The Map and the TTRPG
It is undeniable how TTRPGs are almost ubiquitous in their relationship with maps, being one of the most recurring tools for the artforms — and so many cannot imagine it without any form of map. But what do maps actually do in TTRPGs? If they are tools, they are tools for what in collaborative storytelling?
It may be helpful for that to ponder on how maps became so interwoven with TTRPGs. I don’t know how that happened, but I see two recurring convergent points. So many early TTRPGs were in the fantasy genre, that they took many of their features from it — including obligatory maps, itself a contaminant brought in by Tolkien. The other, of course, would be from war games by way of Gary Gygax and his work.
What is interesting about this is how different tools maps are for Tolkien and for Gygax. Tolkien, the dutigul child of Empire as he was, saw it as nothing more natural than to indulge in the British desire to draw lines and assign places to people; for the journey of the Hobbit to be the adventure it is, he had the need to assign where different people and where they belong — with the two extremes of Bilbo leaving where he belongs and the dwarves setting to take back the place that is “theirs”. Tolkien’s maps mark who belongs to where, and in the later works, determine who gets to be persons and human or are just from the Evil Place where the Bad People belong to. With this being the use for his maps, no wonder Tolkien was never compelled to map Valinor.
Gygax co-wrote his application of maps from John Locke. His are of the frontier, the grid-plots that are wasted and ready to be extracted, terra nullis, where there are no people and where combat and all sorts of violence belong; if you see a Gygax map, you know this is The Land of War of All Against All. The conflict that these maps reflect is not about some right to belong, but one between Law and Chaos. The domains of Law are rarely mapped, and if they are mapped at all, it is in a disciplinarian psychopolitical way; the map of Gygax is the map of a death-world, where everyone within is a non-person, whose life has no useful value other than how they may die.
Perhaps in here emerges some synthesis in the way Tolkien and Gygax use maps and when they meet TTRPGs, they shape how they are used as tools: both use who is and who is not represented in a map as categorizing violence. Gygax map marks those within as enemies; the Evil People aligned to the Bad Species of the Bad Lands do not even get a place on most maps of Middle Earth.
So, even if we see maps as just tools, it seems that if they are a tool for TTRPGs, they may have joined us as a categorizing tool through exclusion.
Map Tools
Maps are widely regarded as tools. Neutral, if not positive, artifacts of knowing and thinking1. It is accepted that harm coming from a map is not from the process of mapping or the uses of the map, but a necessary risk inherent to every map being inaccurate. This is nowhere more evident than the map-territory problem; all problems with maps are not because of maps but because the map is confused with the territory. Map is a model, territory is data, a model is not the data but they have similar enough structure that they are useful to map2.
See, this idea dances pretty close to the point but never intercepts it. A model is a model. Data is data. But data is not reality. Data has to be read; a model has purposes it seeks to model. Even if one got the utopian fantasies of every big data mogul or census tyrant, even in the wilderness of On Exactitude in Science and its map that is the territory, the map would still be insufficient compared to the starting point. Borge’s impeccable scale-accurate, reproduction of the kingdom is not the kingdom.
Even if we have a map that is a perfect reproduction of the data of the territories, to the point it seems very much THE territory, it is still not the territories. It is a dead world, lacking all the interconnections that actually make it the kingdom; the social knowledge of cartography, the institution of monarchy, the love between the persons inhabiting mapped bodies, the mutual acknowledge of personhood of those portrayed, the ties and stories the mapped tell about the mapped and those beyond the territory. The perfect map would need to deny any personhood to fulfill its purpose3.
A map is a weapon of omnicide. It can kill the world.
So, what is a difference between a map as a tool and a map as a weapon? According to Scarry4, it is purely a question of the surface upon which the object falls: a weapon falls upon a sentient entity, while a tool falls upon a non-sentient entity. So, all the meaning, connotation of a map derive from what the map portrays.
Okay, so a map of social relationships and political entities is clearly a weapon, but this means a purely geological map is always a tool, right? Pete Buttigiege’s choice of living room art included.
