I've had a little difficulty in handling this as a referee in my games, but my players haven't ventured too far outside Khromarium. I'm used to numbered hex maps to make the sandbox a little easier to navigate on the fly, and kind of wish there was one of the map for this game.

I've got a plan to redraw the map in hexographer and let the program number it for me. There's a tracing function in the program that'll allow me to place the actual map underneath and trace over the actual lines. The trick is getting the hex cells to match up.

You should check out the D30 sandbox companion, something that allows you to organize overland locations. http://www.rpgnow.com/product/124392/d30-Sandbox-Companion

It's nice for a ref to have something fast to get from location to location. I don't like to share the actual map from the game with my players, just rough hand drawn maps that may or may not be accurate.

 

Blackadder23 wrote:

"East and west are relative to one’s position when facing north; in general, if north is faced, east is to the right and west is to the left. The sun lingers on the horizon and is ever westering; to follow the path of the sun is to travel west."

This part seems to be physically impossible.  If two men are standing on opposite sides of Mount Vhuurmithadon - in effect facing each other - and each one considers himself to be facing north, then the sun (whichever side of the sky it's on) should be westward for one and eastward for the other.  However, this is not a criticism; I consider the apparent impossibility of this scenario to be one of the things that's fundamentally "wrong" with Hyperborea, akin to the non-Euclidian geometry of R'lyeh.  Based on the description in the gazetteer, when you walk around to the other side of Mount Vhuurmithadon, the sun apparently switches places in the sky.  Tell me that's not crazy!

EDIT: Never mind.  On reflection I realized direction must work something like this vis a vis the real North Pole, so it can't be a physical impossibility -  even though it makes no sense.  Oh well, it's still pretty cool even if it doesn't reflect the hand of Xathoqqua.

Whew. Because for a minute you had really blown my mind. "But it *does* work--doesn't it?--does it?--man, I'm constantly confused!"

The sun "turns" counterclockwise from the perspective of someone standing on the pinnacle of Mount Vhuurmithadon. right? So from anywhere else, facing "north" means that the sun is always moving toward your left, "westering." Yes?

It might be safer for me and my limited grasp of spatial relations to focus on how people in Hyerpborea would talk about directions. The Hyperborean Sea would be "the southern ocean" from anyone's POV, and the Rapids at the End of the World and the Black Gulf would be in the utter south, right, far south of the River Okeanos? It's a bit confusing that the North Wind is *south* of all these things, but you can take that up with Boreas if you dare. I guess it is still to the north from the perspective of Old Earth.

I wonder if Hyperboreans (in general) would have words for the "other south," that is, a south that lies across the Great Spiral Array from where they are (or where they grew up). Or maybe the weltanschauung is so attuned to sea travel that they only refer to how far east or west somthing is by circumnavigation?

At any rate, that old druid meant "south" when he said "east-southeast"!
 

Blackadder23 wrote:

Handy Haversack wrote:

It's a bit confusing that the North Wind is *south* of all these things, but you can take that up with Boreas if you dare. I guess it is still to the north from the perspective of Old Earth.

It's because you're in Hyperborea.  You're even north of north.
 

Hea-vy. I can see through time!

Crisippo wrote:

I haven't even tried to explain this to my players, the ship's navigator training was done off camera, and i guess that when some NPC tries to explain this to the barbarian PC he will consider him a lunatic (Which means he will either kill him or do anything he says).
 

Noble creatures . . . so like us.

I guess in a dungeon or indoor setting, one could just use the cardinal directions when describing rooms--and I would probably tell my players that it's arbitrary and that they really don't know which was in north once they're underground unless they have some special means (ha! no dwarves now, jerks!). My players don't really use a map that much either, and even if they did they wouldn't use it to say "we go south" but "we go to these ruins with all the Xs and skulls and swords drawn next to them."

But I do want to nail down some sort of language for what they hear when they interact with NPCs. I would think perhaps "x points east of south" might be a way land-locked Hyperboreans describe something. Since north and south are going to define things to a great extend (toward Mt. V or toward the Black Gulf--jeez, except for the potential for treasure, it's about as inviting as my favorite highway sign in NYC; the options it gives you are New Haven, Albany, Trenton; ewww), I think the laypeople might adopt something like this.
 

"Go on worrying about East and West instead of living or dying. I'll be sure to bury the maps with you."--- Garn Grímnesh

I realize the entire concept can be a bit confusing, or even counter-intuitive, but I think you all get what I was trying to accomplish with this aspect of the setting. I wanted Hyperborea to still behave like an "arctic continent" displaced from Old Earth; hence, Mt. Vhuurmithadon is the very apex, center, and northernmost point of Hyperborea. I also realize that if the PC party is exploring the Black Waste, you run into the cardinal directions of east and west being reversed when facing north, because west is right and east is left when facing the direction of Mt. Vhuurmithadon. For this reason, I feel it's prudent to show only "north" on an outdoor adventure map, because east and west are arbitrary divisions based on the Prime Meridian of the setting. The Prime Meridian of Hyperborea is actually less than ideal, I think in hindsight. I set up the gazetteer to be the work of sages from Khromarium, so why would the prime meridian be anywhere else but Khromarium? Perhaps the whole continent should be shifted to make this so; an easier solution, however, would be to have a small village on the coast right where the Prime Meridian passes, not so far from Port Greely. Perhaps it could be there, where some sage, sorcerer, or madman devised the cardinal directions as displayed on the map.  

Great discussion, gents!

Thinking about it too hard makes my head hurt.

When you run a game, do you default to N, S, E, W in dungeon settings, or do you just use "left" and "right"?

Good question, Handy. Since I've used Khromarium as the home base for almost all the characters in my campaign, they are accustomed to thinking of east to their right, and west to their left, and that's how we've approached dungeons.

IMHO, the prime meridian is useful only if you want to categorize the Hyperborean space without thinking much about crossing the North.
But to navigate, without any tool, you'd need a route listing landmarks and the relative direction from one to the next.
To get back to giving direction, as it is, I think it's quite simple to do it right from your relative stand point or a local map (the arc of the latitude being irrelevant and appearing as a straight line), but a general map of Hyperborea can only confuse you if you're not on the Khromarium Meridian. 
But maybe every major town has a Hyperborean map centered on its own meridian ?