Much of the stuff on this blog so far has concerned my primary interest in role playing games, worldbuilding. Like a lot of you, I love a good map, and I love to imagine what different places on the map might look like.
I have a rather complex procedure of developing landforms and elevations for my maps, and I hope to share it at some time. For now, however, I’d like to share my map of an island called Oilinane that I developed.
After developing some primary themes for the campaign world, I decided it would be set around 550 bce. I chose this period because of its relative importance as a liminal period in what some have called the world system of southern Eurasia and Africa.
The idea, briefly, is that rather than thinking about the period as a collection of discrete states and cultures, it is better to think of an entire “world” of relationships founded on trade. It doesn’t define a world in the traditional sense, but rather as a system of complex interactions. Such a world, like our own, is cosmopolitan, with people from all parts of it likely to turn up in any other part of it.
The world system I’m speaking of involved the geographical area from roughly Spain to India, including the entire northern part of Africa, which was heavily populated. There were other regions on its periphery, too: the British Isles, northern Europe including Scandinavia, and sub-Saharan Africa.
The period saw the development of several cultural developments which would form the foundation for life up into the medieval period (and in many ways beyond it). Many of the world’s most popular religions received their classic forms around this time, including Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Not coincidentally, there was also the rise of many different kingdoms: Rome, Greece, Carthage, the kingdoms of northern India. There were also some older kingdoms which underwent many changes, including Egypt, the Mesopotamian kingdoms, Persia, and the smaller kingdoms of the Levant.
This is the jumping-off point for my campaign world. I’ve developed much of it conceptually, but today I’d like to share a map of the small island of Oilinane, developed with reference to the Connacht region of Ireland around 550 bce. The map is available for free, like everything else, over on my Patreon.
Thanks for reading my blog. If you’d like free copies of the web and print versions of Oilinane, head over to my Patreon site: https://www.patreon.com/nimirienbooks.
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