By Rory HJ, rbuxton, Phoenixguard, Jake, Suzi, Caradilis, Jubal, and Lizard

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Atop Three Kings’ Crag, the North Wind raged. It was a storm to uproot oak trees, to topple houses, to send all creatures scurrying to shelter. It cut through all the layers of fur, leather and wool I was wearing, chilling me to the bone. I scarce dared to stand for fear of being plucked from the rock and carried to ancestors know where. But I had business to be about that night, business that at its completion would uproot royal trees, topple noble houses and send oppressors scurrying for shelter. At least this high above the clouds, there was no rain to make the mountaintop yet more miserable.

Crouched low against the mighty gusts and roped together for safety, my companions and I inched our way across the bare rock. Ahead of us, Kelgar’s Rest – the smallest of the three barrows – seemed to glow faintly from within, a promise of warmth in the darkness. In fair weather, the journey from the top of the path to the barrow entrance was barely a minute’s stroll. That night, it was an eternity of biting cold.

At long, long, last, we reached the door. Pressing tight against it to seek respite from the wind, I beat against it with the haft of my axe-turned-walking pole.
“Who goes there?” asked a voice, muffled by stone.

“Can’t we do the interrogation inside? It’s freezing out here,” I replied, more concerned for comfort than security at this point.

“Spoken like a true spy. Who knocks?”

“I am Ren,” I said, “With me are Monok, Turin and Pey: three men with only one tongue between them.”

The door opened and I ducked inside to find a young Southern woman, weathered beyond her years, staring at the two mutes behind me. She rushed to greet them in their traditional way – foreheads touching – and, though her words were alien to me, her relief at seeing her kinsmen was palpable. Turin and Pey could only murmur in reply. I turned away to find two small children, a boy and a girl, at my feet.

“Isil vai,” I stammered, and they responded in kind.

Discomforted by the children’s stares, I looked about the room: a chimney hole had been made in the barrow’s stones; there were furs aplenty, but little else. Turin and Pey came inside to greet the children, and Monok heaved himself in after them.

“I apologise,” said the woman, “I am Surimay. You are welcome to shelter with us tonight, but you’ll find no food here.”

“We have plenty for us all”, I replied, as I sought comfort against the stones.

“How can you bear,” growled Monok, “To shelter in this tomb?”

“It will be our tomb before Midwinter,” was the curt response, “We have nowhere else to go.”

The children, ignorant of their mother’s words, looked at us in confusion. Seeing our expressions, Surimay continued:

“I’d rather we die before they take our tongues.”


I awoke with a start.

Around me, the other inhabitants of the barrow continued to slumber in their bedrolls, oblivious to my current panicked state.

I heard a snuffling on the other side of the door. Something was out there.

A slow scratching sound emanated from out in the cold, like a gigantic clawed hand dragging down the hard stone door.

My teeth chattered, not from the cold this time, but from fear. I’d never seen a Silencer, and everyone I had met were not able to tell me of them, but I knew that one was outside the door at that moment. Whether it had managed to follow my own trail, or if it were able to track the scent of its former prey, did not matter.

It was there, looking for a way in.

Slowly, quietly, I gathered my things, searching desperately for another way out.

The barrow was too well built for escape. Though furs hid the sharp edges of the smooth metal, silencer’s metal, there was no yielding. No exit.

I was fortunate among our broken people, not only had I so far avoided silencers I possessed a modicum of knowledge picked up from those few who had learnt before silencers rooted out our last settlements and we were truly scattered. The vague probing behind the door, as the natural sounds faded a low metallic whine began to fill the air rising in pitch and intensity before an earth-shattering crash sounded, again. And again. The door began to shudder and falter before the onslaught. There was no time.

From my pack I drew a glistening metal rod which seemed to hum in its natural surroundings. The tongueless drew back in fright; the woman spoke over the ear-piercing whine “What are you? That thing is of the silencers”.

I could not reply, entranced by the radiance. The soft glow of white behind the furs had been replaced by a dancing brilliance that assaulted my sense. The rod - the Baton - danced in conjunction as I wove it in the first form. New shrieks broke the night. The silencer seemed to grow more frantic, desperately whining. As the door buckled and I caught my first glimpse of the twisted metal and flesh which made the monstrous silencer.

It advanced in triumph.

Behind me, awakened from its slumber, a silencer emerged.

