west,
: and darkness seems to come from the east, then perhaps
: the Faraway is a land of pure balance, and the further
: east you go the more extreme things get; to the south
: things become too chaotic, and to the north things
: become too orderly. In between this perfect balance
: and absolute extremes, Wyrd placed his dream-world.
: We can see evidence of all this in what lands we know of
: already; the Trow to the north and the military lands
: of Gower and all very orderly, as are the undead
: forces which seem to have come from there. The south
: has the wild Ghols and the appropriately named Untamed
: Lands. The west has the most civilized, lively Human
: lands.
: Since SiliconDream pointed out that the far west is the
: far east and that supported his "Land of
: Perfectly Peaceful EVIL!" theory, I pointed out
: that the Faraway and the far east could be like
: good/evil poles; that when you go west past the
: Faraway, things get more evil until you're back at the
: far east. And directly opposite Wyrd's vision is a
: place of similar light/dark balance.
: That's all old theorization. The new thing that I'm
: thinking of is, exactly how big is the known map, and
: thus how large is that in comparison to the rest of
: the Myth world?
: Some basic things we know about the world and the known
: lands are that the world is around the same size as
: Earth (the gravitational values are the same). We know
: the world is a sphere; GURPS mentions Trow freezing at
: the poles, which a disc or ringworld wouldn't have.
Actually, the Mythworld could be smaller and denser, or larger and less dense, than our world. Either way the gravity would work out. And does GURPS actually mention the poles? I thought it was the Myth2 Handbook that talks about that; GURPS, IIRC just said they froze on high mountains.
: The known lands seem to be in the northern hemisphere, as
: there are forests in the south while there are
: glaciers in the north. However, the known lands don't
: seem too far to the north, as they are on a
: penninsula, where there are seas to the north and
: south and west, but none of them are frozen over; so
: they're not in the arctic yet, though it's implied
: that the Deep does freeze over.
Can't read too much into this, though. The known lands are obviously semi-based on Western Europe, which is much warmer than it should be because of the Gulf Stream. I'd say the Deep is probably around the level of mid-Scandinavia. How's that for ignoring my own advice toward caution?
: So, do we have any known measurements of the Myth map?
: Anywhere where someone says it's this far from this
: landmark to that? If we have just one measurement that
: we can apply to a straight line on the map, we can
: figure out how big the map is and how much space it
: takes up on the globe (which is Earth-sized), and by
: knowing that it's not quite in the arctic yet we can
: figure out where it is.
From the TFL journals:
Distance from the northwest corner of Forest Heart to the southern edge of the Dire Marsh, directly south of the mouth of the Gjol = 250 miles.
Distance from said point on the edge of the Dire Marsh to Rhi'anon = 500 miles.
Doesn't look that way on the map, does it? It looks like the two distances are about the same. But all maps involve distortion, and maps from this primitive era doubtless involve more than most. I'd take the 250-mile measure as the more accurate one, since it's in a more civilized and human-known area. In this case, the known Mythworld spans about 1500 miles east-west.
: Also, since we know that the far east of the continent is
: dark lands, and we since Wyrd's vision seems to be on
: the equator of balance, then we can assume that the
: continent spans around a quarter of the globe
: longitudinally, but no more - 'cause if it were more,
: the far east would be lighter than the middle east,
: not darker.
The known part, from above, would span about a 20th of an Earth-sized Mythworld, or a 10th if we take the Dire Marsh--Rhi'anon distance. If your model is right, there's room for things to get very very bad to the East.
Anyone up to make an enormous map with a number of wells and watch to see when the sunlight falls in each, in order to calculate the curvature of the Mythworld and therefore its size?
--SiliconDream