Obviously not; just thinking for a second about the sentient elements of an ecosystem, this denies entirely their connection to the nonsentient components of the ecosystem — you don’t need to look any further than a hydrography map to see how it separates sentients from their water sources. On top of shelter and all other needs for life, we also have on top the question of the land itself. If you see a map as a tool, you cannot see the land as a fellow person; and if you don’t see the land as a person, you don’t see all the bonds and stories and life poured by other peoples into the land — a denial that is violence applied against those people.
No matter how you spin it, a map is a weapon — one that becomes an instrument of torture if you keep regarding it as a tool.
Maps and Artifice
Okay, alright, there is more than a map being a weapon that is misused when treated as a tool; because a map is something that transcends into a Scarry’s artifact. Tools and weapons are extensions, expansions of the embodied body; artifacts — either be tool or weapons — are able to embody the body in ways that cannot be considered mere extensions of it. Artifacts are made-things, invented things, that embody one into a reality beyond that of their own body.
This is why the map-and-territory dichotomy proves itself again a misguided philosophical musing: the purpose of maps has never been to present a “compromised” yet “accurate” representation of reality; it has always been to create reality. By the map, the body exists embodied in the body — but it also lives now on the map. But alas, since it is also a weapon, it is not just embodied; it is captured on the map.
People make tools — especially those that are artifacts — as part of a process of pain reduction; before they are material objects and culture, they are a reality they want to inhabit, pain of their embodied experience they want to make real. Or in other words, before something can be made, the reality it seeks to create, the pain it wishes to alleviate. As such, all of maps required a world to be imagined, a world the map wants to make real.
What world Pete’s map imagines?
Painterly Crimson Worlds
It is often used to dismiss that all this fake, all this is artifice, all this is made up. It is! And this is why it is important, not why it is irrelevant! Thinking that is a luxury to those in privilege for whose benefit all this artifice is tailored for. In Space Forces5, the history of space habitats we have built and/or the ways of living in space that science fiction has imagined are explored through a critical lens: what it means to live in space? Who makes the decisions about in which conditions one lives in space? Who wants, should and must live in space? Living spaces in, well, space, are obviously artificial, constructed. This tends to discard any illusions about the subjectivity of the environments which we habit: what is the gravity? Acceptable exposure to radiation? Light-cycle? Light spectrum? Which atmospheric composition is adequate? Acceptable contaminants and to whom? Where is water sourced and recycled? How are the health dangers of living in space addressed?
While it is obvious for those concerned with designing and manufacturing such living spaces in science fiction and extra-planetary endeavours, these questions and decisions are made for any living space. Who decides what a habitable Earth is, what is the degree of climate collapse it is worth to pursue, which species are deemed acceptable losses, which populations will be sacrificed. Productivity culture determines who is socially disabled. Classification of what is to live as an “essential worker” during the first years of the coronavirus global pandemic determined who is to be exposed to disabling event. US army strategists and Israel carefully design and assemble how much of ecological devastation, calories and water can be allowed into Gaza to keep those living within — and the occupying settlers decide what “living” means to Palestinians.
Maps and other artifacts are the dreams of a world we want to exist. It is not their feasibility that matters, or their “accuracy” or “realism” or whatever label one wants to muddle the question with. It is a roadmap to alleviate the woes that we find make our current life painful. Our history of space exploration and the stories we tell about space shape a lot more.
But wait a minute. Who’s this “we”? Whose dreams are we making real?
Take NASA and the concept of the space stations. It is the most fascistic dream, out of the dreams of Von Braun’s space conquest. A map of the cosmos that believes there will always be death-worlds that are needed to exist so Man6 can fulfill its manifest destiny to conquer the stars; which also requires the application of universal violence. If the cosmos “needs” concentration camps like Mittelbau-Dora, those “Planet Dora”7 need camp watchtowers. Earth-Dora, of course, needs its orbiting weapon platforms8 to keep those filthy communists in check9.
So we have the space station, a very odd space habitat to have become so ubiquitous. A weapon platforms, no matter what is the nature of the weapon. Not a manufacturing dedicated to the industries allowed by space, not an habitat adapted to the environment of space, not a waystation. Very much looking inward, to project power and violence over those who it orbits over. And yet, “space stations” became ubiquitously associated with the hegemonic imaginary of sci fi and how one should live in space; the dream, the map, the artifact, remains the same10. The worlds they build are the death-worlds of Planet Dora.
