In this age, Eighthers demand to know what kind of world they live in. How wide, how long, and what flavor? Benedat, our first hero of Constructed Thought, brought to us the following knowledge:
- The surface of our world is shaped as a slice from a pie with eight portions, thusforthly we have named it "
the Eighth"
.
- Although there is but one Eighth, it is aligned alongside itself, giving the appearance of seven other slices if one has sufficient courage to approach the North Point and observe west or east of oneself.
- Sailing in one direction at constant latitude, one may eventually reach the original location, and accomplish nothing by this excursion.
- At the North Point, lies Sun Island, which spews forth the sun itself from a hollow peak.
- The Eighth, though resembling a pie, tastes nothing like one, unless of course, the comparison pie were fashioned out of dirt, in which case the experiment has not been conducted correctly.
Others have produced measures of distance between various points, mainly using lengths of rope attached to large migratory birds. After sufficient analysis, we firmly guess that the Eighth is 5,000 miles from any location on the southern border to the North Point. By travel, we have discovered continents, islands, oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers. We have learned where our fellow men dwell, friend and foe alike. We have witnessed the great wonders created by man and nature. So much is known in these modern times, yet it remains scattered in various minds of the wise and educated. Now we must make permanent records of our geography, political boundaries, travel routes, and other locations of interest.
There are some that object to the creation of maps. Many towns have carefully guarded their location as a defense from invasion. Would not cartography quickly become a tool of conquest? As the argument goes, no King sets forth to conquer lands of which he has no knowledge, therefore it would be best to create false maps, or no maps at all. To those that value their obscurity, we plan to offer the following service: For a small fee we will put the name of your town on our Do Not Visit list, which will be distributed with every copy of our maps. The list may also state a reason of your choosing for not visiting such as "
Afflicted by Mad Groin Plague"
or "
We Don't Have Money, Turnips, or Anything Else You'd Want."
Surely this will dissuade most hostile ambitions.
Others, the romantic explorers among us, treasure the prospect of random journeys to unknown destinations. They fear that all joy in the world as a place of mystery will be lost to them. Why should the world be ruthlessly identified and classified? To these we answer: Look, we're tired of having to ask for directions and hearing stuff like, "
Way yonder, past three green hills, and a smaller hill which is actually a compost pile, and there at the end of a partially submerged ravine, you may find my brother Nuddley, who knows people that could give better directions."
It isn't a good situation when you are just trying to get over to your relatives in time for Brucklemas Fest. So we're going to make a decent map here, and you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
We proclaim that all cartographers are obligated to share their knowledge for the betterment of mankind. Let us now devise our maps independantly with what knowledge we have gathered and to the best of our skills. We shall convene in the fair coastal city of Mellenfral, in Professor Drictum's High Room, on the Second Day of Twissuary, Seventy-Eight years after Benedat's Discovery. There we shall review the work of each contributor and deliberate on how the Master Map of the Eighth shall be devised.
We accept the sad irony that many of our esteemed community members will have difficulty in finding Mellenfral due to the lack of correct and comprehensive maps. But if you are on the main continent, it's really simple: walk in any direction until you reach the ocean, then follow the coast in either direction and surely you will find us. Of course, you might be confused about whether or not your continent is the main continent, or even if you are on a continent. For this, we can only offer the following advice: when you have reached the highest point of your land mass, you may see ocean along the entire horizon. In this case, you are not on one of the continents, but are, in fact, on an island. If you still don't know how to get to Mellenfral, (which is a lovely place to visit for any reason--ah, the graceful blombadils in Twissuary!) try asking the person who delivered this message to you. If that person doesn't know the way, chances are it's because someone else gave this message to him, in which case you should find that other person and ask him, following the chain of delivery and asking more people as needed, until eventually you will find someone that has successfully made the journey from Mellenfral and can give you trustworthy advice, unless that one happens to be a large migratory bird.
Rules for Contest
Make a map using any methods you like (computer, hand-drawn, elbow-drawn), and get it into an image file. Accepted file formats are PNG, JPG, or GIF. The image can be absolutely humongous if you want, but keep the file size under a megabyte so it can be posted on the forum, and people have a reasonable chance of viewing it with standard software. E-mail this file to me by 1/15/04.
By submitting your map and entering this contest, you are giving Caravel Software permission to copy and distribute your ideas, names, artwork, and any other content on the map. A purpose of this contest is specifically to "
steal"
some ideas from the fans, and reuse them for our business of building the DROD mythos. If you aren't okay with this, then please don't submit your map.
You may submit as many entries as you like, but if you are aiming to win, consider that your entries may compete with each other and draw away votes. You should not post your maps on the forum or elsewhere to solicit feedback. (Bad showmanship!) Try not to send me multiple versions of the same map; work on your map until it's done, then send it to me.
I'll be posting all of the entries to the forum at one time after 1/15 and each entry (not each person) will be listed as one poll choice. Authors of maps won't be revealed until after the contest has ended, so if an author wishes to remain anonymous for the vote it is entirely up to him to be discrete. (Agaricus, I realize it will probably be impossible for you to make an anonymous entry, since you've described the unique style of your intended map--my apologies.) I don't want artistic skill to be the deciding factor, and will ask for people not to judge that way, but I'm sure it helps if you can present your map clearly. I'll ask people voting to consider the following factors:
- Interesting ideas.
- Good names for places.
- Appealing geographical features.
- Consistency with descriptions of the Eighth found so far. (See
"Story Collaboration" and
"Kingdoms of the Eighth" topics on the forum. See the Stories section on the site.)
Whoever receives the most votes after a certain period of time will win the contest. The prize is any item of your choosing from the
DROD Store. Later I'll put together a Master Map of the Eighth and mingle ideas from the map entries along with my own. So even if you don't win, you might like seeing some of your ideas become official.
If anyone would like to make a map, but feels silly putting it in a competition with some of the more serious contenders, please just make the thing and submit it anyway. This can be just for fun! Maybe someone will get a good chuckle out of it, or you might hit upon a nice little gem that we can use in the Eighth. (I am still looking for the right place to use the word "
Mothingness"
.) If you've got 15 minutes to scrawl something on the back of a napkin, it's worth sending it to me.
The flipside of this: If you have ambitious ideas for a map, but are afraid of being a contest bully by taking too much time on the map and raising the bell curve... well, don't ever apologize for an inspired piece of work. All's fair in love and cartography!
-Erik
[Edited by ErikH2000 on 12-24-2003 at 01:00 AM GMT: 15,000 changed to 5,000.]
[Edited by ErikH2000 on 12-24-2003 at 11:51 PM GMT: Additional rules and clarification.]
[Edited by ErikH2000 on 12-25-2003 at 01:01 AM GMT: Comments about anonymity.]
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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15K * 15K * 3.14 is 706.5 million, not thouand.
Aw, what the hell... Count me in. I'm not going to start it now though, I need to sleep. (Christmas-time flu sucks.)
). It would be impossible to walk north onto the north point anyway, as you would bump into yourself when you got really close.