If anyone has the inclination, somebody should definitely go through the old suggestions and find some good ones and then post them here. I mean it's all well and good to say "use some old suggestions that never got picked", but which ones?
Personally I think we need fewer maps of neat little multi-colored interlocking states, which are fine but A) boring after a while and B) less relevant in the modern age, with terrorist networks and multinational corporations and the internet and so forth. No, what we need are what I'm calling, for lack of a better term, "theme maps". Hapsburg just put up a very interesting map of crime syndicates on the Map Thread, for example. So in that spirit here are a few suggestions:
The Red Death-Create a map depicting the spread of a disease, or two maps showing the world before and after a disease, which never occurred IOTL.
(Future Not Available in Latin America, Africa, India or Asia)- (or "Future Not Available" for short. I think I'm stealing this from a Simpsons joke, but I'm not sure. ANYWAY...) Create a map depicting a time, in our future or the future of an ATL, when part of the world is a post-scarcity technological paradise, where the state is obsolete because all social problems have been solved by technology, while other parts of the world are still impoverished, and probably very angry at the goddamn Jetsons over there living it up in (insert region) with their robot butlers while us honest folk in (different region) starve.
Crime and/or Punishment- Create a map depicting the areas controlled by various criminal groups, the measures taken by governments to fight this crime (prisons, court districts, troop deployments), or both.
The Gun is Our Government- (taken from a quote by a captured Somali pirate in Robert Kaplan's Monsoon, which I got for xmas) It's always bothered me that "anarchic" areas on maps here are just blank (and I'm guilty of this too), when there's so much going on inside them. So fill in the blanks, and create a map of a stateless region, the warlords or gangs or town militias or what have you that maintain or fail to maintain a bit of order, economic activity and how it functions without state protection, etc.
Sons of Chaos- Create a map showing an ATL terrorist network, at any time in (alternate) history. Training camps, major attacks, sources of arms and money, anything related to this terrorist group is okay.
Thoughts?
