Space is Big...

..Really big.

And so forth.

I’ve had an oppressive insomnia dominating my life in past weeks. On the upside, I have had about 21 hours a day to to work on projects since I can only muster up about three hours of sleep per night. On the downside, the walls have begun to melt, my wife has turned into a giant frog, and I’ve had the overwhelming and intrusive urge to transform into Jeff Goldblum from The Fly and start terrorizing the neighbourhood, drowning everyone I don’t like in acidic white slime. The list is shorter these days because I rarely leave my home anyway.

But in this sleep deprived insanity while working both on my D&D world and my game Procyon Frequency simultaneously, with the line between the two sometimes becoming blurred and confused despite their diametrically opposed subject matter, I started to ask questions. Utterly pointless questions.

For the first time in my life I am not building some very very tiny microcosm of a map that offers just enough material for a short campaign and eschewing the rest for the sake of brevity, but instead am trying to plan out the entire game world ahead of time. I settled on six mile hexes because I felt ten wasn’t granular enough, and seven would make me look like an asshole. And that is already my pedigree so I didn’t think it was necessary to throw fuel on the fire.

I generated a map that was about 1500 miles in circumferance to start, and based my initial layout on one of my favourite games, Ultima Online. It triggered my fascination with cool and essentially useless cloth maps, and the cloth map of Britannia I own is one of my finest trinkets right next to the giant cloth map of the Shire that takes up a whole wall in my room. If that wasn’t enough I have a flag of Rohan over my bed which I believe grants me sacred sexual powers. Unfortunately, it also gives my wife conveniently timed headaches, so it’s certainly a double edged sword.

Eventually I got most of Britannia built out after two obsessive days which are the only kind of days I tend to have. If anyone suggests getting tested for autism as an adult, I don’t recommend it. It might explain why you have watched Conan the Barbarian hundreds of times, but it’s kind of like finding out a world ending meteor is about to hit the Earth. It’s knowledge that doesn’t do you any real good when you are thirty-eight and have forced yourself to function socially in some capacity.

After that I decided I wasn’t really satisfied. I had campaign settings I had run in the past approximating Eastern Europe and the Silk Road, and so I wanted to cram those in there as well. So I made yet another 1500 mile map and went to work on that. I’m sure by the end of the week I will be unsatisfied with that as well.

Then I thought about scale, and realized that even if the ocean was say, ten thousand miles across, I’d still be another roughly ten thousand miles off of approximating the size of the Earth. So naturally I generated a map of about 4000x4000 hexes to at least get reasonably close to scale, and see what I could do there.

The answer is that the software became unusable and crashed. At about 16 million hexes, it’s not difficult to see why. Right before it crashed I was able to draw a very large outline of a landmass which showed up as barely a blip on the mini-map that Worldographer provides.

I thought to myself, if I break this down into chunks, it could probably be done. But then I got to thinking, if I stay at this scale, it’s going to get stupid really quickly, so maybe it would make a lot more sense to increase the size of each hex. And then I calculated that I’d need roughly 100 or so regional maps to break things down further. At this point its 3AM and my natural challenges with math have become exacerbated. My mind starts racing, and I get into yet more pointless calculations.

First I wanted to determine how many known settlements with a reasonable population, say, the size of a village or greater, actually exist on the Earth. All the data I could dredge up approximated this at about 3 million. This was utterly staggering at 3:25 AM. I go online and I start looking up Earth scale D&D maps and I don’t find much on there except a couple of very pretty and very badly scaled Inkarnate maps which have no functional or useful properties whatsoever from a practical perspective. I love nice looking maps, but when it comes to running a world, they are crap fit for cretins.

And then at about 3:55 AM my brain really went off the deep end. I figured out the rough distance between the Earth and the moon. 239,000 miles. I’m tired, but I still have the sense to know that this is probably a larger number than the 24,901 miles that make up the circumference of this glorified space rock. And that’s pretty impressive. Then I get thinking about the pipe dreams of dickhead entrepreneurs who want to send people to Mars, and find out that Mars is on average about 140 million miles from the Earth, give or take a hundred thousand miles depending on orbit. Finally, I look up the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri and well…its in a truncated equation that I remember having severe issues with when trying to program a JavaScript parser to read large amounts of data from Excel sheets. And based on our current knowledge of expansion, that only increases by the day.

