The Diamond Map Thread

Something by Sregan:


Well, this project took WAY too long and I'm still not entirely happy with it - the key still looks a little unfinished and I've never been totally satisfied with the borders in Europe (which are supposed to look like this), but I think it's time to sign off on it. I think I'm getting better at this whole Photoshop thing - the margin background is based on this tutorial for creating a wet stone texture, though it didn't turn out quite as craggy as I hoped. The borders are anti-aliased, though I couldn't bring myself to do it with the internal subdivisions. All the borders and text are actually very dark turquoise - something I discovered worked well with my last project (which used dark green).

This is La Muerte De Mí, a TL/Scenario based around three different ideas I wanted to develop. Firstly, I wanted to explore the Union of the British and French crowns that nearly happened in OTL - but didn't want to turn it into a generic 'Hurr hurr, Britain and France unite into The Mighty Fritbrance and conquers the world'). Secondly, I had some rough ideas for a Scotwank focusing around Scottish migrants building a powerful dog-wagging colony in the Americas, but had no idea how to get them the necessary cash and manpower. Finally, I had an old idea kicking around called Inter Caetera, about Spain and Portugal dividing the Holy Roman Empire between them. I roughly combined the ideas here and here, and was so pleased with the result I decided to give it a go in PS.

La Muerte De Mí takes as its P.O.D. the survival of Henry V of England until 1441, by which time he has secured the French throne, defeated Charles VII, and married Joan of Arc. Unfortunately, whilst the House of Lancaster (now simply referred to as Anjou) becomes ever more firmly ensconced in France, their grip on England progressively weakens, and in 1458, outraged by Henry VI's decision to govern from the continent, the Yorkists rise up under Richard III (our Richard Plantagenet) and are able - at great cost - to defeat the Lancastrian loyalists and seize the island throne. However, England does not remain independent for long. Lacking a warfleet, ravaged by the Red and White War and virtually bankrupt, England is invaded not once but three times over the course of the next century, falling under Scottish, Portuguese, and finally Spanish control. 'Londres' becomes a gigantic sweatshop, supplying Spain with an unfathomable quantity of cheap manufactured goods and textiles for export. The year is now 1920, and Spain has dominated Europe - and the globe - for five hundred years. But with the French, Germans, and Scottish carving out their own empires, how much longer can Spain remain the master of the world?

The map should be more or less self-explanatory, and includes some explanations of different aspects of the LMDM world. Some other points:

- Cúrsa Pathadh ('The Road of Thirst') (OTL Namibia) and Grande Java were founded as penal colonies - transportation to Rémission on the east coast of *Australia was a particularly feared punishment. When France began to settle the west coast, it was made a free colony, and penal colonists who had earned their freedom through hard work could travel west to Côte Libre.

- Venice was forced to surrender its non-contiguous possessions in exchange for Milan, the Papal States, and the Neapolitan Abruzzes. Bosnia, Serbia, and 'Wallachia' are Spanish puppets, pried out of Hungary's zone of influence as a result of the *War of Austrian Succession.

- After a catastrophic defeat in a continental war with Spain, Portugal was forced into political union and the Portuguese language, like English, has been all but erased, leaving Brazil as the only Portuguese-speaking nation. When Brazil broke away from Iberian control, the Siete Ciudades ('Seven Cities') - the first historic colonies in *South America - counter-seceded and submitted to Spanish authority. Since then Brazil has rebuilt its industrial strength, on the south-east and north-east coasts, as well as at its huge new capital, Sul-Cruz/South Cross, and is more or less as powerful as OTL Brazil, despite its loss of territory.

- France played a Great Game with Russia in the 18th century and won quite convincingly, taking most of *Turkestan, including *Almaty. Russia had to settle for dividing Mongolia and *Japan with a much more modernised, outward-looking China.

d86gxmd-5a369623-d684-4121-ae45-4d62aaa974df.png
 
Questions answered:

lonestarr said:
Epic map, SRegan.

Just epic.

Particularly interested in Germany. Is it a Germany we can relate to, or have the changes been so great that it is virtually unidentifiable?

charl said:
Its capital is Prague. That makes it virtually unidentifiable to me.

