Cartography Special

Question: In your really awesome Religion World Map download, there were a couple of things that confused me that weren't covered by your readme! So I'm asking here. Why are there disconnected inland bits of Algonquin and Berber religious groups? I can understand breaks across shores, but that struck me a bit odd. Also, while I like the Diaspora, I was wondering if there were any pantheons not ignored, because A and B from the readme in that area! Otherwise South America seems surprisingly lacking! Thank you!

Well, first of all, just a quick reiteration to everyone using the map - it is way not perfectly accurate to the mile, or even ten miles, or even fifty miles. It's meant to give you a quick visual of the spreads of the largest pantheons in each area, mostly so you have an easy reference if you need to know whose territory your Scions are blithely wandering into or whose toes they might have stepped on if they blow up an important local landmark. I'm not a cartographer, and I would totally be lying if I said that things were exact, although we did do the best we could in terms of being mostly accurate.

But you guys know all of this, it was in the readme. So on to your questions!

For the Berbers, that's easy; their traditional territory is in the middle of the Sahara desert zone in northern Africa, and when you live in the Sahara, you live in whatever part of it is most hospitable to survival. The Berber people have also been nomadic for much of their history, especially those who live in the harshest desert conditions or who were trying to avoid the Muslim conquest going on nearby, meaning that the areas marked on the map show an approximation of their most common and populated territory, but that there may be Berbers in plenty of other nearby areas, just in fewer numbers or for less time. You see two different zones on the map because that was our best guess at traditional Berber stomping grounds, and most likely has to do with those areas being particularly good for life-sustaining oases and settlements and avoiding historical Arab incursions.

"Algonquin" is kind of an umbrella term for several different peoples (actually, "Berber" is, too!), from Ojibwa to Anishiinabe to Mahican and several others, but we're using it for the moment as a general label since they have a lot of mythological figures and beliefs in common and we haven't yet dived into that region of the world for a good thorough research visit. And because it's an umbrella term, that means they're not necessarily a contiguous people all the way through that territory; those disconnected spots are most likely places where a particular ethnic group within the Algonquin language family has a slightly separate territory from the next closest people. They're linguistically and culturally related, but not necessarily the same, so there's a wide range and no reason that they all have to have "borders" that rub right up on one another.

As for South America, the map is definitely very visually deceptive. Because we included only "pantheons" that had at least a handful of deities, for ease of integrating with Scion's classically-founded model, vast areas of South America look uninhabited, or at least areligious. This is totally not true. There is tons of mythology in South America, but most of it is isolated by the vast mess of the Amazon rainforest, which covers a huge part of the continent's interior and in ancient times was pretty much so massive and impenetrable that ethnic groups who lived comparatively near one another (close enough that European ethnic groups would have been fighting) might never bump into each other for long stretches of time. Various different peoples in central South America have their own mythologies, but have only one or two totem deities rather than a classic "pantheon", so they are not represented on the map. But they're there, and they're important, so if you want to explore South America's mythological map, you should totally do so. Things get crazy in the jungle.

Really, the map's a quick jumping-off point for games with globetrotting Scions and we've gotten a lot of use out of it, but you guys should not consider it authoritative or anything. It's just a game simplifier, and one that we may try to revisit and refine in the future. (But don't hold your breath - it's not super high on our priority list!)