Fantasy Cartography

Hi everyone, I’m looking for any suggestions on this monster! Is it appropriate for a CR 5 creature? Any rules I’ve missed or ideas on how to improve it?

Copyright stuff: The Zuvembie appears in the Pathfinder Bestiary 3, and can be found on the Pathfinder System Reference Document at https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/zuvembie. This conversion for D&D 5th edition is by Lachlan McGowan, and uses text from the Harpy in the 5th edition Monster Manual.

 Monster lore & tactics:

 A Zuvembie is an undead creature formed when sacred forests are corrupted by necrotic energy. They wander the paths between the Feywild, the Material Plane, and the Shadowfell, driven by a twisted desire to protect whatever forests they travel through. Some zuvembies are former dryads; others were once elves, eladrin, or even hags. Most zuvembies are forced into undeath by the forests’ corruption, but a few have embraced it willingly, looking to take revenge on the creatures who attacked their lands. In either case, their desire for revenge soon overtakes all else in their mind.

Territorial Wanderers: Zuvembies are determined to protect the sacred groves they once resided in, but they are also compulsive wanderers with a poor sense of direction. This means that they usually consider whichever patch of forest they happen to be standing in at the moment as an inviolable holy site. If a zuvembie sees someone starting a campfire, trapping an animal, or even stepping on the wrong patch of grass in the forest, it is likely to fly into a cold rage and prepare an ambush.

Controlling and Summoning: When a zuvembie decides to attack a person, its priorities are controlling the battlefield and keeping itself safe. It will usually begin fights by luring in enemies with its hypnotic Corpse Call, and summoning animals to distract foes that it has not enchanted. Zuvembies have a particular affinity for poisonous beasts, and will usually summon giant scorpions, giant spiders, or giant toads. If its summoned allies are defeated, the zuvembie will use its other spells to control the battlefield so it can kill its enemies or escape. While it carries a battleaxe and has razor-sharp claws, its primary focus is spellcasting – it only uses its melee weapons on entranced or entrapped targets.

Guardians and Traps: In theory, a zuvembie’s extreme territorial instincts could make it a capable guard creature – in practice, they are almost impossible to bargain with, since they value nothing but indiscriminate violence. A few powerful necromancers and foolhardy fey lords have managed to use a zuvembie as a guard creature; by all accounts, their usual method is to capture the zuvembie with magic, let it loose in whatever room they need guarded, lock the doors, and let the zuvembie’s territorial instincts do the rest.

Tropical Rainforests

Scrubland/Dry Forests. For extra effect make them the sort that burn very often; some native plants never germinate until after a fire, and some animals not only rely on fire to smoke out prey, but may even start them themselves.

Savannas/Tropical Grasslands

Temperate Rainforests. I almost didn’t include this bc New Zealand is covered in them, and that’s where they filmed Lord of the Rings. But tbh, no one really knows about them, so it belongs here

Taiga Forests

Barren Tundra, perfect for some extreme seasonal dichotomy

Polar Ice Sheets

Desert-Grasslands (arguably the same as Scrubland but Australia’s good at adding its own twists)

Barren Desert

If you like Cacti, look at American Deserts like the Sonoran

Salt Flats

Soda Lakes and Alkaline Lakes

Madagascar’s Karst Limestone Formations

Madagascar’s Spiny Forests

Madagascar’s Baobab Forests

Madagascar’s Subhumid Forests (Madagascar is cool as hell ok)

Danxia Landforms

Badlands/Mountainous Deserts

Steppes and Highland Prairies

Flood Basalts

Newly-Formed Islands, still rife with Volcanic activity

Now for Underwater Environments, sure Coral Reefs are cool.

But there are SO MANY other kinds of environments for aquatic settings, it’s unbelievable:

Seaside Cliffs

Archipelagos. Not just Tropical Island chains like Polynesia (Moana anyone?) but also Coldwater Archipelagos like the Aleutians.

Tidal Flats

Bayous/Cypress Swamps

Tropical River Basins, AKA Seasonally Flooded Rainforests

Mangrove Swamps/Deltas/Beaches

Kelp Forests

The Open Ocean

Coastal Seabeds

Rocky Beaches with Tidepools

AuthaGraphic Map:  The most accurate yet? 