Indeed :) The LMDM German Republic has very little in common with the OTL German Empire>Republic, being more an analogue of the OTL French Republic. As its subdivisions suggest (or would suggest if I didn't have a compulsion to cover them up with annotations) it's a direct descendent of the HRE, and has historically been dominated by Bohemia. In terms of national culture they're similar to the colonial Dutch, with a soupçon of Revolutionary French Rationalism. Prussian militarism doesn't get a look in, which significantly alters their outlook.
B_Munro said:
Another first-rate map, to be sure. But I note you still haven't explained Scottish colonial success: perhaps English refugees provide some more manpower, but the Scots hardly have the resources to protect settlers from the Spanish colossus or from the French, if they decide to move into N. America beyond the arctic bits they seem to have obtained. And although the Gaelic names are nice, hadn't lowland Scots (a Germanic language) become dominant by the mid-15th century time of the POD? That extra English manpower wouldn't be speaking Gaelic, either.

Sorry if I offend... :(

Bruce

PS-when and how did Mexico/Mecica become independent?

Thanks - The Empire of Meçica was detached from the rest of the Spanish Empire as part of the peace that allowed Spain to absorb Portugal. It's currently under an Oldemburgo cadet branch and has historically been in close alliance with Spain, though it is fiercely defensive of its integrity (which makes it a convenient buffer against Spanish northward expansion).

Scotland's colonial ventures begin during the Union of the Scottish and English Crowns, but mostly succeed due to the fact that it is the only country in the game at the time. Spanish attention is focused southwards on the still-extant Inca Empire, whilst the French have their hands full in Europe. Terra-Neuve was a possession of the English crown, taken by the Lancastrians when they surrendered their claim to the island throne, and the Company lands exist only by New Scottish sufferance.

The Gaelic naming was a little fanciful on my part: the premise of the TL requires English to be eradicated, so I've had to assume a 'Ghaedlig' revival, which might make more sense if it were confined to place names in New Scotland (similar to the Latin and Greek pretensions of the OTL American colonists). I didn't necessarily envisage the English refugees as the American colonists, merely as generating wealth and potentially starting a demographic boom.
 
More SRegan:


Well, this took about six times longer than I wanted, but I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of this Photoshop malarkey. John J. Reilly's essays were, along with Tony Jones' stuff, my first introduction to the online AH community, and accordingly for my first all-PS map I set myself the task of doing a rendering of his "The Irish Empire" world, set in OTL 1901.

This proved more difficult than I had first imagined, mostly because Reilly is infuriatingly vague about what's going on in massive areas of the world. The Kingdom of Poland is clearly a Russia-analogue, in the 19th century extending "almost to the Urals". This leaves the question of what exactly is going on in Siberia. I played with several ideas, including surviving Samoyed states, Japan up to the Urals on the other side, a gigantic arc of Irish territory bisecting Eurasia, and mega-Persia, before settling on the first option, simply to avoid accusations of space-filling.

The extent of the Irish Empire itself was also a pain in the rear end: Reilly has the Irish Empire expand to cover a quarter of the world's surface (i.e. the same as the OTL British Empire). Only problem is, where is all this territory supposed to come from? Ireland has already built up a substantial South American empire, lost everything outside Brazil to the Spanish and Peru, and then Brazil achieves independence. It can't have more than a thin slice of the NA east coast (so no Canada), and we're also told that it's been pushed out of the Pacific by the Spanish and Japanese (which I interpreted to mean no Australia and only the Indian Ocean parts of Indonesia). The only solution was expanding its holdings in Africa and India, which didn't look like nearly enough. I did some rough calculations, and to my amazement my revised holdings came out at 33.646 mil km, compared to the OTL Br. Empire's 33.7 mil km at its height.