I realised that, in my fear, I had stopped moving. The Baton was still humming, held in the first form by my previous movements, but it no longer seemed to affect the two silencers as it had been. I knew from my research that the first form would only aggravate them, but was a necessary precursor to the end form that would allow a temporary reprieve. Quickly, I resumed my movements, weaving the Baton once again into the second form.

Sensing the change in the Baton, the two silencers once again began to move. However now they seemed dazed and I knew this was the work of the Baton. They shuffled sluggishly, as though half awake, towards me- they were pulled by the workings of the Baton. I began to weave the third form and finally dared myself to hope that I could pull this off. As long as nothing broke the trance that the Baton was creating, I could get myself and these people out alive.

Fate, it seemed, had other ideas.

As I began to weave the fourth and final form with the Baton, one of the barrow inhabitants finally decided that he should run. The noise he created broke the trance and I stared in horror as the two beasts advanced on me.

Okay, so subtly sneaking away wasn’t going to work this time. Fine. Violence it is then. “Run!” I shouted at the others, charging right at the two beasts, Baton still in hand. Hungry? Choke on this! I jammed the Baton right between their razor-sharp metallic teeth as I slid through the small space between them. This gave me just the second I needed to pull Songweaver from my belt. The albinium blade gleamed bright blue, humming contently and vibrating in my hand, thirsty to bite into the Starforge Titanium skin of the Silencers.

I had only done this once before. I had sworn to never do it again. Songweaver was one of only seven albinium blades, the only swords that could cut through Starforge Titanium, but there were consequences. Destroy a Silencer and the Lords of History – I did not name them, take it up with them if you have issues – would know immediately where you were. They would find me, but for now, that didn’t matter. The others still had a chance to escape.

The growling beasts were done chewing down on my Starforge Baton and turned to face me once again. The others had all made it outside. I had to believe that they would make it far enough away before the death of the Silencers would home in the airstrike. I lifted Songweaver and braced myself for impact. “These are my words. This is where I stand.” I thought, as I made my blade sing.

It sang of the Lords of History, the Takers of Tongues. It sang hope beyond death, joy beyond fury, and freedom beyond chains.

The blade tasted the shapeless, metal-jawed silencers, slicing the flesh-knots and the cacophony of jarring, jutting metal, singing lost harmony past the titanium skin and into the dark knots of energy that kept the silencers… alive, if they could be truly said to be living. Fighting is usually a grim, physical, sweaty business, but the blade of songs made it almost serene.
The two silencers slumped where they fell. And now they knew.

I looked down at myself. Beneath the heavy furs and gloves, I quivered. I took a glove off for a moment and just stared at my hand – earth-dark with a pale palm, as my family’s always were – and wondered what that hand might do with its fingers round such a hilt. I had sworn never to take that risk out of fear. That night, caught between the song of a sword and the cry of the thunder, I found the courage to become the oathbreaker I was destined to be.

Stepping up to the door, I passed out of the barrow. None of the Southerners could be seen. The dark, close curls of my hair tossed in the breeze, and lighting ripped across the sky. I held my sword aloft, and the sky seemed to roll around me. I screamed my name – my real name – and in the distance, shapes loomed through the clouds.


The maelstrom of storm-clouds, flickering with forked lightening, swirled, parted, and closed again around the man who held his sword high, challenging the night. He was manic, frenzied, broken by time and fear and held no qualms with his final stand being here, fighting off the ships which loomed on the horizon and were ready to purge.

Malcette watched, as if seated behind her pilot’s shoulder, but remained within the safety of the Lords of History’s court. She was fascinated. This provincial man, haggard by years of hard work and fear, so small when all things were considered… He should stand in the darkness, as if his albinium blade stood any chance of taking out three strike ships cruising at a thousand feet? It was absurd, comical, really. She sat forwards, over the communications array, and called off the strike.
 
“Lady Malcette?” The squadron leader’s voice crackled, the signal only just penetrating the storm.

“I said ‘disengage’.” The lightening stopped, the thunder gave one last clap, and the clouds began to lessen. The last she saw of the man, before the strike ships turned, was a look on his face somewhere between disbelief and triumph.

If he should fancy himself an Oathbreaker, she thought, then he would have to learn. They were dead, extinct, and it would do everyone good to relive the pain and remember.

She did not look forwards to the task ahead of her, breaking the people, destroying this man. But it had to be done. Before things could get any worse.

