Shadowrun Digital Map, ArcGIS for fun. Options

[Tzeentch]

I don't remember writing that about Boise. Hmm. OK now I need to look at that how that would work.

See this is why I started this project, to catch these things and make sure there's a detailed and consistent map everyone could use even for times when I myself want to contradict stuff I wrote in the past because I misremembered lol (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

edit: I dug Tir Tairngire out of storage and yup, the map clearly shows the city being partitioned. Thanks!

[lokii]

Asia was a bit much. I have 135 lines from Shadowrun maps for this one, so for now I didn't put markers in. The portion of Asia beyond 180° is missing, but it just belongs to TPA. The map shows in essence the geography of Shadows of Asia which was consistent between the different maps in the book with a few minor exceptions. Most parts of Asia can be described using existing state and sub-state borders with some new lines interspersed. The longest new border line runs through Russia, it still traces a few rivers though. As I said before, whereas the Sixth World Almanac simplifies some of the SoA borders, it does not actually explain any of these changes. That is why except for Israel I used the 2064 borders for my alternate world map. Israel and Palestine are still a bit different from SWA, which reflects a change to the world map made in the German translation of the Almanac (should be confirmed with Catalyst). Anyway if nothing else this should have some "historical" value. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Also, note that I split the file because of upload size constraints of the Shadowhelix:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstr...ion_Asien_1.png
http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstr...ion_Asien_2.png

South America:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstr...Suedamerika.png

So, North America is last. Our discussion reminded me, that there are lot of spots that need reworking. But for completeness' sake I think I will provide the construction of my current state too.

See this is why I started this project, to catch these things and make sure there's a detailed and consistent map everyone could use even for times when I myself want to contradict stuff I wrote in the past because I misremembered lol (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

And I appreciate the opportunity for an info dump. My custom stuff was never really suitable for redistribution. So it's good to have a more standardised resource.

[lokii]

And North America:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstr...Nordamerika.png

Some info regarding the UCAS/CAS border:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Shadowhelix:...American_States

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Illust...on_Missouri.png
http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Illust...on_Virginia.png

South Florida is one of the things to be corrected:

http://www.michael.burrage.net/pages/games...ps/sr-maps.html

So, now I will see whether I can get all my coordinate sets into a shape file.

[Tzeentch]

I think the Tir Tairngire map takes the crown of absolutely godawful presentation and accuracy. Sure, that map of the eastern region looks ok, but then you actually stretch it out and they messed up the southern border by over 80 km because they didn't keep track of where the roads and their already drawn borders actually were. It's distorted all to hell and the eastern border doesn't even have the same SHAPE as what is shown on other maps.

Boise is a gigantic metroplex according to that map BTW. Like 8x the current size of the city. Well, this helps explain where all those SSC residents live. Did you know Missoula is on that map? Well you wouldn't because it's not labeled. Did you know that the expansion of the city was pretty much exclusively east but Caldwell, Meridian, and Nampa don't even show up? That the roads are only barely recognizable (and I drive down to Boise quite often)?

And I've traced the source of the trouble by using the MUCH better SONA maps.

Boise is in the wrong spot on most Shadowrun maps. Specifically, it's 60 kilometers off in the SONA map. What they call Boise is the town of Melba.

Adding this to the list of things to find out from on high about.

[lokii]

Boise is in the wrong spot on most Shadowrun maps. Specifically, it's 60 kilometers off in the SONA map. What they call Boise is the town of Melba.

For my maps, I think I used the coordinates of Boise as an anchor point for where the three country borders meet. Of course while the city might be divided between two countries, it certainly isn't divided between three, so maybe it would still make more sense to use the Tír map, at least in that spot. Also the highways provide a geographically well defined border. As far as I could tell (see my construction map) two freely drawn lines are otherwise needed to describe that segment of the border.

Adding this to the list of things to find out from on high about.

Could you add the list of open issues to your first post?

[Tzeentch]

-- Based on the information provided by Wak Shaani I created maps showing the area encompassed by the PCC land purchase/swap described (but not shown) in Storm Front.

PCC Land Purchase Maps
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kr36a0211g4szzo/Zef2p4w1fB


-- If you're interested, I also created two maps showing how Missouri is split between the UCAS and CAS, and the fixes I made to Virginia to show the right apportionment of counties between the UCAS and CAS.

Missouri Split Map
* Grey line is Shadowrun border.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4p5rfdksmpmmh9/MIssouriSplit.pdf

Virginia Split Map
* The small polygons are the counties.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7tkd53tiq79rlez/VirginiaSplit.pdf

[Tzeentch]

Updated the first post to describe some of the outstanding issues. Currently doing some more tweaks to show what my "final" Asamando map looks like.