The annotations were wildly over-ambitious*, and I now wish now I'd just done independent states and left some space to add in capital names. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun making them up: I've diverged a little from Reilly's vision, which is soaked in industrial-strength butterfly repellent**. The dominant language of both commerce and art in his world is Ibernacha, a Latinised Goedelic, and the name of the language coupled with the Irish capitol*** suggests something that sounds very much like OTL Spanish. Of course, TTL Spanish is going to develop differently as well. I've provided original-language versions of all the major players' names which removes some of the butterflies - Brazil/Breasil is forgiveable, given the Irish legend, but there wasn't much I could do about named minors such as the Cherokee Kingdom of the Appalachians (I'm fairly sure that a 9th century discovery of America should butterfly away both the Cherokee and the Iroquois), but I've tried to compensate elsewhere. I've also tried to imitate localisation of names by conquering or hegemonic powers (most noteably in East Asia and Africa) with varying degrees of success. Pretty much all the names are (god help me) based on real languages or cultures existing before the P.O.D.. Cûscada means 'Footfall' in Gaelic/Latin mashup, Christoscãra means 'Christ-friendly', Caudesan and Bilkenstal mean 'Timber Station' in mangled Franco-Latin and Germanic respectively, etc.

On the technical side, I've shamelessly pilfered Nugax's technique for creating believable borders (namely by layering them on top of a satellite photo), though I didn't have the guts to go all-out with anti-aliasing. The basemap I made from the equirectangular satellite image can be found here. I had originally planned to do a highly ornate Aztec-y border based on this and this but eventually decided it looked rubbish, and was too much like the Paint-drawing I'm trying to get away from. In the end I went with a very simple mock-iron textured border with very slightly varying border widths to try and give a 3D look, which I think looks decent.

Notes:

- Antartica is claimed to different distances from the South Pole under different treaties - some powers, like Spain and Ireland, have staked their claim in multilateral talks but continue to hold independent claims. Spain's unilateral claims include the Islas Uã Dierenacha and a slice of the southern state of the UERB. The Quetzal League simply claims all of Antarctica proper as its own territory. I got the effect by centring flattened circles on different layers on an arbitrary point below the bottom of the map and erasing the areas outside the desired arc.

- I added in the subdivisions to avoid a space-filling look in Africa, India, and the Americas, but I'm quite pleased with the way it came out, especially Breasil. I tried with the African subdivisions in particular to show that whilst different powers have created the subdivisions, they're describing roughly the same areas (cf. the Libyan desert, Algeria and the Congo).

- Every major power's key is layered against a piece of art relevant to its dominant culture in ATL. I originally just put a single Aztec image behind all of them, but it looked a bit rubbish.

- Legedun and Vindebone are alternate small nation-states that could have arisen if things had gone differently. Lugdunum was THE major north-west European city until it got trashed by war, and Vindobona (the origin of the name Vienna) was a major trade center until floods and administrative incompetence in the 4th century killed it off.

- Mega-Italy was an invention of mine, intended to grant some plausibility to the notion that Ireland could fight three wars in 70 years against resource-rich Germany and kick their rear end every time without a Gallic Entente. I've tried to justify it by implying that the Bohemian Marcomanni eventually gained control of the Italian peninsula.

* I was originally planning to name every subdivision, similar to the MoF 06 map annotations I did with Nicksplace27, but suspected it would probably kill me.

** Re-reading it I practically went into meltdown when I read that the Irish Empire, the product of a 1st century P.O.D., funds the defeat of Napoleon. I reproduce my notes here:
"NAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEON: Ireland allies with the Kingdom of Poland (extending 'almost to the Urals') and finances the defeat of NAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEON."

*** 'Rodillanegra', which as far as I can tell means Black Knee, but I'm guessing is intended to be a play on Dublin meaning Black Pool.




d86ykcv-d3b07895-26cc-4760-ba50-89b71228f90a.png
 
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For completeness, the world map, although much of it is still sort of crudely sketched in.


9rtwdhJ.png


Accompanying notes:

The Steamopera is an ASB steampunk Solar System with different physical laws (anti-gravity stuff, some aether, different biology), and some physical changes to Earth's geography: my plans for New Zealand already included feathered pseudo-dinosaurs (cousins to birds) and whatnot, so I decided to make it bigger by expanding South Island into Zealandia territory. I don't think a bit bigger South Island's going to cause any big changes in the ocean-streams around here (I tried to figure out, but there's a pretty big gap there and most streaming seems to follow the Zealandia outline a bit), etc.