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This is one of three stories written as part of our summer 2018 chain writing project. You can read the other two here and here, and find the project wrap-up announcement here.

Editor's Note: This was the one of the three chains that was designated from the outset as "definitely SFF" though the other chains managed to fit that bill equally well. Storms and Silence ended up being a fairly consistent narrative throughout, and was probably in some ways the smoothest of the three resulting stories. The cliffhanger ending does rather beg for more, though...

The Editor Is Now Concerned About: Silencers. Silencers are scary.

By Loren, Andreas, ArtDodge, Tusky, Samuel Cook (aka Tar-Palantir), HenriNatalie, Caradilis, and Andrew Conway

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If she could wipe out her own race, she would. But it is not time yet.

She allows the idiosyncrasies to snowball and explode in one large sitting, like a black holocaustic balloon of smoke. Anything less would be an insult to her years of precise planning.

She is at best a troll and at worst a misanthrope. The neurosis of her own kind creeps under her skin and annoys the crap out of her. The best part is she understands completely this neurosis, a pattern that has dominated her for the first 18 years of her life. She has been a nervous wreck. She refuses to spawn, even with elite specimens declared the best of her kind, to bring more little maniac Booyians into this already hysteric world.

She is obsessive with staging a reform – one that could turn back the clock and restore life proper on New Earth, and perhaps bring back the long-forgotten prestigious race. One that has tickled her fancy, one that she has for so long yearning to be part of, one that she could turn her back on her ascendants for, one that could undisputedly be the rightful ruling species, one that could be her downfall.

She cannot knock before it is time. Instead, she waits. Btobo is waiting as well, she knows. He is sat upright behind his desk, waiting for her to be done waiting.

'He will see you at 0900 hours.'

This is the statement Btobo's secretary made. It is a reality which has not yet come to pass, but a reality nonetheless.

She looks at her watch, an old thing from an old world, from a dead people, a bit of guidance to cling to amid the uncertainty. She thinks about the reality that is her plan and a shade of purple creeps into her skin tone. A balled up tentacle trembles as her thoughts drift. They had it all figured out, time and words and order, all of it was once theirs to understand, to command, and they are no more.

She will knock in thirteen seconds and Btobo will see no purple. She will speak and her words will not be reality.

At one second to 0900 hours, she raises her arm and it coils around the plain knocker. Thrice, she lifts the iron ring and thrice, at equidistant intervals, metal slams into wood.
The door swings open, their eyes meet, and Btobo nods his approval.

The forgotten race used greetings of varying formality, sometimes pleasantries and even physical contact, but the Booyians only incline their heads, confirming, 'Yes, you are who I expected. You are who I have business with.'

‘So, tell me what happened?' Btobo asks.

‘I had it again’ I answered. ‘Another attack.  Suddenly, I could not breathe, I started shaking and everything turned dark around me. I got lost, forgot where and who I was and what I was going. I kept my focus on my breathing. I do not know for how long. I closed my eyes. And I got lost in this darkness. I felt cold and empty. As if I was about to die; as if this darkness was my path. But I was not afraid. I was just empty… inside’.

 ‘Do you take your medication?’ Btobo looked disinterested.

‘Yes, I do’ I answered. ‘But it is not enough. I need something stronger. It is not working.’

‘I cannot give anything else now - it should be enough. You must keep on taking it and it will work. Now please, you have to leave’

‘But I cannot go back to work, I need to have a break. I am afraid I will make a fatal mistake ‘

‘Just be more concentrated and take your medication. Your condition will improve. Now go. Your time is over’

‘Yes, but what if it doesn’t?

‘In that case, we will find another solution, but you may not like it.’

She found it frustrating that so much of their discourse had to be hidden in code and double meaning. It was a necessary evil, however. The ministry was monitored too heavily and Btobo worked so deep within it that if they ever spoke frankly it would undoubtedly mean a swift end to both them, and the others involved in the plan.

'So you'd like me to leave... now' She asked with a laboured pause.

He nodded.

She had her answer. He'd got to the limits of what he could provide her. It meant the reform was coming, and much sooner than she had expected, or hoped. It was welcome news. Very soon perhaps she could be freed from these afflictions and affectations of a civilization she had no desire to be a part of.

With a slight nod in reply she stood and left. She felt a strange mixture of heady elation and a sense of deep foreboding of what must come next.

