February 2023 – Geofictician Blog

Conagher Rail Car Company

My low-effort brag post for the week is the Conagher Rail Car Company, in southwest Ohunkagan. Remember that the city of Ohunkagan, as currently mapped, is stuck sometime in the late 1910’s. So this is the height of the railroad industry and this rail car company plant is conceptually modeled on something like the old Pullman Rail Car company in south Chicago, maybe. I used old maps of the Pullman factory as a guide for laying out this factory.

Here is a link to the slippy map on OpenGeofiction: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=17/-42.40661/145.99363&layers=B

White Earth Agency

My low-effort brag post for the week is something I uploaded just this very moment – some detail (buildings, streets, a few schools/churches/businesses) for the town of White Earth Agency, a rural county seat in southern Makaska, but also the “capital” of the Federated Tribes, a fictional kind of “league of native reservations” that helps empower the native peoples of Makaska and neighboring Ooayatais Province, coordinating social services, advocacy and similar.

Here is a link to the slippy map on OpenGeofiction: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=15/-43.3101/145.3347&layers=B

Goodgrove

For this week’s low-effort brag-post of my geofiction, I’m taking a detour off the OpenGeofiction site and going to my other map-server, the planet called Arhet. I built this map-server before rebuilding the OpenGeofiction site – it a sense, it ended up as a kind of audition for being considered qualified to take over OGF. Anyway, there are far fewer users on Arhet, it’s a much smaller server, and it’s quite a bit more chaotic – there is no effort to create a coherent “world” the way that we do on OpenGeofiction. It’s just little map-snippets the various users are working on. Unlike OGF, there are no constraints on realism. That’s why I put this bit of mapping on Arhet.

Goodgrove is the “start town” for a MUD (“multi-user-dungeon” – a type of text-based old-school computer game) I was desigining for a while, with a working title of Hellbridge. That work is definitely dormant – I haven’t worked on it in years. The setting is a kind of semi-steampunk, semi-swords-and-sorcery setting. But I had the novel idea that I could create a detailed map of the world, much higher quality than that typically associated with MUD’s, and that I could even go in the direction of having some kind of “player locator” icon on some customized presentation of the map. So you would be moving around the game-world and meanwhile you could be logged into a website hosting a slippy map of the world, and you could see an icon that placed your location in that world.

I still think it’s a compelling and clever idea, and within the realm of what I could conceivably create, but I simply didn’t have the energy or gumption to push forward with it. But the starter town of Goodgrove was mapped down to every detail, and every single node on the in-game map has a corresponding node on this OSM-style map. It’s not meant to be strictly realistic – it’s a game map for a fantasy setting, not meant to represent any verisimilitudinous place.

Here is link to the zoomable map: https://arhet.rent-a-planet.com/#map=16/41.9412/-66.8451&layers=W

Country Club Alameda, Ohunkagan

My low-effort brag-post for this week is a neighborhood called “Country Club Alameda, in the imaginary city of Ohunkagan. The mapping is currently in a time-warp, not yet having reached 1920, but there’s an intersection of two streetcar routes at 63rd Avenue and Melville Street, and a golf course southwest of that.

This neighborhood is found on the opengeofiction map here: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=17/-42.49772/146.04194&layers=B