Procyon Frequency deals with the question of the possibility of interstellar travel. Because I tend to err on the side of pessimism, the narrative of the game spells out very clearly that it is actually an impossibility by any reasonable human standard. But because that would make for a boring game, I went with the concept of uplifting instead. Some alien species warns us that there is trouble abound, and gives us the technology needed to leave our solar system. Interstellar travel is one of the most fascinating concepts in science fiction, and when you start to put a scale to things and build up, you begin to realize just how mind-shatteringly, absurdly, incomprehensibly small we are. I’ll save you further quotes from Hitchhiker’s Guide, it’s been done enough.

While you could certainly do what I had thought of and make larger scale hexes and build a roughly to scale map of a world that way, it would lose something in the process - detail, and a lot of it. Again, we are talking about a ridiculous amount of regional maps to extrapolate the details of this space. No reasonable person would bother to do this. It would be an act of obsessive insanity.

But nobody ever said that Dungeon Masters were sane.

Exhibit A is Alexis Smolensk, better known on the internet as The Tao of D&D. His long running blog is a massive collection of his personal thoughts and views on the greatest game on Earth. The only other person I have seen who has a remotely similar scale to their game is another fellow Canadian by the name of Robert A. Wardhaugh, but he is not quite as forthcoming about his thoughts, maintaining a seemingly limited online presence.

The blog has been running since 2008 and has an accompanying YouTube channel with a far more limited but still interesting collection of content. A couple of years ago I read through a pretty sizeable portion of it, and though it didn’t immediately prompt me to explore D&D in a deeper way, it certainly planted a seed. Over the next couple of years I would almost obsessively pick apart and analyze D&D and its history, reading several books on the topic, poring over all the D&D material from the 70’s and beyond up to about 3rd edition which I avoided digging into because I don’t need that kind of trauma in my life.

I want to share a brief quote which I think serves as a good general hypothesis for the work Alexis has been doing for the last several decades.

Understand geography.  This does not mean reading a text book on the subject.  It means reading 30 textbooks on the subject, and then commentary on the text books, and then commentary on the commentary.  These books must describe physical geography, yes, and geology also, but what's wanted are books about political, historical and economic geography.  All these books exist.  And for many, they are dull, inflexible and hard to equate to gaming or why we'd want a map.

I was very drawn to Tao of D&D for one very particular reason. There is a fellow who runs a bookstore in Florida called Abraxas Books named James D. Sass whose work I accidentally stumbled upon many years ago on his blog Cosmodromium. Although he used to maintain several bodies of writing both online and off, he no longer apparently engages in that. Once a prominent member of the Church of Satan, James is known for his voracious appetite for reading. He dropped out of school as a teen to work at a used bookstore. He would read several books a week, sometimes multiple books a day. And not just read - but analyze, on a deep and comprehensive level. His entire house contains almost nothing but shelves for books, of which he owns thousands. He shared an anecdote about how sometimes he will buy a book multiple times because he misplaces it among other books and it’s just easier to buy another copy. And as Alexis is describing here, James leaves no stone unturned when he is interested in a subject, referring to referenced materials and dedicating a notebook to each book which he will use to further break down and dissect the material.

And perhaps not ironically, his highest reading recommendation is “How to Read A Book” by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. Mortimer J. Adler was also responsible for the book A Guidebook to Learning which acted as a sort of template for his incredible contribution to the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Propædia, which was initially a replacement for the index of Britannica, and also contained the Outline of Knowledge, an organized framework for the whole of human knowledge broken down into 10 parts, each of which are broken down in a more granular fashion. The idea behind this outline is that you could use it in conjunction with the encyclopedia to gain a broader understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Shit, sorry.

Alexis is the only other person whose work I have read that elicited a similarly obsessive personality with an appreciation for autodidactic education. And interestingly, both Sass and Alexis have a writing style that are often misanthropic and humorous in tone. From what I have gathered reading Tao of D&D, this has caused a lot of people to dismiss Alexis as an angry old grognard, discounting the depth and thoughtfulness of his work and writing him off as a cantankerous “meanie”.

As a side note, I’ve only ever been interested in “meanies”. Very often they are the most insightful and honest people in the room.

Sass was absolutely seminal in the development of my own writing style, and in shifting my own perspective on what he would call “learning for the sake of learning.” Where you tackle a subject in a deep, obsessive fashion not because it is a necessity precluding personal gain of any kind, but because it is interesting and expands your own worldview.