She made her way out of the building to the street. Despicable, chittering pen pushers in suits rushed here and there, oblivious to how futile their manic endeavours were. Endless rush hour traffic crawled past. She could see Eress waiting for her in the massive truck across the road. She ran over, dodging a few cars which honked in protest, and jumped in the passenger seat.

'Ok, there's no more' She said.

Eress smiled. She started the thunderous engine, and they pulled away.

Eress asked ‘So, it is time to leave, then?’

She replied ‘Yes. Now. We must leave.’

The rest of the journey passed in silence. Both occupants of the truck were too unsure of what lay ahead and whether the plan would work to engage in any unnecessary and probably pointless chitchat. In all likelihood, they would both be dead soon. Only the occasional pulsating patch of red on their skins belied the anxiety they both felt.

The truck pulled up at the deserted hangar, far away from prying eyes. This was the last consignment of materials and supplies. They loaded them quickly into the vessel, getting ever more nervous as the minutes passed. Surely they’d be discovered? Surely someone would shout ‘STOP!’ any second?

But nothing happened and soon the loading was complete. They both entered the vessel and began the pre-flight checks. Still no sound of sirens or signs of alarm. They couldn’t quite believe that everything was working so far.

It was finally time to leave. Leave this accursed civilisation and, in doing so, destroy it. The viral vials were secure – once they were in orbit, they’d rain death on the unsuspecting Booyians, her own race. They deserved it. And then, with the second set of vials, they could seed the cleansed biosphere and bring back the rightful rulers. The galaxy, if it cared, would thank them for it.

They initiated the launch sequence.

5,
4,
3,
2,
1.

With the buzzing sound of the engine and raising dust the spacecraft took off. All had gone according to plan. Now was the critical moment, the whole plan hinged on. Btobo promised to distract the authorities that heavily guarded the airspace. But would it work? They could not be sure. All they could do was follow the plan.

As they had reached the perfect distance to New Earth, Jurou hesitated for a moment, looked at her beloved planet for the last time - how small and insignificant it seemed now - and pushed the button that released the vials into space. She watched them sail onto earth on their tiny parachutes and saw how New Earth was shrouded by a reddish-grey cloud. A deep feeling of woe swept over her and the tentacles on her head wound up on top of it. The first part of the plan was herewith realised.

Tense, Jurou now looked at her watch. Its arms still moved, albeit according to another time. She had learnt to interpret it correctly, so that she knew when to release the second set of vials. Jurou fathomed that after doing so she will have ushered in a new era. An era of peace and respect. The so-called Prestigious Race would once again not know war nor conflict. Wherever its seed fell on New Earth the Prestigious Race would settle and adapt to their surroundings perfectly. Each population would develop friendly relations with others and together they would prosper anew.
It was time. She turned her chair to the other side of the control panel and her hand reached for the red and black lever that would release the second set of vials. This was the moment all her efforts had been working towards. Her Prestigious Race. They would be so grateful to her for bringing them back. She would be revered, finally. She pulled the lever and a second patch of vials sailed down towards the planet below. Jurou smiled. She had prevailed. New Earth was cleansed and soon the Prestigious Race would be ruling it again, in peace and prosperity, and Jurou, she would be there every step of their way.

But there was not to be peace. There was not to be prosperity. There was not to be a Prestigious Race. It had all been a lie. The Booyians had glorified this mysterious species who had built so many wonders on New Earth. They had named the planet and built the cities. The Booyians never built anything. They never had to. The elaborate structures of stone and steel had been good enough, and they reminded them of what the Booyians had seen as a more glorious time, a time of prosperity and mystical inventions, when great cities were built and when there were still heroes. But the people who lived in those cities first were no heroes. They were monsters, who knew no peace, only greed. And their inventions, they were not meant for mysterious things, as the Booyians had thought. They were meant for war.


Sarah pushed her chair away from the monitor and shook her head in disgust. “I guess we can kill this emulation.” She made a gesture in the control space, and New Earth was nothing but a collection of log files.

Sergei looked up from the novel he was reading. “Not again? I thought we had it this time.”
“Yep, total species extinction in 18.3 gigaseconds. Terrorist attack using bioweapons.”

“But they were doing so well. Strong central government, scientific research, a space program… Let’s try again with more deference to authority. Perhaps some sheep genes as well as the octopus, turtle, and magpie?”

“I think it’s time to give up on the air breathing octopuses. We’ve run twenty nine emulations now, and the best one only lasted less than 40 gigaseconds.  We need to go back and look at the bears again.”