About the orange areas in the East Indies etc: Because the Technocracy of Netherland is basically a satellite state of the Republic of France, the colonial possessions of the Netherlands and France in the eastern hemisphere have been united into a single sphere of influence, which I've decided to call with the pseudo-orwellian name of Probationary Territories. These include the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, most of Indonesia, eastern Australia (New Holland), South Island (New Zealand) and Kyushu.

The Japanese Commonwealth: This is a lose pseudo-federation of basically sovereign states in a constant low-profile cold war going on. Each of the states pledges loyalty to the Emperor, from the Republic of Ezo to the Shogunate in Eastern Japan (Edo), and the Daimyonate in Western Japan (Kyoto), plus something going on in Shikoku. Kyushu is French/Hollandish and Okinawa is British. Korea is a sovereign Kingdom, Manchuria is Prussian.

Republican bloc vs. Monarchist bloc in Europe:
The Conciliary Republic of France and its satellites: The Technocracy of Netherland (sic), Conciliary Republic of Swabia, Conciliary Union of Rhineland and the Swiss Republic (+ places like Republic of Lucca.

The Union Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland + Hanover (Vicky is a boy).

K. Prussia. Kingdom of Saxony. Kingdom of Denmark.

The United Kingdoms of the Danube (Danubia, Donavia? Donauia?)

Russia is split into northern and southern states: Old Russia is the rump of the old St. Petersburg Tsardom, including Livonia and the Grand Duchy of Finland. The Ruthenian Empire is... The result of a Russian Napoleon, I'd guess. There was a republican revolution, which ultimately resulted in a charismatic neo-imperialist Emperor.

Africa: I have no idea. I just cut it into random bits and pieces and gave them out willy-nilly to the big powers. I trust this is sufficiently authentic in tone. :D The French African territories are no part of the Probationary Territories, and not jointly ruled by the French-Dutch concorde.

The colours may be a bit hard to read so here: British Bengal, British Pakistan/Afghanistan, some sort of thing going on in central India, etc.

Of the states in America, the Emigré Kingdom of Louisiane actually has colonial possessions in India and other places.

South America is generally random. I have no idea what would be plausible, and my idea for an ironically delicious split Brazil/united Spanish South America isn't very plausible. Possibly I'll later do them along more ethnic/linguistic areas.

But why have you labelled Afghanistan as Prussian, but not given it the Prussian colour? Afghanistan looks British to me... the Gujarat is in the Prussian colour, though...


The explanation is simple: I fucked up. Afghanistan is, of course, British. The other bit is Prussian.

Well, the colours aren't that noticeable. I'm putting names down mainly because they're all very low-saturation. But the problem is figuring out what names to use (for example, I know next to nothing about India's history - what's that bit in the middle? Some sort continuing Maharat confederacy, what? What's the Gujarat? Can I eat it??), and then I screw up spectacularly. :D

I should also mark the Louisianan colonies, etc. And add some red borders around the republic bloc in Europe and name it the... Confederated Concord of Conciliary Republics, or the CCCR for short.
 
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A couple by Atom. First, the sequel to this: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/map-thread-vi.136161/page-386#post-3466236

And this is the second one. It should be noted that FACTS Magazine is not an... unbiased source. It's very certainly a loyal monarchist publication of Virginia (it's endorsed every President king candidate of the Washington family, and King George IV, if reluctantly[1]), and is very interested in making the IWC look as bad as possible. So, it's not as bad as it appears, and the other side isn't as good as it appears, obviously.

The main thing this map doesn't show that well is the sheer diversity of the IWC. I tried to make it like every possible Authoritarian-Socialist permutation I could think of, from the permanent Gulag of Patagonia, to the English surveillance state, and then to the collapsing Phillipines. So certain areas are much nicer to live in then others. For instance France is actually a rather nice place all things considered, as long as you don't anger the Surete Political. It's not corrupt, has excellent Educational opportunities (particularly in theoretical physics, biology and chemistry, although they tend to lag behind in Mathematics and applied sciences), and is very intellectual. If you anger the Surete Political however... no one talks of that. Oh, and they've absolutely destroyed the current French orthography replacing it with something that horrifies all OTL French, and is rather terrifically ugly.