Cartographing The Artform
Let’s bring it all back to TTRPGs for the finisher.
What function we have for the artifact-weapon of the map within the art-form?
There is a lot of dissonance between maps, and what they are supposed to do in games. I asked around what people consider “good maps”11 and found that they do and mean different things. And while enlightening, it did not really give me any insights into what TTRPG maps are expected to do; every single good map example was something that was impactful because it did things to that game that served what that game wanted to accomplish.
Okay, but maybe there would be a thing to learn from “bad maps”? Specially recurringly “bad” ones?
Legend of the Five Rings may be the perfect case study for maps and TTRPGs; for almost three decades people been complaining about the maps, that they are bad and beg for “better maps”. Damn, four different companies and twelve different creative teams have had control over this lineage of TTRPGs, and they are recurring bad?
Very well. Behold, a bad TTRPG map.
Alright, what does the map does for Legend of the Five Rings? Unless heterodox choices are made, this is a game where you play minor nobles (middle managers) of a multi-cultural empire. Almost exclusively, you will come from one of the various cultures of warrior-aristocrats; while characters may be warriors, officers, diplomats, priests, spiritualists, artisans, merchants, pirates, blood mages, monster hunters, assassins, spies, anchorites, they all come from the warrior-aristocracy. This means they see the world through the lens of warrior-aristocrats in general, and their specific culture in particular; it means they are materially and socially concerned as a warrior-aristocrat. The warrior fights to serve the interest of the aristocracy, but so the artisan works to enrich the lives of the aristocracy and earn such prestige, the pirate terrorizes the sea to be recognized by other warrior-aristocrats, the priest tends to the needs of spirits and people as part of their aristocratic management rather than a closer connection to these entities, and so on.
No matter the many characters you can make, unless you are going for a different game, at the end of the day, the game is about how you do what you do within, for and as a warrior-aristocrat.
This shapes what you do in the game. You rarely go “adventuring” in the pop TTRPG sense; whenever you journey, it is with a purpose. Life of the warrior-aristocrat in this game is viewed through the lens of the warrior-aristocrat, which in Legend of the Five Rings means three blocks of time dedicated to a favored type of activity: Summer (warfare), Autumn (journey, taxes), Winter-Spring (intrigue, politics, cultural events).
This means the game takes place in the places where warrior-aristocrats spend these blocks: castles, palaces, battlefields, cultural and holy sites where class events occur. The spaces in between only matter when something goes wrong, and then it becomes a battlefield and is seen as such — bandits take taxes, pirates try to kidnap you down the river, etc.
So if you look at this map, it serves that purpose; it serves the purposes of the orthodox player character. It is a map that enforces two gazes: the gaze of the minor nobility and the gaze of the social betters they serve — the Imperial families and the other major nobles descended by colonizing conquerors of another realm. You want to know palaces and castles; you want to know which of the warrior-aristocrat cultures claims domain over it. You want to know the aristocrat-level centres of trade are, and the navigable rivers between palaces and castles are, so you know if you gonna take it — otherwise just put a squiggly line there. There are countless holy sites in the land, and thousands of gods; you only care for those that have aristocrats or even are dedicated to people you or someone you serve may be related to. There are many cultures within the empire, but you only care about warrior-aristocrats and Imperial cultures — and even not most of those, as the lesser noble cultures are absent from most maps. This map creates the world your characters see and inhabit, and just looking at it is a constant reminder of what they care about and where they do what they do; whenever it focuses in a region at higher resolution, the same patterns repeat themselves.
Then why TTRPG players say these maps are bad? This seems to serve quite well how you end up playing the game; it is not even a narrative dissonance thing, for the mechanical rules of all but the most DnDfied takes on these games do not require “concrete” position, location and what not — be it for courtly meetings, a battle between armies or two duelists facing each other.
Well, it is easier to show you how players attempt to "fix the maps”.
The complaints tend to boil down to:
Maps are inaccurate and have contradictions.
Maps don’t have border and territorial control.
Little to no geography other than outstanding remarkable features.
Maps lack information, especially about population centers.
The dissonance seems to come from seeing it as a tool or a weapon — and utter ignoring their workings as an artifact.