Sergei shook his head in frustration. “Environmental collapse every time with the bears. Twenty runs, and they all ended the same way. Overfishing, overeating. You can’t build a decent civilization with a species that hibernates. It has to be octopuses. They are intelligent, they have fine motor skills and mainpulative ability. Just get them out of the water so they can learn metallurgy. Let’s try one more time.”

Sarah shrugged. “OK, one more octopus run, and then we do the bears again. I think there’s a hummingbird sequence we can add to prevent hibernation, and some sloth to slow down the metabolism.”

Sergei nodded, and began to set up another emulation run. Beneath the orbiting DNA bank, an empty planet turned, and the last two surviving humans tried to work out how to repopulate it.

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This is one of three stories written as part of our summer 2018 chain writing project. You can read the other two here and here, and find the project wrap-up announcement here.

Editor's Note: This was the one that I'd mentally pegged as "maybe this won't end up as Sci Fi". You... can see how well that ended up. It's a twisty narrative, but I think wrapped up very neatly in a way that actually drew pretty well on the strange octopoid life story that emerged in the early parts of it. This chain was the first to be completed, and holds an impressive record for fastest turnaround time on a section - part 4 of this was emailed back to me twenty-one minutes after I'd sent it to Sam Cook, which is certainly a record marker for future chain writers to have a crack at beating!

The Editor Is Now Concerned About: Whether octopuses and bears are really the best two options here. Axolotls may be underestimated as a possibility?

This is the third and last part of "A Cartload of Cartograhpy", Tar-Palantir's article series looking at the history of maps and mapmaking! You can read part one, on ancient and medieval maps, here, and part two, on early modern mapping, here.

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From the 18th century onwards, cartography pretty much becomes a case of increasing precision and accuracy, often in the service of imperial ambitions, and greatly helped by the invention of accurate marine chronometers in the later 18th century, making the determination of longitude possible. As states became more territorially-based, mapping and defining that territory became more important, so national mapping agencies begin to appear, charged with charting the homeland and its colonies in exacting detail, usually through thorough triangulation-based surveying. More sophisticated administrative structures also needed maps for things such as accurate taxation and governance. As machines started to become more involved and producing maps became easier, special-purpose maps, showing, say, the distribution of one kind of thing also became more common – say, regions where malaria was endemic. Fast forward to the current day, and maps are usually digitised, with all the possibilities that entails – cartograms, multiple layers of information and so on. Another big development is the use of contour lines and symbols for different kinds of land cover and features of interest – rather than representing a forest by drawing lots of little trees, modern maps will colour the area green or fill it with some sort of tree symbol. Rather than a little drawing of a town, there’ll be a dot of the relevant size and style. And so on.

The important thing to think about here is that your map should reflect the technological level of the civilisation. If you’re aiming for something, say, 18th-19th century, a hand-drawn look would be appropriate, but you’re going to need to make sure it’s pretty accurate. For a 20th-21st century look, you might want to consider using some GIS software (QGIS is free and fairly straightforward to create maps in – there are tutorials online) to make your map, for a digital look. And, of course, if you’re aiming for something from the future, make sure to make your map look futuristic. In any case, make sure you include things like scale bars, meanings of abbreviations or foreign words, a colour and symbol legend if relevant, and so on.

At the same time, decorative maps are still very much a thing in this day and age, so a more old-style map would work, but you’d have to make sure you have a good in-universe reason for it being relevant.

That concludes our whistle-stop tour of cartographic history. Hopefully that’s given you a few ideas for how you could make the map of your world feel more authentic – remember, the important thing is to create something that looks as if the culture and technology of your world could have produced it. So, if you’re writing something faux-medieval, a clean digital map of the entire world is not a good idea; similarly, if you’re more futuristic, a hand-drawn and wildly-inaccurate map is not really suitable. Happy mapping!

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A Note On Projections

One other thing to bear in mind is the issue of map projections. It is, of course, impossible to accurately represent the surface of a sphere on a flat continuous 2D plane (of course, one solution to this is to present your map as a globe, but, depending on how you’re aiming to present your map, that may not be feasible). There is, inevitably, a distortion of area, shape or position. Over the centuries, cartographers have come up with all sorts of different projections to minimise this issue in different ways, but which one is the ‘best’ really depends on your purpose. As stated above, the Mercator projection is great for regional nautical charts, but its very obvious and dramatic distortion of apparent area and shape at high latitudes means it doesn’t work so well in depicting the entire globe. If you’re aiming to produce a truly-accurate, modern-style map, therefore, you should investigate the range of projections available and pick one that suits – which one that is will depend very much on your particular requirements. Modern GIS software will easily allow you to change projections, so don’t worry about having to work out the maths yourself.

