Re: [HOE] HoE Maps

["Mr Leonard Zimmermann" <zimmerml@cnrf.navy.mil>]

There are plenty of digitized maps available on the internet. Including datasets that will let you create your own digitized maps from them. Check out a program called Wilbur, would be my first recommendation. You can find it at http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html. This program is freeware from the same gentleman who wrote the Fractal Terrains program from ProFantasy's Campaign Cartographer.

I've got some North American stuff I've been working on myself, but there are three areas of contention for me at the moment that I'll look at. The first is simply the Shattered Coast. Obviously no real map or dataset will cover the Shattered Coast, so I would have to modify a dataset by hand. If this project is really getting off the ground, I may just find the time to do that, though, if you like.

The second problem is that I will have to do the same for the route of the Mississippi River, which changed course. We've never been given the official path, other than that it took a more direct route south somewhere around Baton Rouge sometime before the end of the war. (I think Hell or High Water has a more exact date, but does not define the new route.) Again this is just something to be done by hand and I don't suppose anyone would mind if I, or someone else, just made an estimated guess on that route.

The final problem is that all of the maps I have been generating lately have made one assumption that I have used for my campaign, that has never been officially defined or revealed in the HoE sourcebooks. And that is that there has been some form of global warming event (I presume caused by the devastation and release of radioactive energies). I make this assumption because of the general "feel" of most of the WW seeming to be desert, dry and arid. As well as the fact that several books mention the flooding in south Louisiana.

To a certain extend this assumption actually alleviates the second problem above because I presume that such warming has melted at least some of the Polar Ice Caps and raised the sea level between 12 and 20 feet. (I don't remember my exact number, but I based it more on the maps I was generating than anything else.) This turns a good deal of south Louisiana and some parts of Texas into not much more than a group of islands out in the middle of a shallow saltwater marshland. Sounds like a Hell Swamp to me, so if you'd like me to follow up on that I'd be happy to send some of what I have.

As for why the "satellite" photo in the back of the HoE book doesn't show the flooding, it's easy to read that ComSAT really isn't interested in showing too much of what has really happened, so you're probably looking at a pre-war phot (BTW, that's not actually a photo, but a terrain computer generated from a real-world dataset. I've email the actual creator of the original that is mentioned on that photo, and he wasn't even aware of how his work had been changed (only that it had been, which he obviously sanctioned). I do not know who did the shattered Coast modification on that one, though. Maybe when Shane gets back from GenCon he could provide some insight? If we are REAL lucky the artist who did it did it to a dataset and still has it and is willing to make it available.

Lenny