Fantasy Maps as Possibility Structures

To begin with, let us propose a definition of a map. Let us say that it's a two-dimensional arrangement of symbols, where the spatial relationships between the symbols spatial relationships between the things symbolized. Importantly for our purposes, the things symbolized may be real or imagined. This definition is good enough for a simple drawn map, though it probably doesn't suffice for things like color gradients or borders. But we'll get to that.

A single symbol is not a map. Arrange two symbols, however, and you have the beginning of something. Put a mountain near the top-left corner of the page, and a castle in the middle. Questions arise. How close is the castle to the mountains? Can the people in the castle see the mountain? Do they travel to it? What's in the empty, in-between space? Add a road, a river, and other symbols, and soon you have a web of possible journeys. For a certain sort of mind it is impossible not to plot routes, imagine vistas, and consider obstacles.

The symbols may be arbitrarily dimensional: the dot labeled "Los Angeles" on a map of the United States stands for a dazzlingly complex city and landscape, while a different map's labeled dot may indicate a village that hasn't been imagined yet. The idea of the discrete symbol breaks down here: a color gradient could indicate temperature, or elevation, or any number of continuous things, while a boundary line may symbolize no particular or recognizable feature in a physical location, yet political division of territory is one of the things we want maps to show us.

At this stage, we have something like a map as a spatial symbolic field.

The maps that came with Tolkien's books entranced your humble critic when he was a boy. They were of course helpful in understanding the events described in the books, but it was the places the characters never thought to go that really caught my attention. In The Hobbit's map, what were the Grey Mountains like? And the Withered Heath? And the Iron Hills? Could the group have climbed the Mountains of Mirkwood to get their bearings, or would they have found worse monsters up there? And in The Lord of the Rings, there was that mysterious word on the right side of the map, Rhûn...

It is often said that the map is not the territory, but I do not believe that this necessarily holds for fantasy maps.

A territorial map is the first form of possibility structure, implying as it does any number of traversals. A second form of possibility structure extends in time, elaborating or suggesting a branching sequence of events. And the forms may of course be combined. I think of Hamann's assertion that painting was the first writing, while music was "the original bodily image of all temporal measures and intervals"; in other words, music belongs to time and painting to space. One wonders if the full spatiotemporal possibility structure analogizes to Wagner's total work of art, but one wonders this only briefly, before remembering what it is we're talking about: to wit, RPG sourcebooks.