The player that finds this wrong looks at it and say “this map is a tool, and is a bad tool for me”,12 so they invite the Gygaxian grid in order to reduce the world to plots to be made productive, the violence of the borders to facilitate a violence more familiar to the players rather than their characters, or the database-lore mindset of the atlas to catalog and shelf all components of the world of Legend of Five Rings into parts that can be extracted and exploited individually. Not only they try to make the tool work, they also ignore the artifice of a map; they treat it as there being a Real, True, Platonic “Emerald Land”, that these maps fail to accurate depict and do not do a proper census — ignoring that this map is crucial for creating that world and how the nobility of said world builds and wishes to preserve that world.
For one to appreciate the maps of this game, one needs to understand that they are looking at a weapon and an artifact: they see the beautiful intricate violence that is done by what is not in the map, what is reduced to what, what the people that keep this world in chains value, what your character — not players — value. How the three cultures that share a valley are reduced to nothing except part of a blanket area where warrior-aristocrats with the heraldry of yellow and green may levy and tax. The map creates the world in which everyone lives, what everyone that matters sees and cares, and is the consistent dispenser of violence. You may invade the lands of your rival, take their castle, torment the locals — but unless the warrior-aristocracy amends the map, unless the other warrior-aristocrats and imperial nobility acknowledge it and map it real, you have not conquered shit. It is the “map of the game” in a way very few are.
This also happens in the good examples I have been told about: Spire/Heart are games set in a colonial-settler domain which is mechanically reinforced by tags; the map being divided by the same tags, neatly marks who belongs to where in this regime. The map of Lady Blackbird narrows in the categorizing-exclusivity — their function in shaping the play of the artform are so similar to picklists, making it a graphical picklist in practice13. The social combat maps of Diaspora turn social connections into weapons, and when and by whom they are deployed and for what and in which shape, create a distinction between socialization as tool or as weapon. Blackmoor and other well-regarded adventurer-conquistador serving maps neatly label sites for extraction, accumulation and shipping — when looking for a historical materialistic equivalent, the closest maps they remind me off once you remove the grids and hexes, is the maps of colonial railways and ports14.
Maps — including in TTRPGs — are not a tool; when used as tool, a poor tool they make. They are powerful components of collaborative cooperative art when you treat them as the weapons and artifacts they are. And make use of them.
Of course, making use of them is to understand the map.
How the weapon creates pain. Who is the subject upon which the weapon falls or is designed to fall upon? How it can be twisted into a false-tool and be used as implement of torture?
What world the artifact crafts. Whose dreams it aims to make embodied in the world? What considers pain and is its project to alleviate? What it means to live in such artifice?
Who are the “we” screaming through the map?
This should already have started raising eyebrows. What knowledge? Whose knowledge? What is the epistemological process of said knowledge? Maps do not think by themselves, these paper computers are made of thinking. Again, whose thinking? For what purpose? That those are questions that may be asked immediately drives a wedge between maps and any concept of neutrality.
Korzybski, A. (1933). Science and sanity. An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics. International Non-Aristotelian Libr.
Do not think about the depersonalization of big data we are being assaulted with today and these implications of perfect data capture for perfect modelling.
Scarry, Elaine (1985). The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world. New York: Oxford University Press.
Scharmen, Fred. (2021). Space Forces. Verso.
“Homo sapiens with von Braun characteristics”
Yves Béon, Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age, Michael J. Neufeld, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998)
Michael J. Neufeld, “ ‘Space Superiority’: Wernher von Braun’s Campaign for a Nuclear-Armed Space Station,” Space Policy 22:1 (February 2006)
Wernher von Braun and Henry J. White, Project Mars: A Technical Tale (Burlington, ON: Apogee, 2006)
This can be quite headscratching; even if subtle, the fascist assumptions of the Babylon Project served Babylon 5 well. Taking a more explicit fascist space station for Deep Space Nine and having the occupation force be the Federation does it no favors. Unless the goal was to provide a technocratic good management liberal pat-on-the-back scenario.
Beyond the aesthetics of cartography, of course.
With the requirement of not inquiring that if it is a tool, what does a map-tool helps produce?
This overlap of function in the artform may account for the evolution of picklists if they started as text-maps.
The most generic names screaming “there is no history or stories connected to the land, Saxons arrived here two generations ago and made this map” does not help with the impression.