You can see some Sioux Nation maps here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pm1uw6wrc1nbptm/uA_1jcRePU

[tete]

<chuckle> Wow, well . . . this whole exercise has really reinforced the idea that the Shadowrun canon has become an unmanageable clusterfuck. I looked at the map of LA in Enclaves and just set it down and laughed. It doesn't make any sense with what is said in other sourcebooks. Were the authors even familiar with the LA region? Did later authors realize LA was flooded? So many questions .... ugh.

If you look at the original Seattle Source books several roads, rivers etc are in the wrong place. Later books look like they at least had a map to work off of.

[Tzeentch]

The Enclaves map I've come to learn to live with. I just need the southern coast issue addressed (is San Diego supposed to be islands? That's not really explained in the book).

The LA map in Enclaves perfectly georectified so I'm confident that part is right.

[Tzeentch]

Gold and Ivory Coast
Uploaded my attempted fixes and canon smoothing to https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5lwgnx0leohn71j/q4W8E4R7uN

The maps should be consistent with Feral Cities, p. 69.

-- Asante Nation changed to Kingdom of Asante (not "Assante") as in Feral Cities.

-- Anyl corrected spelling to Anyi.

-- Asamando borders consistent with Feral Cities and swallows most of the contested land seen in SWA. A rump cut-off area of the Gold and Ivory Coast Tribal Area remains in the south (labeled Contested Gold Cost Land).

-- Kingdom of Benin loses a significant amount of land but borders for both kingdoms should match what you see in Feral Cities.

-- On the region map note "Island_NearNigeria." That island has no clear ownership in canon. There's actually quite a few islands like that, and are given generic names in my geodatabase for later assignment.

-- I don't think I can georectify the Lagos map (Feral Cities, p. 93). It's too divergent from the current area to find tie points. I've attached a map showing one of my attempts as LagosNowWhat (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Tzeentch]

Westphalia
Updated the Westphalia area with the map from the Reiseführer (Travel Guide) sourcebook. I had to do a little surgery to get the new coastlines to match at the United Netherlands area but it wasn't too bad. Note that the sourcebook borders are not exactly matching (as you can see on the rectified image), but the other stuff matched close enough that I feel pretty good about the new coastline changes.


Westphalia Updates
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4tp5xmt5odabdsi/K6nynvBMWl

[lokii]

-- If you're interested, I also created two maps showing how Missouri is split between the UCAS and CAS, and the fixes I made to Virginia to show the right apportionment of counties between the UCAS and CAS.

What do you make of Shadows of North America p. 71? "All counties intersecting or to the south of a line drawn from Jasper County to Jefferson County (just south of St. Louis) became the CAS state of South Missouri (with Springfield as state capital)." That is why I simply ignored the Missouri border from all the maps and just used the counties (plus the St. Louis wedge) to create the border line.

The Enclaves map I've come to learn to live with. I just need the southern coast issue addressed (is San Diego supposed to be islands? That's not really explained in the book).

Corporate Enclaves p. 34 "The most notable thing about San Diego is that it has turned into a city of islands."

The maps should be consistent with Feral Cities, p. 69.

Why do you use that as the standard, though? It does have its problems. If Asamando is expanded like this it swallows up the corporate enclaves of Bibiani (Ares) and Wenchi (Saeder-Krupp). The purple lines on this map:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Anpass...enbeinküste.png

Would the megacorps allow their territory to be surrounded by Asamando (assuming they have kept it) and would Thema Laula step on their toes like this? Also Feral Cities is only hinting at why Asamando expanded. The only clue I see is Feral Cities p. 74 "Any invading army is going to find the entire population turned out against them. The Asante found that out the hard way in '64 and '65." This points to an invasion by Asante that Asamando defeated. Maybe they occupied Asante territory afterwards, which would explain part of the changes on the map. But there is no explanation for the Asante's expansion towards the east. On the other hand if Asamando just expelled the Asante invasion force, there would be little need to change the map from the state in Cyberpirates! at all...

-- On the region map note "Island_NearNigeria." That island has no clear ownership in canon. There's actually quite a few islands like that, and are given generic names in my geodatabase for later assignment.

Basically all of the remaining colonial possessions could be put on the list of open issues. Just a few examples: the British Falkland Islands or Ascension Island, the French islands around Madagascar like Mayotte and Réunion. Where I see the French fighting tooth and nails to keep them, I would imagine the British either auctioned them off or permanently leased them to corporations, though there is a different precedence set with the Bermudas.

[Vicar]

Sweet. Thanks for all the work (I do love me some maps).