The Marathas are not as nice, but India is much richer then in OTL, and WR Maratha along with Mysore are the largest power block after France. Together France and it's allies in the WNC fight the long game with Maratha and Mysore for political influence, although both groups are becoming increasingly annoyed with the absolute failure of the rest of the WRs to get it together. Since the WNC is also a fairly weak body, it only manages to apear as powerful as it is to toher powers due to it's opacity and the members fear that if they don't present a united front, Russia, China (and if they could ever agree) the USA would rip them up.

On the bad side of the WNC, you find places like Pegu (imagine the Khmer Rouge left absolutely alone for 30 years, and yoou'll be close), the slavery system of the Congo, the racist caste society of Amazonas, England (imagine 1984+Prisoner and every other British dystopia of that type, and you'll only be a little over the top of ATL England), the almost entirely collapse Phillipines (Manila and bits of Luzon are basically the only area actually controlled by the government) with rampant brigandry and violence, along with more typicall corrupt one party systems like Mejico and Guinea.

the WNC last fought a war ten years ago when Russia and China finally allied together and tried to break through the Himalayas with the help of Bengal. It didn't work out so well for them. Since then all of the world powers have retreated and the world lies in a semi-peace, although recent signs along the Red Curtain of Eastern Europe worry the populace of the world. This time, with an interventionist President king the USA looks set to join, surely on the side of the Capitalist powers. And deep within Paris as the thousands of delegates squabble and shout, cooler minds worry about the fate of the Revolution.

[1]The American political system in ATL is... complicated to say the least, but I'll try to simplify as quickly as possible. Due to the Frontier war of the 1810s, Virginia, Delaware, Mackinack and formerly Maryland and Michigan were in Personal union under the Washington Dynasty. The Washington Dynasty was also a perennial runner in the presidential elections (blame a slightly different George Washington I) as the conservative candidate, and when they're both King and President, they are usually reffered to as President-King in ATL. Canada, Belize, Jamaica, Quebec, and Nova Scotia are all part of the USA in ATL (the British monarchy fled to Ontario due to the French invasion in the 20s) and George IV stepped in when there was no Washington heir to run for president in the 1840s, when faced with a powerful radical opponent.



YlLfHI1.png
 
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Some of you may remember the maps I made of the complicated Russian empire and Napoleanic French Socialist Empire. This is the third and neutral power of that world, the USA. But it's a very very different USA.

So, without further ado, a map of the USA in the year 1923, 30 years since the end of the Progressive Revolution:

SwxTZHK.png
 
Some more details on that one:


B_Munro;3643150I said:
sn't China also a major power?
Somewhat. It's definitely on a lower tier then Russia, the Workers Congress, and the USA. Perhaps rather like Japan before WWI. No one really wants to get it on the other side, but it not's really as industrialized or developed as the Great Powers.

B_Munro;3643150I said:
Ok, so Washington became, hm, king in Virginia and some sort of figurehead emperor of America, to provide a unifying figure? And when Napoleonic France overran Britain, the British royal house fled to Canada and, oy vey, the British kingdom of Canada became part of the United States with the British king as a vassal of the Emperor Washington? (And I'd like to see how the British crown in exile swallowed _that_...but perhaps that was rather a while later).
Well, sort of. The Presidency was taken by Washington son in the aftermath of the first American Civil War (or the Claims War), and Virginia proclaimed him King as well (it's complicated, but Virginia use to control Illinois, Chicago and Michigan as well). This created a tradition of the Presidency being held by the House of Washington, although only as the conservative candidate. Things got very complicated later when after Napoleon invaded Britain, the British fled to Canada. They ended up joining the USA as part of a very complicated deal that left the Empire with American allies, but a number of responsibilities to America. The part about being below the House of Washington was difficult at first, but after George IV (not ours, the British house in ATL is descended from William Frederick Duke of Gloucester and Edinburg, who managed to escape unlike most) was elected President in the aftermath of George Washington II's assasination, things became much easier.

