The Geography of Titan!

Titan - the Fighting Fantasy world!

Steve Luxton, original cartographer for the sourcebook Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World (Gascoigne, 1986), recently got in touch with the gang at Titan_Rebuilding. He's looking at redrawing the original maps of Titan and its various continents for Arion Games upcoming release of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy rules system. Steve wants to know what improvements can be made to the Fighting Fantasy maps to make them more accurate and remove or reduce the errors that crept into the original designs. This blog post has two functions then:

• To highlight the errors and inconsistencies in the original maps from Titan.
• To serve as a forum, via the comments section, where YOU state your opinion as to what should change and what should stay the same, and also to add any spotted errors that may have been missed.

For this post, we're just looking at the big map of Titan (see Figure 1), and from what I can see, most potential changes can be grouped under three main categories.

Figure 1: The World of Titan, by Steve Luxton (from Gascoigne, 1986).

1. The Shape of the Continents.

In the bad old days before Photoshop, the nearest equivalent you had to resizing images and placing them in a new image was the office photocopier. This may explain why the shapes and sizes of the various continents on the big map of Titan differ radically from their appearance in their individuals maps. Figure 2 shows the map of Titan with the individual shapes of the continents superimposed over the top.

Figure 2. The continents of Titan. Actual shape of continents as coloured overlay.

Two further points follow on from this.

a) Priorities. If we want to make an accurate map of Titan, we need an accurate map of each of the three continents developed first, so we can then downsize them and insert them into the main map. Unfortunately this goes against Steve's idea of sorting the main map out first, and then letting the rest follow on from there.

b) Scale. Accurate map scales are rubbish in the world of Titan. This is easily established, thanks to Warren M., by looking at the map of Khul the Dark Continent in Figure 3. The distance between the towns of Willowbend and Fenmarge takes one day to travel through in Scorpion Swamp (Jackson, 1984), and yet a similar distance in the Inland Sea make take a week or more of sailing in Seas of Blood (Chapman, 1986). Ironically, the scale looks a bit better on the otherwise incorrect Titan map, where the Inland Sea is larger, than the individual map of Khul.

Figure 3. Khul, the Dark Continent, by Steve Luxton (from Gascoigne, 1986).

2. The Climate of Titan.

Another problem area! Figure 4 shows an expected climate map of Titan, with a central tropical equatorial orange band, bordered by two green bands of more temperate climates, and surmounted by icy polar regions in blue, at the north and south poles.

Figure 4. The expected climate of Titan (blue: polar, green: temperate, orange: tropical).

Unfortunately, this isn't what we find when we look at both the original map of Titan and what we read about in the various gamebooks themselves. Figure 5 shows a simplified look at Titan's unusual climate where we have a narrow northern temperate band followed by a broad tropical climate area, followed by more temperate regions (in Khul), then more tropics in southern Khul, then the southern polar area! Just what is going on and what solution can we come up with?

Figure 5. The actual climate of Titan (blue: polar, green: temperate, orange: tropical).

Given that the climate weirdness of Titan is due in part to the tropical areas of southern Khul, perhaps one approach would be to invert Khul so that its tropical region lies within the main equatorial band. Figure 6 shows this, with Khul effectively becoming an upside down continent in the southern hemisphere. The problem here of course is that it disregards 25 years of established Fighting Fantasy canon.

Figure 6. Climate solution #1: Flip Khul upside down! [a.k.a "Australian Solution"]

A better approach may be simply accept the fact that Titan's climate is highly irregular and heavily messed-up. This could be due to any of the following:

• The War of the Wizards, and the creation of the Wastes of Chaos in central Khul.
• A lingering tectonic/magnetic anomaly caused by the Splitting of the Lands following the sinking of Atlantis.
• Problems stemming from the original First Battle of the Gods, and the release of Chronada the God of Time into the atmosphere of the planet Titan.
• A combination of all of the above three theories!

Figure 7. Climate solution #2: The unexplained Khulian anomaly!

What it gives us is Figure 7. This map looks almost normal, were it not for the strange temperate region of most of Khul, otherwise surrounded by equatorial tropics. Perhaps the Wastes of Chaos are somehow responsible after all...

3. The Lost Lands of Titan.

There has been a considerable amount of geological and tectonic upheaval on the planet of Titan. It would be nice to see a few references this on the main map of the world, especially since their locations will not be covered by any of the individual maps of the continents. Figure 8 shows us the location of two of Titan's major lost land-masses: Atlantis and Vangoria.

Figure 8. The lost lands of Titan (Atlantis: orange, Vangoria: green).

a) Atlantis. The sinking of Atlantis caused the cataclysm that split the great continent of Irritaria into the three lands of Allansia, Khul, and the Old World. Although its final resting place has never been shown, we know from Demons of the Deep (Jackson, 1986) that the sunken capital of Atlantis lies near Fish Island and Skull Island in the Western Ocean. Figure 8 therefore demonstrates a potential location to mark it on the map of Titan. Of course, the whole island of Atlantis does not need to be marked. Perhaps instead we could just have a cross that says "Sunken City of Atlantis" or something similar.



Figure 9. The land of Vangoria,
(artist unknown, from Jackson, 1993).


b) Vangoria. The continent of Vangoria, and its connection to the Fighting Fantasy world of Titan, is a little more obscure. Vangoria was the world of Steve Jackson's collectible card game BattleCards, and Figure 9 depicts it in all its glory. An immediate link to Titan can be seen here - the Eelsea of Vangoria's eastern coast matches the Eelsea of the Old World's western coast (other links can be found here). Hence the decision in Figure 8 to place the sunken continent of Vangoria in the northern waters between the Old World and Allansia.

Obviously Vangoria was another product of the Splitting of Irritaria and existed for several centuries in the obscure period immediately following that cataclysm. However, a secondary tectonic disaster (perhaps caused by the magical wars of succession described in and by the BattleCards game itself), caused Vangoria, like Atlantis before it, to sink beneath the waves, leaving us just a few scattered islands (Dolphin Island, Compass Island, and the Cragspider archipelago) to mark its passing. One could also make the argument that survivors from Vangoria made it to both the Island of Scars and its neighbouring Isle of Despair to account for the diverse populations supported by these otherwise highly isolated places.

Given that it is much more obscure than Atlantis, if we want to record its presence on the main map of Titan, we probably would look for a dotted outline of the continent and labelled "Lost Land of Vangoria".

c) Islands of Titans. Offhand, I can't think of any other issues with the island and other lands of Titan (apart from Allansia, Khul, and the Old World, which will merit separate posts). A few small things would be to finally label the Isle of Despair (alongside the Island of Scars), and perhaps also Stayng Island (the eastern-most islet in the Arrowhead Archipelago), but that's about it. There are other islands mentioned in Demons of the Deep (Jackson, 1986), but given their size and location it's probable they make up the Blood Islands group.

Phew! That's it from me. What do YOU thing needs changing (or not)?

References

Chapman, A. (1985). Seas of Blood. London: Puffin Books.

Gascoigne, M. (1986). Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World. London: Puffin Books.

Jackson, S. (1984). Scorpion Swamp. London: Puffin Books.

Jackson, S. (1986). Demons of the Deep. London: Puffin Books.

Jackson, S. (1993). BattleCards. San Diego, California: Merlin Publishing International.