I took a look at the Sioux maps, and really liked what I saw. A couple of questions on Sioux.pdf, though:

(Assuming the blue dots are cities)
1) There is an unlabeled blue dot between Bozeman and Hardin (Is maybe Billings?)
2) There are two blue dots in the vicinity of the Cody label
3) Two blue dots in the vicinity of the Laramie label (One of them should be Cheyenne?)
4) There is an unlabeled blue dot to the NW of Sidney, SW of Alliance
5) There is an unlabeled blue dot to the NE of Butte (I'm assuming this is Helena)

Again, thanks for all the work.

[Tzeentch]

What do you make of Shadows of North America p. 71? "All counties intersecting or to the south of a line drawn from Jasper County to Jefferson County (just south of St. Louis) became the CAS state of South Missouri (with Springfield as state capital)." That is why I simply ignored the Missouri border from all the maps and just used the counties (plus the St. Louis wedge) to create the border line.

-- I'll send this in to the line developer to see if I can get a ruling. Right now I'm assuming the line cutting the counties is right as it's been pretty consistent over every book.

Corporate Enclaves p. 34 "The most notable thing about San Diego is that it has turned into a city of islands."

-- Yeah, but I don't think the author actually looked at it. The city is GONE. It didn't nicely get broken up and float apart.

Why do you use that as the standard, though? It does have its problems. If Asamando is expanded like this it swallows up the corporate enclaves of Bibiani (Ares) and Wenchi (Saeder-Krupp). The purple lines on this map:

-- The enclaves shown in Cyberpirates are not seen in SWA so I assume they are still largely corporate run or the corps left or who knows (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
-- I'm willing to bet money that the word from God on this is going to be something like "borders change all the time there." So don't get too wedded to the lines I have up there now, even if it gets blessed.

Would the megacorps allow their territory to be surrounded by Asamando (assuming they have kept it) and would Thema Laula step on their toes like this? Also Feral Cities is only hinting at why Asamando expanded. The only clue I see is Feral Cities p. 74 "Any invading army is going to find the entire population turned out against them. The Asante found that out the hard way in '64 and '65." This points to an invasion by Asante that Asamando defeated. Maybe they occupied Asante territory afterwards, which would explain part of the changes on the map. But there is no explanation for the Asante's expansion towards the east. On the other hand if Asamando just expelled the Asante invasion force, there would be little need to change the map from the state in Cyberpirates! at all...

-- Based on the Cyberpirates fluff I actually assume its more like "Asamando claims this area, no one is powerful enough to press their own claim, so on a map suddenly it's marked "Asamando."

Basically all of the remaining colonial possessions could be put on the list of open issues. Just a few examples: the British Falkland Islands or Ascension Island, the French islands around Madagascar like Mayotte and Réunion. Where I see the French fighting tooth and nails to keep them, I would imagine the British either auctioned them off or permanently leased them to corporations, though there is a different precedence set with the Bermudas.

-- I couldn't find anything about who "owns" the Falklands. A lot of those islands, even big ones, don't get borders drawn around them (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Tzeentch]

Ok I sent in a list of questions to Jason Hardy on some of the more outstanding issues.

Again, thanks for all the work.

-- I've made a less busy map showing the borders and cities (and fixed some of the labeling issues - it was not drawing labels that overlapped).

Sioux Region - Cities: https://www.dropbox.com/s/duhc6w75vaczx14/Sioux-Cities.pdf
-- The light grey lines are the current state and national borders.

Sioux Region - Cities With Terrain Background: https://www.dropbox.com/s/j2deqabiioaqi8a/S...ies_Terrain.pdf
-- I like how this looks so will probably keep that background on the other city overview maps.

[lokii]

-- I'll send this in to the line developer to see if I can get a ruling. Right now I'm assuming the line cutting the counties is right as it's been pretty consistent over every book.

The main advantage is the cleanly defined geographic structure. Anyway there would still be my maps as kind of a "minority opinion". (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

-- I'm willing to bet money that the word from God on this is going to be something like "borders change all the time there." So don't get too wedded to the lines I have up there now, even if it gets blessed.

Or you could be blamed for every mistake on the maps in perpetuity. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

-- Based on the Cyberpirates fluff I actually assume its more like "Asamando claims this area, no one is powerful enough to press their own claim, so on a map suddenly it's marked "Asamando."

Well, with Feral Cities you get the impression Asamando is a functioning state with a highly educated workforce and an efficient army, just run by ghouls.

[Tzeentch]

The main advantage is the cleanly defined geographic structure. Anyway there would still be my maps as kind of a "minority opinion". (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

-- True. And it wouldn't be hard to update using the actual county borders (one of the nice things about having it all in a GIS is I can trace the legal borders).
-- It's one of the questions I sent in to the line developer. Jason quickly responded saying he would look at it after GenCon was all over (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Or you could be blamed for every mistake on the maps in perpetuity. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

-- At least my maps will be consistently wrong, which is a big improvement over the current state of affairs.