B_Munro;3643150I said:
And, as your other maps show, a lot of Latin America went revolutionary hard left: so the Empire of Mexico survives in exile in California, which was never annexed by the US in this TL? (Although Texas seems to have done so)? And New Mexico seems to have come into the US seperately as a Spanish-speaking state...I get the impression this is a lot looser union than the OTL US. No war over the slave thing? But I suppose with Mongo Napoleonic Empire around, a certain Hang Together or Hang Seperately attitude may have prevailed.
Mexico split up during the revolution and most of the non-Worker's remnants (Texas, New Mexico, Arikaree, Yucatan) joined the USA, although only two remained loyal to the House of Iturbide.

B_Munro;3643150I said:
And those "revolutionary congresses" really just baffle me.

EDIT: Oops, so I just looked at the other maps: so he's president rather than Emperor, although the contitutional arrangements for having a monarchy as part of a democratic federal...ah, forget about it, or I'll need an Advil too.
Bruce
The Revolutionary Congresses are from the Second America Civil War. Imagine if the late 19th century Progressive moment decided to rise up in arms in the Northeast/west and around Chicago, were rather successful and managed to negotiate a settlement that achieved most of their goals (a Constitutional amendment for disability, retirement, and child welfare mostly). The USA in ATL is much much looser, although the exact structure of it is actually rather similar. The Noble titles are come from the federated states below, there's no USA noble titles. Slavery doesn't officially exist after the Progressive Revolution.

archaeogeek said:
Beautiful map Atom.
Now excuse me I'll be popping some Advil to understand what the hell is going on there...

Also from what I get: Mexico is split between American vassal states, the imperial government in Exil in California and Mexico as part of... is that the progressives?
No, that's the worker's congress, a socialist version of a Mnogo Napoleanic Empire. And there not vassal states, but full members (the Americans wish they could get organized enough to have Vassal states).

Analytical Engine said:
What's with Newfoundland and the Bahamas? Are they not British any more?
The Bahamas were taken in the war with the Napoleanic Empire, and Newfoundland left after the Grand Banks conflict.
 
What even is a "diamond map"?
Maps by Diamond, one of the first important map-makers on this forum. He took down most of his maps when he left, which struck me as a bit of a shame, so I created this thread as a tribute to someone who was something of an inspiration to me when I started making AH maps. Later I felt a bit guilty about having this stickied when there was already an oversupply of stickied threads on this forum, so I decided to make it more widely worthwhile by posting other quality maps that have been lost to the forum through link rot and may not have been seen by more recent joiners.
 
More SRegan:


Well, this took about six times longer than I wanted, but I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of this Photoshop malarkey. John J. Reilly's essays were, along with Tony Jones' stuff, my first introduction to the online AH community, and accordingly for my first all-PS map I set myself the task of doing a rendering of his "The Irish Empire" world, set in OTL 1901.

This proved more difficult than I had first imagined, mostly because Reilly is infuriatingly vague about what's going on in massive areas of the world. The Kingdom of Poland is clearly a Russia-analogue, in the 19th century extending "almost to the Urals". This leaves the question of what exactly is going on in Siberia. I played with several ideas, including surviving Samoyed states, Japan up to the Urals on the other side, a gigantic arc of Irish territory bisecting Eurasia, and mega-Persia, before settling on the first option, simply to avoid accusations of space-filling.

The extent of the Irish Empire itself was also a pain in the rear end: Reilly has the Irish Empire expand to cover a quarter of the world's surface (i.e. the same as the OTL British Empire). Only problem is, where is all this territory supposed to come from? Ireland has already built up a substantial South American empire, lost everything outside Brazil to the Spanish and Peru, and then Brazil achieves independence. It can't have more than a thin slice of the NA east coast (so no Canada), and we're also told that it's been pushed out of the Pacific by the Spanish and Japanese (which I interpreted to mean no Australia and only the Indian Ocean parts of Indonesia). The only solution was expanding its holdings in Africa and India, which didn't look like nearly enough. I did some rough calculations, and to my amazement my revised holdings came out at 33.646 mil km, compared to the OTL Br. Empire's 33.7 mil km at its height.