In the case of Alexis, he has a variety of different interests which operate on this level. Geography and cartography is a big one, and his own long-running game world appears to be the roughly equivalent to the Earth itself, broken down in extreme detail. There is no doubt in my mind that he is creating the most functional, sound, informed and detailed maps in the history of the game.

Here are but a couple of examples:

This is a zoomed in snapshot of a map titled “Illyria to Croatia” that Alexis graciously sent me when I emailed him asking for permission to share some of his work.

This is a six-mile breakdown of Europe.

This one is of particular interest, as it displays detailed trade routes. Alexis maps out logical trade routes for his game which has an elaborate trade system. Not only has he spent countless time producing an endless quantity of such maps in several scales, but his world has an economy.

A part of Britain, of particular interest to me personally since, well…I really like maps of Britain.

I also particularly love this quote, from a post made in 2011:

I think the most important thing in the game about having a map, whether you invent your own world or not, is the sense for the BIG PICTURE you get.  It's all very well to know the road between the town and the dungeon and the other temple, but if you want your world to flesh out and come alive, the great scheme of human movement cannot really be understood without a top down view of considerable proportions.  Measure the maps above, and ask yourself if we really understand how large this world is, or how varied is its possibility for adventure, or how immeasurably the facets of the world jostle one another for power.

According to the wiki page for his game, it takes place on a fictional, fantasy charged Earth in the year 1650. I do not know how current this information is. The wiki itself acts as a massive repository of information pertaining to his game and the rules therein. Alexis does not play a standard version of D&D, having opted to create his own ruleset.

And if you are building a map that hopes to encompass the entirety of the planet, then shit, why not?

Before James D. Sass decided to leave the Church of Satan, he had planned to write a book called Deep Satanism. It would have been a treatise on the atheistic philosophy of that particular religion, cult, call it what you will, and would have focused heavily on academia. At a certain point, he apparently became disenchanted with the religion in general, or his worldview generally shifted, and found that the majority of people who were a part of that group were aggravating to deal with.

What Alexis is doing, and what other people are doing (though I’d have to suspect on a much much smaller scale in general) I have taken to calling “Deep Dungeon Mastery”, and is the entire premise of this space, apart from occasional bitch sessions of the continued regression of D&D into some idiotic single cell life-form. The only inherent issue in it, is that were I a student of either Alexis or Sass, I would most undoubtedly and deservedly receive an F.

That said the entire purpose of this space is an experiment in trying to reach a fraction of the standard Alexis has achieved as a DM. And as demonstrated here, and as Alexis often touts in his own writing, work is the key. Work on a level inconceivable to most DM’s, least of all the current school of thought which celebrates “the lazy Dungeon Master” and criticizes DM’s who get absorbed in details most players will never be privy to.

Everything Alexis is concerned about is detail oriented. It inspires the reader to ask questions they would never think of asking themselves when creating worlds. And then it bashes them over the skull repeatedly with a DMG over and over and over again, demanding more extrapolation, more detail, to a point where it can never be enough.

And the function of this should be fairly self-evident to anyone who has even tried to scrape just the surface of this way of thinking. Because you know your world so well, because it is so fleshed out in every possible way, the “story” you might otherwise write becomes a completely irrelevant waste of time. You are taking off the training wheels, getting off the railroad track, and as a natural result of thinking in this manner, these things will begin to occur naturally. Your game will undoubtedly improve, the same way that I only improved as a writer of fiction when I began to explore non-fiction subjects such as history, philosophy, sociology, and so on. Because the game of D&D is not just stat blocks and magic items; it is a game that in many ways explores the human condition. And these subjects are not comprehensible if you don’t have any understanding of where we came from, and where we are going.

But just like Sass promotes learning for the sake of learning, I think there is something to be said about worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding. I have tested this myself, on a most perfunctory surface level at least, and found that there are people craving this kind of experience. They have been subsisting on a diet of cheeseburgers and are sick to death of the taste - and some of them just want to bite into a fucking rib-eye.

You can find the Tao of D&D blog here:

Tao of D&D

Along the sidebar there is a very useful breakdown of subject matter, links to Alexis’ book How To Run: An Advanced Guide to Managing Role-Playing Games , his wiki page and all other manner of things Tao of D&D.

Special thanks to Alexis for allowing me to post pictures from his blog.