Telephone Map Game: 13th Edition
- Thread starter CourageousLife
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- tmg
The 13th Edition is officially over! I'll put together the timeline in this thread for viewing. Everyone is free to post their own contributions on all platforms, I just ask that a link is attached to direct people back to this page to see more.
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First Millennium
@Falkanner 
@Iontu
@Guildencrantz
@ItsaMapping
@endermage989
@feedle
@TheKutKu
@mikroraptor
@Codae
@zalezsky
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Second Millennium
@Epsilon Tauri 
@Dull_Establishment
@Prince di Corsica
@JuniperHyacinthe
@Karl der Große
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Karl der Große
Banned
Pretty cool! What's a way we can do better though. For example things pop up in later maps that are impossible given the POD. Islam existing, Constantinople existing, the Papacy existing, etc. After a few maps there are clearly influences from OTL situations. To be clear I am not faulting anyone, my map fell prey to the same inconsistencies. It's also difficult to tell what a map three maps back in line from your own would have indicated about the area you decided to focus on. Another pitfall we can easily avoided is stating in map text what the state of affairs will be in the future. That removes freedom from your map's successor. The only limit on the map's successor should be the reality of the previous map. But it makes for maps that seem in the end unrelated. Perhaps the coordinator of the game can maintain a chronological list of basic points containing bare minimum information? For example for this game it could start:
Rome lost to Sertorius and servile revolt and Pontus
Rome made a little comeback
Seleucid king went Buddhist
Goths are in Balkans
Etc.
Rome lost to Sertorius and servile revolt and Pontus
Rome made a little comeback
Seleucid king went Buddhist
Goths are in Balkans
Etc.
I mean that defeats the purpose of the broken telephone concept. The fun is seeing the different directions changing context take us.
Karl der Große
Banned
Reading the OP again, I see you're right. Each map only needs to seem like it could be in the same universe as the ones preceding and following.
That being said it could be an interesting twist if the contest had a "theme". Like I remember an edition I start and was asked to do a map relating to climate change, but that theme faltered very early on. Perhaps having that as a common theme could be fun.
Or even something like Rome never falls, just a general idea to make it more compact
Going beyond the Telephone Map Game concept, I think it would be cool to do a map game/collaborative timeline thingy where each player has a single, public turn that covers a long (but predetermined) span of time. Each turn could go into detail describing some important event, or some important aspect of the setting without necessarily covering every part of the world in detail. Later turns could then fill in the gaps. In the end, we'd have a fleshed-out, internally consistent modern-day world with millennia of alternate history.
Karl der Große
Banned
Yeah and we could work together. Make suggestions for things. But ultimately it would all be up to the mapmaker for that century.
I'm willing to get the ball rolling on something like this, but only if I can confirm that it won't clash with the next round of the Telephone Map Game. I don't want the two games detracting players from each other.
I'm sorry I may have misunderstood something but isn't what's being proposed just a regular Map Game as done in Shared Worlds?
On a fundamental level, yes, but in the Map Games in Shared Worlds, players typically edit a WorldA map and move forward in small intervals (often one year per turn). What I'm proposing is a game where each player contributes a single, original map (which could be a vector map, a detailed raster map, or even a WorldA map with Munro-style annotations) separated by much longer intervals, which could range from anywhere between 200 years in antiquity to 25 years in the 20th century. There would be less emphasis on detail and realistic pacing, and more emphasis on worldbuilding and artistic expression.
Karl der Große
Banned
Yeah but we would sidestep the typical map game pitfalls of dying after three turns, and having huge events magically forgotten about for turns in a row because nobody is paying attention.