Looking at the map of North America circa 2070, they have the old state and provincial borders presented, but do people still use those borders in-game? Would I say I'm heading north to Southern Ontario, UCAS? Would you say you're visiting Southern Manitoba, or what about Colorado, which is now divided between three nations?

Just curious.

Locals might still probably refer to the original regions as would some government types who don't see the area outside of a map on their comm.

But for someone on the outside passing through they probably use the new designations unless they were old enough to remember the original lay of the land.

In various fluff they reference states, I think Harlequin makes reference to Missouri and IIRC in Conspiracy Theories they say that the Seattle Metroplex is essentially a state.

The state and province borders still exist. Flip through things like the Corporate Guide, or Dirty Tricks, or Spy Games, and you'll find lots of references to locations that include the political subdivision (state, province, prefecture, etc) in addition to the city name. For Colorado, I'm sure there's a state/province/territory of Colorado in every nation that got a chunk of it, along with Ontario, UCAS and Nevada, PCC and the oft-malagined Texas, CAS.

hmm... When PCC merged with Ute did that create a north and south Colorado?

Most of the NAN has no known second-order administrative units. Usually the states are in the background simply as a reference for the geographically challenged so they can more readily discern where the Shadowrun borders lie. Note also that the old US states do not necessarily correspond to their 'modern' units and use in either the UCAS or CAS. There are some inconsistencies between books where people are using the current borders, but some sourcebooks specifically note that the borders are somewhat different from their current outlines due to political changes or the fallout from the joining of Canada and/or the split between CAS and UCAS.

They are inconstistant for a good reason I believe. The world's state of crisis has caused the nation/state relationship to erode with the national agenda becoming non-existant. But people realisticly live in a state which rely on the Nation for support...

The states in Crisis therefore are non existant unless they form under the equivilent of a national agenda. Like the PCC.
Who is a nation-state within the NAN. The real power otherwise is in keeping the people close. Concentrated populations form the natural statehood.

No, I mean that one book describes the UCAS state borders one way, and another book forgets about it, and a third book shows a map that doesn't match either of the previous two. Most of the Shadowrun borders appear to literally have been drawn with a marker using highways and major geographic features (or even time zones, in the Sioux/UCAS case). It's just a jumble.

I tend to take the Sixth World Almanac as the definitive maps. It’s the only sourcebook where Fasa/WizKids/Catalyst took maps seriously.

The 6WA-maps are crap, like a lot of the rest of that book.

Example:
http://shadowhelix.de/images/f/f2/Adl_almanach_us.jpg (Sixth World Almanac)
http://shadowhelix.de/images/9/98/Adl_almanach_de.jpg (corrected german edition)

Eh, I liked 6WA but I can see why threy're are those who didn't. All the same map wise it was their best effort to date.

Sorry, but there are very few immediately obvious differences between the two. Though there are a few subtle differences (which might make little to no difference to someone who is not native). Wish I could read German.

I don't see what make Sixth World Almanac maps superior to previous maps.

But I do see that Nice is one hundred kilometers from its actual position, Auvergne is labelled as a city while it's a region, New Monaco has been renamed New Morocco and Belgium is no longer divided for no reason, Tel-Aviv replaced Jerusalem, and I can only guess how many other errors that I'm not able to detect as easily.

Just take a look at the coastline of AGS/United Netherlands or at San Diego/Los Angeles. Or the Belgian-French border. There are a lot of mistakes if you compare to "older" maps.

- Palestine
- Allied German States
- Czech Republic
- Austria
- France
- Belgium
- Denmark
- United Netherlands
- SOX
- ...

Sounds a lot like Bogota being located on the Coast.

There's nothing terribly wrong with the SWA maps except that it's just a Illustrator drawing on top of the Blue Marble graphic, so it's not super accurate and there are some puzzling inconsistencies with previous books (Cyberpirates, for example) and the European sourcebooks (the latter is not too surprising). That's the problem, boiled down: they've been using drawings on top of maps. That's why I started my project to make a spatially explicit geodatabase of borders.

Loki from the Shadowhelix works already with geodata:

- http://shadowhelix.de/images/a/a7/Kartendo...00_and_2072.png
- http://shadowhelix.de/Kategorie:!Bilde...Positionskarten
- http://shadowhelix.de/Datei:Weltkarte_2072...nk_mercator.svg
- http://shadowhelix.de/Datei:Weltkarte_2072...k_mollweide.svg
- http://shadowhelix.de/Datei:Weltkarte_2072...nk_robinson.svg
- http://shadowhelix.de/Datei:Weltkarte_2072_blank_platt.svg
- Sources: http://shadowhelix.de/Shadowhelix:Karten/Quellen

Why is the latter "not too surprising"?

Besides, the map cannot be wrong. It is canon. As such, it can be used as a reference to claim that Wallonia left France and joined the United Netherlands, Israel annexed Lebanon and Egypt annexed Sudan, even if mention of these events are nowhere to be found (it's not like the same book featured a timeline for every year where such events could have been mentioned).
Also, the use of disputed borders markings in Africa makes little sense (entities as ill-defined as "tribal lands" or the kingdoms of Nigeria have well-established borders, while Kenya, Angola and Azania would only have disputed borders?). And the extent of the "Congo Tribal Lands makes no sense geographically or historically (at least that one got a mention in the timeline, as late as 2069, that doesn't explain anything).

I know Loki does, I have been working with him. I'm using standard ArcGIS shapefiles. I imported in some of his borders into my own project.

-- Because access to the European sourcebooks, and language skills to understand the material, is not super common. Consistency with the euro material was never super high priority on this side of the pond. AFAIK its still not.


-- Everything outside the Americas and Europe gets increasingly into "fuzzy canonicity" territory. I wouldn't take it as a reference of anything. Some major events may even get explicitely ignored or quasi-retconned without changing the maps that are illustrated. For example, the current map of Lagos doesn't really have much of anything to do with the real Lagos area, but I don't make too many assumptions about why that is

-- Might look ugly if all of Africa was a mess of disputed territory lines

The geographic content in SR is generalized i guees to keeps options open for later changes.....

And maps are copyrighted also. If it's a common use they have to be accurate...

Still, taking a look at Shadows of Europe maps would have been a good start.

-- It looks broadly similar to SOE. They didn't edit the coastline so that entire area looks very different.

-- It's not like all of the Euro sourcebook maps can be perfectly rationalized with each other either. The Netherlands area in particular looks VERY different from book to book.

You mean except for the entire North Sea coast? A change which is mentioned right in the BBB's "so it came to pass", just like California.


That simply painting borders on a current satellite image cannot represent six decades of natural cataclysm should be obvious to everyone, you can't tell me that anyone acted in good faith there.

Not a surprise since the European economy is big on copyrights and how to enforce them.

What do copyrights have to do with inaccurate maps?

To use something protected that way, and so commonly distributed, implies that the intregity of the thing is understood.

So you are better off making mock copy than say, illustrating what a hord of zombies can do to the orginal....

Would you mind starting to make some sense?

What do you mean?

That's what I'm asking you

Who's on First?

Seemingly me: There is no law preventing a company from creating a map based on their own IP.

... WUT?

-- SWA uses the NASA Blue Marble Next Generation graphics for the basemaps as far as I know. They could have photoshopped them a little to represent the sunken areas. I don't think there's a major copyright issue with that.

-- BTW I have gotten some clarification and guidance on some long-standing map issues for Shadowrun North America from the line developer. I hope to integrate that into my project soon.