A Delightfully Blank Canvas

William Church's map of Prax from the second edition of Chaosium's RuneQuest remains one of my favorite RPG maps ever. The other day, for reasons that will become clear later, I found myself perusing a different Chaosium RPG, Stormbringer. The game's original 1981 boxed set includes, among its many goodies, a fold-out wall map of the Young Kingdoms that's also the handiwork of Mr Church. 

Please enlarge!Though the map of the Young Kingdoms lacks the wonderful little details of the Prax map, I nevertheless find it quite compelling. Michael Moorcock and his evocative names – the Sighing Desert, the Weeping Waste, the Silent Lands, among many others – deserve a lot of the credit for that, of course, but Church also did a great job of bringing this classic fantasy setting to life. In fact, I might even argue that, in this case, the sparseness of the map works in its favor, particularly as a map for use with a roleplaying game. The map practically invites players and referees to fill in the blank spaces and make it their own, as any good RPG map should.