The annotations were wildly over-ambitious*, and I now wish now I'd just done independent states and left some space to add in capital names. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun making them up: I've diverged a little from Reilly's vision, which is soaked in industrial-strength butterfly repellent**. The dominant language of both commerce and art in his world is Ibernacha, a Latinised Goedelic, and the name of the language coupled with the Irish capitol*** suggests something that sounds very much like OTL Spanish. Of course, TTL Spanish is going to develop differently as well. I've provided original-language versions of all the major players' names which removes some of the butterflies - Brazil/Breasil is forgiveable, given the Irish legend, but there wasn't much I could do about named minors such as the Cherokee Kingdom of the Appalachians (I'm fairly sure that a 9th century discovery of America should butterfly away both the Cherokee and the Iroquois), but I've tried to compensate elsewhere. I've also tried to imitate localisation of names by conquering or hegemonic powers (most noteably in East Asia and Africa) with varying degrees of success. Pretty much all the names are (god help me) based on real languages or cultures existing before the P.O.D.. Cûscada means 'Footfall' in Gaelic/Latin mashup, Christoscãra means 'Christ-friendly', Caudesan and Bilkenstal mean 'Timber Station' in mangled Franco-Latin and Germanic respectively, etc.

On the technical side, I've shamelessly pilfered Nugax's technique for creating believable borders (namely by layering them on top of a satellite photo), though I didn't have the guts to go all-out with anti-aliasing. The basemap I made from the equirectangular satellite image can be found here. I had originally planned to do a highly ornate Aztec-y border based on this and this but eventually decided it looked rubbish, and was too much like the Paint-drawing I'm trying to get away from. In the end I went with a very simple mock-iron textured border with very slightly varying border widths to try and give a 3D look, which I think looks decent.

Notes:

- Antartica is claimed to different distances from the South Pole under different treaties - some powers, like Spain and Ireland, have staked their claim in multilateral talks but continue to hold independent claims. Spain's unilateral claims include the Islas Uã Dierenacha and a slice of the southern state of the UERB. The Quetzal League simply claims all of Antarctica proper as its own territory. I got the effect by centring flattened circles on different layers on an arbitrary point below the bottom of the map and erasing the areas outside the desired arc.

- I added in the subdivisions to avoid a space-filling look in Africa, India, and the Americas, but I'm quite pleased with the way it came out, especially Breasil. I tried with the African subdivisions in particular to show that whilst different powers have created the subdivisions, they're describing roughly the same areas (cf. the Libyan desert, Algeria and the Congo).

- Every major power's key is layered against a piece of art relevant to its dominant culture in ATL. I originally just put a single Aztec image behind all of them, but it looked a bit rubbish.

- Legedun and Vindebone are alternate small nation-states that could have arisen if things had gone differently. Lugdunum was THE major north-west European city until it got trashed by war, and Vindobona (the origin of the name Vienna) was a major trade center until floods and administrative incompetence in the 4th century killed it off.

- Mega-Italy was an invention of mine, intended to grant some plausibility to the notion that Ireland could fight three wars in 70 years against resource-rich Germany and kick their rear end every time without a Gallic Entente. I've tried to justify it by implying that the Bohemian Marcomanni eventually gained control of the Italian peninsula.

* I was originally planning to name every subdivision, similar to the MoF 06 map annotations I did with Nicksplace27, but suspected it would probably kill me.

** Re-reading it I practically went into meltdown when I read that the Irish Empire, the product of a 1st century P.O.D., funds the defeat of Napoleon. I reproduce my notes here:
"NAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEON: Ireland allies with the Kingdom of Poland (extending 'almost to the Urals') and finances the defeat of NAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEONNAPOLEON."

*** 'Rodillanegra', which as far as I can tell means Black Knee, but I'm guessing is intended to be a play on Dublin meaning Black Pool.




d86ykcv-d3b07895-26cc-4760-ba50-89b71228f90a.png
First time in awhile I've seen a mega-Poland, visually its pretty rad just felt like I had to throw that in. I appreciate your appreciation of these artists, I only knew them from dA not their lives here so thank you for making this thread.
 
Just looking at the above set perhaps you could give us a bmunro touch a in modern times map if Basileus Giorgios is ok with it .
 
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