PieRatCat

It's a cat or perhaps a rat who is also a pirate, or is the ship a pie?

[pieratcat]

Mapping Thedas Part Three

School has started again and I’ve been busy. Unfortunately, there is not much time for side projects. However, I have switched from ArcGIS Desktop to ArcGIS Pro, which means I get to play around with fancy styles. This is just a test to see what I can do with my new software.

[pieratcat]

Mapping Thedas Part Two

Part One

Thedas base map (work in progress): seas, rivers, lakes.

Detail:

[pieratcat]

Mapping Thedas Part One

Today I am on my summer break and have randomly decided to combine my ArcGIS skills and obsession with Dragon Age to georeference the maps of Thedas. Since there is little official information on the scale of Thedas (other than “Thedas is a continent in the southern hemisphere” and “Ferelden is approximately the size of England”, etc.) I had no choice but to base my maps on several assumptions.

The first major assumption I am making is that the planet of Thedas is the same size as the Earth. This is for the simple reason that I am an archaeologist, not a planetary scientist and I don’t know a thing about modelling a fictional planet, nor do I have software that can create and apply a coordinate system of a differently sized world (I am using ArcGIS 10.6.1).

There are several map scales commonly in use by the Dragon Age fandom. In this case, I have decided to use scale v2 from the Interactive Map of Thedas by bendingwind. It looks legit and I like it, but most importantly, when georeferenced at this scale, the map of Thedas corresponds very closely to the outline of Europe flipped upside down. You have to see it to believe it. 

I used the 30 km hexagon map to place control points on a grid which I will explain in a moment, in combination with Computing Distances between Latitudes/Longitudes in One Step.

I had to place the zero meridian somewhere, and Minrathous, the capital of the Tevinter Empire is essentially the centre of the civilization, all roads lead to Minrathous, Tevinters are smart and educated, and so on and so forth. Hence, the 0° 0’ 0” longitude running through it. Due to the all roads thing, for the latitude of Minrathous I chose the approximate latitude of real-life Rome, 42°, in this case, 42° South, as Thedas is in the southern hemisphere. This was my starting point for calculating the latitude and longitude of the grid of control points which I used to apply 3rd order polynomial transformation to the image. I must have chosen right because Ferelden is indeed located at the latitude of England, with Korcari Wilds stretching into Scotland. Gwaren is almost spot on Glasgow at its 55.9° latitude. (I need to do another map with Thedas upside down and overlaying Europe!).

One problem with this scale of Thedas is that Par Vollen is not close enough to the equator to describe it as “a chain of tropical islands”. If it was meant to be literally, geographically tropical, on the earth the tropics are located between 23°26’12.3” N and 23°26’12.3” S. The southern part of Par Vollen that is visible on the map is around 38° S. I will have to interpret it as “warm, islands covered in what looks like tropical vegetation” and not the actual geographical zone, unless there is a large part of Par Vollen that is not visible on the existing map and it stretches much further north. Either that or the planet of Thedas is much smaller than the Earth.

Continued in Part Two.