Well, with Feral Cities you get the impression Asamando is a functioning state with a highly educated workforce and an efficient army, just run by ghouls.

-- Aye. It's a weird place. Take a look at where they supposedly have their capital on Google Earth (there's nothing really there atm in real life). Not the best spot one could imagine. How all that stuff works and they don't even have a port is rather astonishing.

[Tzeentch]

I've uploaded additional sets of maps to https://www.dropbox.com/sh/07i5ony0enrg9nc/_AeouepmBy

The Shattered Coast maps are a closer look at the Corporate Enclaves flooding. I've also shown it overlayed on actual DEMs to illustrate how completely arbitrary the whole thing is.

As always, I take requests (as long as its not too elaborate).

Edit: On the DEM maps you can toggle off the SR Nations layer to see the full DEM. Which actually will just leave you with more questions than it answers, but that functionality is included in all of these GeoPDFs.

[lokii]

Looking at my Denver stuff I remembered something else, that I never got around to fix. The old Denver map, that was republished as a black/white graphic in SoNA, shows that the western border of Denver follows existing secondary roads. I did try to register it, but I didn't quite succeed. If you haven't done so already and you have access to the roads, that would be a good opportunity to get a very precise fit of part of the FRFZ border.

[Tzeentch]

Will update the Denver borders.

Using lokii's XY data, so far I've done the following:

Adjusted the borders of Mauritania, Algeria, and Morocco.

Adjusted/fixed the Sheba southern border with the Ethiomalian Territories (ouch that one was a big error!).

Adjusted the Iraq/Kurdistan border. I don't think these borders were really given much thought, so making some changes to follow recognizable landmarks (notably, roads). It appears the Kirkuk area is under Iraqi control so decided not to use lokii's borders in that area. I think that keeping the As Sulaymaniyah region in Iraq territory looks closer to what is in SWA for this area. The Raniyah spur got cot off for Kurdistan but is probably disputed territory (more than most in that area). I've uploaded a map of the area to https://www.dropbox.com/s/pvy67tqvc22w3fu/Kurdistan.pdf

[lokii]

What I forgot to say. No guarantees. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) Well, I'm confident about the general positioning of lines, but I'm sure there will be small errors in the placement. On the other hand most of the new borders are very rough anyway. For Africa I think I got a good fit with the Almanac map once I ignored the underlying shape from the satellite image and just matched borders. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Which reminds me of yet another thing. The Almanac map shows a pretty dramatic expansion of the jungle, the whole southern Sahara is overgrown. That should probably be dialed back. I'm not sure it ever was that densely covered by jungle.

[Tzeentch]

Which reminds me of yet another thing. The Almanac map shows a pretty dramatic expansion of the jungle, the whole southern Sahara is overgrown. That should probably be dialed back. I'm not sure it ever was that densely covered by jungle.

-- The Almanac basemap appears to be the Blue Marble Next Generation graphic. So that's not a Shadowrun edit (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

EDIT: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_cat.php?categoryID=1484

[lokii]

-- The Almanac basemap appears to be the Blue Marble Next Generation graphic. So that's not a Shadowrun edit (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

You are right about Blue Marble, but compare the image to the Almanac map. The latitude of the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula is were the Sahel zone ends today. But on the Almanac map what appears to be vegetation reaches to the latitude of the northern end of the Red Sea. That's several million square kilometers. The vegetation has also extended south.

[Tzeentch]

You are right about Blue Marble, but compare the image to the Almanac map. The latitude of the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula is were the Sahel zone ends today. But on the Almanac map what appears to be vegetation reaches to the latitude of the northern end of the Red Sea. That's several million square kilometers. The vegetation has also extended south.

Ah, ok I see what you mean. Yeah, vegetation was probably clonestamped all over the place. Will add that to my list of questions (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Edit: Oh, and Madagascar (which canonically does have a spooky super-regrow forest) doesn't have one on the map (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[lokii]

Edit: Oh, and Madagascar (which canonically does have a spooky super-regrow forest) doesn't have one on the map (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

In exchange it got a capital (which canonically it doesn't have). (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

For my Africa map (see Shadowrun Wikia) I used a mixture of two different public domain images from Natural Earth as a base map:

http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/...atural-earth-1/
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/...atural-earth-2/

The second one, Natural Earth II, is an idealized version of the earth without the influence of human settlement. The Sahara is still pretty much vegetation free on that map. I put the two images together using Natural Earth I outside the tribal areas and Natural Earth II for Congo, Madagascar and a few other places. But I didn't really work from canon references, except with Madagascar.