This is a little “sense of wonder” game I used to exhibit years ago when trying to impress on how scope can be so deep to become unfathomable.

It’s a simple invite to imagination, all played on maps.

We start from here:

I love the style and earthy colors. But besides that, it’s a little, abstracted section of a map. It opens to the sea, there are some unmarked islands, a river splitting in some ways across the mainland and a good number of towns along its path. Some small some bigger, according to those three different symbols, the empty red circle, the full circle and the square.

You see GOLOTHA, prominent near the bay.

All of that can be enough to be a WORLD. It does look incomplete, but it’s also quite a large playground. Imagine visiting all those towns, it’s a role-playing game, the supposedly large number of inhabitants and their stories. Imagine treading through unmarked territory, maybe find some lone tower, a dungeon. Such a nice and intriguing countryside.

It’s enough of a world that a party of players could spend a couple of years in it, with a good enough master, just getting to know it.

But it’s just a map, and it’s more than it seems…

Here’s some sleight of hands. You think we’re going large, but look better, we’re going closer, toward the smaller…

See on the upper right? There’s our GOLOTHA right there. Right under it there’s CHAKTA, as you expect from the first map. But if you go looking for OMNIS, to the right, you won’t find it. Are the two maps diverging? Nope, OMNIS is simply just slightly out of this territory, out of that rightmost margin.

You can see the main lump of land, with that large swamp called PERIS MOOR, and downward another big town SELVOS, inside DEVERSH BAY. See all those smaller towns around it? They are simply ignored in the first map above. They are so small that they’ve been abstracted away.

Now, pay more attention and you’ll understand that the area of this second large map corresponds almost precisely to the portion of the area of the first map, that drawn “square” block. See how the first map is divided not just by hexes, but also larger squares? Two big ones almost complete but with the bottom portion cut, and more partial ones above and to the sides? The bottom map represents almost precisely one square.

Yet this second bigger map, feels like a continent! Countless towns that would be impossible to visit while playing. This is already so big that defies the possibility of full knowledge. The possibility of being WRITTEN, so that it could then be READ. A world that goes beyond one person. A world that cannot be contained.

But we’re playing a game inside the game.

Sorry for the quality, but if you squint here you can see that this big map is divided by the same “square” outlines used above. I’ve marked an empty square to better assess its size, and then pointed to the arrow that TINY portion of land we’ve examined up to this point.

Well, as you can see, what looked already like incredibly vast land… is part of a MUCH bigger whole.

Let’s approximate and remove those spaces that are just water, and we can say the full map is comprised of 70+ squares.

SEVENTY OF THEM. Just as large and supposedly, potentially as densely detailed as the big map above, showing just one.

How would you even realistically or unrealistically visit this, with a party of players? How can you even WRITE about it, when it’s already daunting to even THINK about it.

How many LIFETIMES could be spent within a single fictional world?

But we’re playing game inside a game here…

Hello world!

See that whole previous map with its own seventy counted land “squares”, it’s now been abstracted down to ONE square. Look at the map here and you can find the continent-now-island right there on the upper left.

I’ve marked with a red square the minuscule-yet-daunting portion of land we started with. Can you feel the VERTIGO now?

Will you be a tourist in your next life? Or rather, an eternal deity of infinite curiosity?

When is that the real world becomes a little toy within a larger fiction?

But you can already see here, that’s not a complete map.

So I introduce you to… LYTHIA.

Here too, if you squint, I marked the original square we started with.

Good luck, fellow fictional traveler, you’ll need it.

How large can this world possibly be. What kind of delusions its inventor had to suffer.

See then, the world whole:

KETHIRA.

But it is just a game, we’re playing.