#fictional geography

I don't consider this a spoiler, because I spent all of Shades of Grey trying to find geographical clues that would help me place the action. This ended up being quite a distraction, so I consider this discussion a favour to readers, to save them time and cognitive load. However, if you'd rather not know anything going in, please don't open the cut ...

doin a lil series where i go super in-depth into my Halfworld headcannons and worldbuilding. This is an extension of my Rocket backstory post where I combine elements of his cannon backstories into a logical and consistent one so go read that first.

In this first part we'll discuss the Keystone Quadrant and Halfworld's geography and maps.

This is the best image we get of Halfworld in the 1985 comics.

As you can see, Halfworld has 4 moons and many... yellow orbs? I believe these are artificial suns as there are none visible nearby. These moons do not have names but I may name them in the future.

Based on this very sea-heavy pic and my personal draws I have created this crappy map:

This is a post-rebellion map. Any older just remove any trace of humanity across the isthmus. As you can see, it's a bit polluted from the constant improper waste disposal from the lab for ~900 years.

"900 YEARS?!?!" you might ask (earth years). We know Rocket and co is part of batch 89. If we assume each batch only survives ~10 years before dying of physical trauma, distress, starvation, or execution we get around ~890-~920-ish years of the labs existence (we can assume to first few batches were the real loonies). Subject names go through the scheme of: Batch#, species class, individual#. We don't know if individual numbers go past double digits, but if they DON'T that leave the maximum total late patients/subjects from batches 1-88 at...

226,512

This is ONLY if individual numbers stay in double digits. Triple would be over 2 million. Oof. Generational trauma moment.

This has gotten off-topic so back to Halfworld ecology. Ever heard of wild worms?

They live in the wasteland areas and eat just about anything. Easily farmable and great food source for the growing civilization. This is one of the few reasons modern Halfworlders venture into the Dark Side.

I am unaware of any other Haflword- exclusive non-sentient species. However, there are likely plenty of birds, lizards, and rodents the Halfworlders were forcibly evolved from.

I am also of the firm belief that surviving lab robots are a problem for modern civilization. The robots were programmed to be entirely independent, making them probably capable of repairing/reproducing new robots with spare parts. This is why I think it'd be advantageous for them to build a wall over the crossing.

Is it possible to fully eliminate all of them? I don't think so, personally. But the government is trying.

"Government?? Tf are you talking about Al??"

1: Anthropological regions This map shows the various "anthropological regions" of Syana. These differ from the geographic divisions of Syana, named "cultural regions" due to their use as the standard cultural way of dividing up Syana. Anthropological regions define areas of the nation that have unique cultures, due to their urbanisation, religion, language/slang or various other factors.

2: The Ydaama Rail Network This is the network of high-speed rail that runs across Syana. The network is funded by the government and run by the Ydaama company, who are owned in their entirety by the national board of transport. High-speed rail connects all 12 cities in Syana as well as 26 significant large towns that serve as population hubs within their local area.

3: Temperature map This map shows tha average yearly temperature across Syana, with the average temperatures of 3 differing latitudes given for reference.

Hey Oda,

Well, I'm not from the Americas and I don't know anything about those places :-) I've read that New York and Chicago were the primary inspirations for Gotham. (At least up until Tim Burton's Batman made it into a neo-gothic city – I don't know if there is any US city with so much gothic-influenced architecture.)

Here's some fun maps from The Atlas of the DC Universe. Picked from: http://ifanboy.com/articles/the-secret-geography-of-the-dc-universe-a-really-big-map/

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.