alt Hacker NewsShow HN: A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world
Comments
Tangential, BUT, here is a grid map of ARDA from a (M)ulti (U)ser (D)ungeon text game from the 90s that you can still play: https://mume.yllemo.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=maps:...
You can literally still connect to this game from your terminal: telnet mume.org 4040 IIRC.
When I was a teenager, a buddy and I printed out giant copies of that map, laminated it, and put it on the wall in front of our computers while we hunted hobbits on our orc characters. Was pretty rad.
Funny, I found this last night: https://www.ardacraft.me/
Friendly advice: this is wrong way to sell fantasy maps to nerds. The link shows some animation (which actually feels a bit annoying cause I can't focus on any particular detail), and lowres pics of maps itself (which can't prove the quality of work), and some useless text. Instead it'd be way better to show a few highres fragments.
A bit unrelated, but one of the rarest pieces for Tolkien's collectors has been put for sale recently
https://www.tomwayling.co.uk/product-page/songs-for-the-phil...
Beautiful work, I love fantasy cartography. Someday I actually want to make some maps of my own, I was thinking of ASOIAF. A slightly off-topic question, are these types of maps legal to sell from copyright point of view? I understand that this is quite a niche product, so maybe I'm overthinking it, but do these count as derivative works ?
Cool!
Very nice. I have a book of maps for his world on a bookshelf here which I got when I was young (The Atlas of Middle-Earth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlas_of_Middle-earth). I enjoyed reading that a lot, and it was nice to see that most parts of it are well thought through and internally consistent (there's one piece near Rivendell which is a bit of a mess between the Hobbit and LotR but we can let Tolkien have one minor issue).