Return to Titan!

Titan - the Fighting Fantasy world, by Steve Luxton
[click to enlarge!]

Steve Luxton has sent me another amazing map of the Fighting Fantasy world of Titan which you can see above. I think this map is virtually finalised in terms of land alignment, and you can see on the left that there's now a key for all the major settlements of the three continents of Titan.

There's a few corrections to be made, but the next step is to consider whether there needs to be any more information or settlements added to this map. After that, we can probably look at discussing some of the individual continental maps of Allansia, Khul and the Old World.

Comments welcome!

Geography of Allansia



Revised climate map of Titan by Steve Luxton

Althought the title says 'Geography of Allansia'  I wanted to briefly talk about Steve Luxton's revised climate map of the Fighting Fantasy world of Titan, as shown above. Are there any more changes we need to make to this? Off hand, I can think of only three small alterations:

• The X that marks the sunken ruins of the city of Atlantis needs to be moved down to perhaps just above the Warm Temperate dotted line.
• Below this, the Bird Islands, Fish Island, Skull Island and the Blood Islands need to resemble their counterparts on the original Titan map.
• As Simon Osborne mentioned previously in the comments, where is Bone Island from Bloodbones? Does anybody have any idea?



Rough map of Allansia by Steve Luxton



Moving on to the classic Fighting Fantasy continent of Allansia, Steve has created and kindly shared this map based on the original from Titan. How can we improve it and what needs to be added to or changed?

A few of my suggestions:

• Do we need to include the northern portion of the continent, which is quite large and basically frozen wasteland?
• Do we include details for Bjorngrim's Sea based on Simon Osborne's revised map for Jonathan Green's unpublished Saga of the Stormchaser?
• I think the Flatlands label needs to be spread out over the grasslands that stretch to the Sea of Pearls coastline, to better indicate the extent of this vast steppes region.
• Agra, the top city on the left-hand coast of the Glimmering Sea, needs to be moved downwards in line with the map from The Riddling Reaver, which was published first and has precedence.
• We could probably add detail from Battleblade Warrior, as that is a relatively blank area of the above map.
• Likewise, we could add some of the settlements from Night Dragon to the Dragon Reaches region.

There you have it! What does everybody else think?

Geography of Titan (Part 3)

This has to be the coolest map of Titan I have ever seen (thanks Steve)! Click on it to see the big version - it really is a work of art!

 

A new climate map of Titan by Steve Luxton.


It's similar to the very rough climate map I made for part two of this discussion, but obviously Steve has put a lot more thought into deciding why and how the oceanic currents and atmospheric conditions actually work. Everything on it looks good and I've just got a few tentative minor issues as follows:

• Atlantis (the dot on the north-western edge of the map), should be closer to Fish Island and Skull Island on the equatorial eastern edge of the map. The events of Demons of the Deep reveal that these locations are fairly close together. Also, for the final map, we have to remember to change Atlantis to a cross, not a dot, as it is a sunken city not an island (which it looks like now).
• I like the Hotspot Anomaly of Allansia centred around the Desert of Skulls. Do we have anything from Fighting Fantasy canon that can confirm the Caarth snakemen are engaged in sorcery to expand the desert? I just had a look in Titan but couldn't find anything relevant.
• The Hotspot Anomaly of Khul is obviously the Wastes of Chaos and the Twin Sun Desert. Case closed?
• Can we reverse the currents on the east coast of Khul? This area is relatively cooler than the lands to the west (and so is the Arrowhead Archipelago). As these currents then come down from the equator they could bring warm water to the tropical northern parts of the Isles of the Dawn.
• The south-eastern coast of the Inland Sea could be a shade warmer, as that's where the jungles beyond the city-states of Marad and Shurrupak lie...

What else can we add? Are there any other suggestions?

Part one of the discussion on the geography of Titan can be found here, and part two is here.

Geography of Titan (Part 2)

[Part 1 is here]

Steve Luxton has now emailed me a revised map of the Fighting Fantasy world of Titan for discussion and review. I've attached it to this post below as Figure 1.

Figure 1. Revised global map of Titan by Steve Luxton.

As you can see, Titan finally has an equator and a scale! I have a few minor issues/notes with it, which you can see in Figure 2 below as possible corrections.

Figure 2. Things to check: Blood Island, the Arrowhead Archipelago,
 and Tura, southernmost Island of the Dawn.

Issues to be addressed on the revised map:

• We really need to sort out correct shapes for the three continents, starting with either Allansia or Khul. Allansia needs to be somewhat broader for instance, to allow for the rolling expanse of the Flatlands.
• I'm not sure what the tiny island is, far to the west of Allansia. If it is Blood Island from Trial of Champions then it needs to be much closer to the Allansian mainland.
• Some of the topmost islands that form the 'point' of the Arrowhead Archipelago appear to have been cropped off.
• We're missing Tura, the entire southern-most Island of the Dawn. Tura can be seen here. Incidentally, do we have any idea what the climate of Tura may be like? Warren mentioned Hokkaido as a point of comparison, which seems as good an idea as any.

What thoughts do other people have about this revised map?

In addition, I did a rough mock-up of a climate map for Steve's revised version. This is Figure 3 - as per before, blue = polar regions, green = temperate regions, and orange = subtropical and tropical regions.

Figure 3. A revised idea of Titan's climate. Better, perhaps?

Again, it's not an exact map, but what do people think of this new climate interpretation of Titan?

You know the drill. Hit us with your ideas, thoughts and opinions. What works and what doesn't. After we've nailed this one down, we could probably then start looking at the individual continents themselves.

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.