Amateur Cartography

Question: I love the way you guys have written (or rewritten) the Titanrealms. I was wondering if you've ever done the same to the God Realms, and if you have, might we see that on the site?

The Overworlds, for the most part, are different beasts from the Titanrealms. Overworlds are places of mythology, the homes of the gods and often also their battlegrounds and home bases for a lot of the shenanigans they get up to during their epic travails. We know a lot about places like Mount Meru, Tir na nOg or Asgard because they're described and stuff happens there; we know about the great feasting halls of the Aesir, the lush paradise of Tlalocan and the forges beneath Olympus because mythology tells us about them. There are exceptions, with Overworlds that aren't thoroughly described or are even lost to time, but we usually know enough to run with.

Titanrealms, on the other hand, are the stuff of roleplaying games - that is, for the most part they're made-up places for the Scion game line, rather than easy-to-pull places from mythology. They often contain a lot of things from various myths - Muspelheim has Surtr's house in it, while Tamoanchan allows you to visit the shining palace of Chandra and Mount Bakhu rises ominously from the depths of Keku - but they're a lot of those mythic things all together, along with a big pile of mechanics and game-stuff that's designed to challenge players and tie all the disparate things going on in there together in some way. Titanrealms are largely invented for Scion, using the trappings of ancient myth but still mainly written for game purposes, so they're a lot harder to run with if you don't have a clear idea of what they ought to look like and do.

So we've been working on Titanrealms more simply because, well, we need them more, and you guys probably do, too. A map of Olympus would be totally rad, but we already kind of know what sort of stuff is probably on Olympus; it's homogenously Greek and is often mentioned in Greek myth, so it's not hard to get a good picture of it for the purposes of your games. A map of Ourea, on the other hand, contains a bunch of other stuff and mechanics to boot, which is a lot harder to come up with on the fly. We can get a vague sense of what Takamagahara looks like from reading myths where the gods run around in it, but it's much more difficult to try to conceptualize a place that's actually a whole bunch of places and the embodiment of a gigantic concept at the same time.

In a perfect world, yes, absolutely, we'd love to make up awesome stats and maps for the Overworlds and the Underworlds, too, both to help our players who have been there and to use as game aids for Storytellers who would love a ready-made resource. Hell, making maps is super time-consuming, but it's also super fun; I'd make maps all day, and churn out some famous Terrae Incognita whlie I was at it. But in our real world of day jobs and limited time, we unfortunately have to prioritize things we need over things we want, which means that if we're spending any time on places and maps, it'll probably be for the Titanrealms, which are much harder for everyone (ourselves included) to run without some useful stuff written down. The time I would much prefer to spend on making awesome rewrites of Overworlds for you guys is currently being used to make database entries and spreadsheets instead, and I doubt that's going to change any time soon.

But... it would be a very fun project, and something we'd love to be able to do someday. Which sounds like something that should be added to the poll over there, don't you think?