However, if your map is meant to be from a pre-Enlightenment period, you can pretty much ignore this issue. The intrinsic inaccuracies in earlier maps mean that projection issues are negligible – it’s only once you’ve got accurate positional data that projecting it properly becomes a real concern. If you do want to think about projections, though, the Mercator one is perhaps the easiest to use (hence its enduring popularity). This represents the surface of a sphere as if it were the unrolled surface of a cylinder, so lines of longitude become straight, parallel lines, much like lines of latitude (and that also shows you why it tends to infinity at the Poles). In other words, you can define a grid of parallel lines and use that to structure your map. But, if your map is hand-drawn based on hearsay from travellers, for instance, I really wouldn’t bother…

Welcome to the second part of this series, on Early Modern maps! You can check the first part, on ancient to medieval maps, out here.



Once we hit the 15th century, something a bit more like the modern map hoves into view. This is largely driven by advances in seafaring, spearheaded by Portugal and the Catalans. As long-distance voyages became more common, especially ones that involved potentially being out-of-sight of land for a while, actually accurate maps became more important. People could measure latitude pretty well by this point, as the astrolabe began to be replaced by the cross-staff and then the backstaff, making the measurement relatively accurate and simple. However, longitude was still problematic, as its accurate measurement relies on being able to accurately measure time, which was beginning to be resolved on land with better timepieces, but was still impossible at sea, as mechanical devices quickly accumulated error due to the motion of the ship and the excess of water and salt throwing out their delicate mechanisms. The alternative was dead reckoning, where you measure the distance you’ve sailed on a given bearing to plot your course. This works fairly well in sight of land, where you can correct against known coastal features, but, in the open ocean or along unfamiliar coasts, rapidly becomes inaccurate. Hence, maps from this period tend to look fairly decent in a north-south direction, but get east-west ones often quite wrong – Africa, for instance, usually ends up looking much wider than it actually is.

These maps, called portolan charts, were inherently nautically-derived documents, though, and, as such, tended to focus more on features of interest to seafarers. The other thing they included lots of were rhumb lines, i.e. lines of constant bearing, as they helped captains know what bearing they should sail on to reach a given destination (though, not being projected correctly, these rhumb lines are really more windrose lines and not actually of much use to a navigator!). A line of constant bearing is, of course, not a straight line at longer distances, because of the curvature of the Earth, so it’s important to plot them properly. This was the motivation behind the invention of the Mercator projection: in that projection, rhumb lines are straight lines, which makes it very handy for a navigator. What it was never designed to do was be the basis of a full world map; a situation it frequently finds itself misapplied to in modern times, where its tending towards infinity at the Poles makes it rather unsuitable for depicting high-latitude landmasses. Back when it was invented, these weren’t well-known, so it wasn’t seen as an issue, but, in this day and age, it makes Greenland look the size of Africa, which is a little problematic.

The late-14th century Catalan Atlas (Figure 1) is perhaps the most impressive map of this kind  - the Mediterranean basin is rendered with a high level of accuracy, but as you move farther afield, this accuracy begins to wane. This map also draws very heavily on the mappa mundi tradition, with various myths and legends depicted in its farther-flung reaches. Most portolan charts were far less elaborate and only showed outlines of coasts with coastal towns and features named.

Portolan charts were produced for a specific purpose for a specific group of people and new ones were usually treated as state secrets, so weren’t available to the general public. However, a more enquiring attitude to the world, overseas exploration (primarily for trade at this stage, not empire) and increasing rejection of Catholic dogma, also meant geographical information was more sought after by non-mariners, so we see the first atlases compiled; the very first, titled simply Atlas, including a world map (Figure 2) by Mercator in 1569, marking a shift in European cartographic power to the Netherlands. The work associated with the Netherlandish school of cartography is much closer to what we would think of as maps – they’re meant to be repositories of geographic knowledge and, as far as possible, an accurate representation of the world. The culmination of this tradition is perhaps Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Maior (Figure 3), published in 9-12 volumes, depending on the edition, between 1662 and 1672. As can be seen in Figures 2 and 3, this school of mapmaking has largely banished the medieval penchant for putting in all kinds of legendary creatures and features, contenting itself with some ships sailing on the sea, explanatory text and decorated borders. Useful bits of cartographic furniture, such as scale bars, also start to make an appearance, in keeping with the changed purpose of these maps.