Because of the inevitable distortions involved in converting our spherical earth to a flat map, global projections can be quite misleading in the representation of geographic area and shape. This problem is particularly true of such classic projections as the Mercator, which exaggerates the size of the high northern latitudes, such as Greenland, Russia, and Canada. 

There have been numerous attempts to correct this problem ever since, but a new map by Tokyo-based artist and architect Hajime Narukawa is definitely helpful. Named the AuthaGraphic map, this projection is both scientifically accurate and aesthetically appealing. In fact, it has been so well received that it was just awarded Japan’s prestigious Good Design Grand Award.

The secret to its accuracy is versatility – the map can be quickly converted from flat map to sphere. No matter what form this map takes, from a conventional, flat rectangle shape to a 3D-folded structure – one that can be tessellated without visible seams – the countries and continents remain proportional to each other, including the often neglected Antarctica.

My main reservation to the accolades above is that brilliant futurist Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983) already pioneered a very similar projection, which he called the “Dymaxion Map.” The Dymaxion projection shows Earth’s continents with minimum distortion when projected or printed on a flat surface.

Fuller’s 1954 version, made with cartographer Shoji Sadao, sometimes called the Airocean World Map, used a modified but mostly regular icosahedron as the base for the projection, which is the version most commonly cited today. This version depicts the Earth’s continents as “one island” of nearly contiguous land masses.

Really, guys?

Really?

Let me remind you all: There is no such thing as a perfect 2D map projection. It’s mathematically impossible. Every map projection has flaws. Every map projection has some things it’s good at and some things it’s bad at. Even a globe -- the most accurate way of representing the entire earth’s surface -- it not without its flaws (among them, the relative lack of portability). The main thing that makes certain map projections more popular than others is marketing, and dumping on the Mercator projection is an easy way to drum up some marketing credit (it worked for Arno Peters...).

If you want to hear more about how map projections actually work, have a look at my video on how projections work and how they don’t work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtkGh6RCY3Q

Hey everyone, my guest appearance on Insert Quest Here has gone live! 

In case you didn’t know, The Deep Forest rules are available online for free! Download them if you want to play the game for yourself, or if you want to figure out why all of us go “oh no” after drawing certain cards!

Also, I’ve made an annotated version of the map in the picture above. I’m hiding it behind a “keep reading” link because it spoils a few major developments:

“I’ll never understand why so many fantasy authors insist upon the useless bloody imperial system. You know who would invent metric units? Dwarves! Dwarves wouldn’t put up with this elven nonsense of chains and furlongs and leagues; dwarves would invent something sensible.”

Today, while looking for cover art, I came upon the worst example I’ve ever seen.

I will say that the Neverwhere cover gets it. That thing just radiates gothicness from every pore. It may not give the best impression to female readers because gothic horror + woman in skimpy non-gothic dress doesn’t always lead to good outcomes, but it’s traditional if nothing else. You could use that same cover art for Dracula, which is generally what you want to achieve with a Gaiman novel.

The Stardust cover is still awful and very little will be able to change my opinion on that. In the blog post where he revealed these covers, Gaiman seems to love the nostalgia value that he gets out of the Stardust cover, so at least it’s a deliberate callback to terrible early-80′s sword-and-sorcery. But I’m sorry to say, Neil, but sometimes... things that are older... are worse. The artist could have put something in there to make it look at least a little bit like a subversion of that archetype instead of following it to the letter. Stiletto heels? Really?

The American Gods cover is just mediocre. It does an okay job of conveying the nature of the story, but not as well as other cover art that I’ve seen. My favourite American Gods cover is actually the poster for the TV show (or the book cover which came with the “hey look we have a TV show” edition), which gets the same message across with a much better aesthetic sense.

And lastly, Anansi Boys. I think... okay, I’ll admit, I actually love this cover. Anansi Boys is probably the least Gothic thing that Gaiman has ever created. In that light, the Late Jazz Age look of the Anansi Boys cover is brilliant. Mr Nancy himself would be extremely proud of that art, and Fat Charlie would be suitably embarrassed by it. My main complaint is that the cover focuses on a scene from the very beginning of the book, with most of the major characters not present (maybe the woman on the left is meant to be Rosie or Daisy, but neither of them ever meet Mr Nancy as far as I can recall, so it isn’t depicting an event from the book). Oh, and the women on the right should have been black. Anansi Boys is not supposed to have any white characters.