Cup and Ring Maps
Stones on every continent (except Antarctica) have these ‘cup and ring’ markings. The ‘cups’ are little depressions, and circles radiate around them. Lines go between them. Nobody knows what they are, or why people all over the planet carved them.
They exist everywhere, but especially in Scotland. Around Argyle, you can’t go for a walk without tripping up over three cup and ring carvings.
Personally, I think they look a little like maps. So I made a map which looks like one.
The map is full of ‘wandering monsters’. You can’t see them, but they are there.
That big circle in the centre is a town. It needs to be kept safe from all the wandering monsters.
The ‘cups’ are brochs (big towers with thick walls), where people play the bagpipes, to draw in the wandering monsters. Archers then pick them off, or at least scare them away from the area. You can see the sound radiating outwards for miles around (as bagpipes have always done, in every mountainous region, from the Roman Empire, to Afghanistan).
The sound of pipes forms a kind of safety perimeter, so people can set up farms with high walls inside there, and they know most of the monsters in the area will head towards the blaring pipes, because the pipes are louder than their cows. And between all the radiating towers, the town sits, surrounded by quiet farmlands (a few smaller circles are shown by the town, representing settlements). The inner farmlands themselves are not depicted, because I didn’t have the time.
So the map shows sounds, and it shows where sounds overlap - that is where you can hear two pipers playing from different directions. This is a kind of map one could almost use in the dark, because you can feel the stone telling you what you might hear, and you can hear the pipes and which direction they come from.
The markings are on the cover of A Temple of Beasts (the last booklet in the attachment). I made it in LaTeX, using tikz
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A world in tiny zines
Status | Released |
Category | Physical game |
Author | Andonome |
Genre | Role Playing |
Tags | Fantasy, OSR, Print & Play, Tabletop role-playing game, zine |
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