Atlases were also supposed to be decorative items, showing the wealth and taste of the owner, so many versions had substantial, increasingly Baroque artwork to fill in gaps on the page. Maps began to be produced that had no particular use and were themselves purely decorative, such as double-hemisphere-type maps (Figure 4), which look nice and afford plenty of decorative space, though are a bit useless as practical maps.

Remember, though, there were still large parts of the world essentially unknown to European mapmakers at this stage – the interior of Africa and parts of Asia hadn’t been nailed down yet. The outline of South America was fairly well-established, though its interior was, likewise, still largely conjectured. North America was less well-outlined, explorers having not yet reached the north-western coast, and the barest outlines of Australia and New Zealand only began to come in during the 17th century. Whilst the overt filling of spaces with legendary figures was no longer practised, mapmakers weren’t averse to conjuring up mountains and rivers to fill them in in a slightly more naturalistic manner, so there was still room for invention.

Overall, then, you have a wide choice of map types if you want to set something in this sort of period. You could come up with something pretty medieval-looking overlaid on a somewhat-accurate topography; you could consider a very minimalist portolan chart, or you could move towards a grandly-decorated modern-style map. Think about what would likely to have been driving cartographic progress in your world and how that would affect the evolution of charts – would it be nautically driven, as in our world, or would something else be the main force?

There are few things harder than compressing the entirety of human history into a video game, and one of them is compressing it into a board game. An example of this is A New Dawn, the latest board game adaptation of the epic Civilization series. In order to meet the Ultimate Challenge, the designers had made sacrifices: retaining the video game's random world generation had come at the expense (in my opinion) of any interaction with the world's oceans. I was disappointed with the absence of naval combat, but how would I have included it alongside a modular board?

I decided to make the tiles of the modular board as simple as possible: a single hexagon providing a given resource (wood, oil etc.). I used concentric hexagons to further divide the tile into three "tiers" - controlling all three would be necessary to gain the resource. Investing in new resources would slow down a player's exploration of the board, represented by flipping tiles over. The modular board would, coincidentally, resemble Catan's.

Next, I needed a single mechanic to simulate nations' military, scientific and cultural advances. I turned to deck building (hold cards, play cards, draw better cards, repeat) and gave players the Hunting (for movement) and Gathering (for recruiting troops) cards at the start of the game. Instead of playing cards, they could "scoop" all of their played cards back into their hand and choose a new one (representing a scientific advance). Their combat strength, however, would be tied to the number of cards they played before scooping - military and scientific advances would, therefore, be mutually exclusive. Cultural advances would be made by "building" cards to make them permanent - Wonder cards would score the most victory points (VPs).

I had mechanics, but did I have a game? I needed a certain kind of person to help me answer that - luckily, I knew where to find them. I sat down with five experienced playtesters (two of them game designers) for a three-player tussle. My team drew the Swords and Slings cards, allowing us to make two attack actions before scooping. Our neighbour drew and built lots of Wonder cards - war was inevitable, since capturing cities was another source of VPs. This highlighted some issues with the combat system: the "scoop and loop" effect trapped the defender on the back foot. They still managed to tie for first place, and we had a lengthy (and completely unbiased) discussion of suitable tie breaks, eventually awarding victory to the player with the most resources.

It was a fun experience and the deck (or, more accurately, hand) building seemed to work, not least because it kept turns short and sweet. One of the main suggestions during my debrief was to tie each resource to a part of the technology tree:

> Iron - military
> Stone - building
> Wood - movement
> Wheat - cities and troops
> Oil - a "wild" resource which counts as anything?

Finishing this project would, however, require years of playtesting: I need at least three "era" decks, and haven't worked out naval combat yet. The game seems to have the potential to meet the Ultimate Challenge, provided I'm willing to write religion, politics, espionage, unrest, barbarians, literature and more out of history. We all have to make sacrifices, but I'm keen to at least keep nuclear weapons: I want the game, and the world, to end when the first is launched.

Have you got a favourite game which tackles the Ultimate Challenge, or any comments on this one? Please leave a reply!