Well, I like the idea as a creative venture, but I don't know if it is a benefit in the long run.
Definite information - call it Canon, Coherence, Continuity or whatever - is always also a restriction of creativity and fantasy.
On the other hand, a certain amount of information - some mystirious sounding place names, a map that leaves enough room for imagination - can indeed trigger the creativity.
Perhaps - just an idea, not sure if it is really better - we can make a
compendium instead of a map. The place names QorDaq collected, plus names of characters, races, historical events etc. with a short description and citation of the source. Just to get the "canonical" material from the original puplications together in one place for reference. This could be considered "lore" inside the game world. Characters may konw these things. They are "common knowledge", but as with real "common knowledge" (even more so in a medieval world), much of it is hearsay, and little is known for sure. The distinction between knowlege and legend are blurred at best.
Having sayd this, I stlill have a taste for maps and if we really decide to give the map project a go, I would like to be part of it.
Of course, we would have to decide what is canon. As for me, everything that is published under the Milton Bradly Heroquest license is canon. This would make the Marvel Winter special canon, the sticker album semi canon and the White Dwarf quests apocryphe. AHQ is not HQ canon, it is clearly and deliberately fully set in the Warhammer world, there is no Mentor nor Morkar*, and it is not MB licensed.
As canonisation goes, some of the original sources may contradict each other, and the "canonisators" have to decide what should go into the canon. In HQ, this is mostly the case with the Sticker album, which pitily is also the source of the most detailed map. Luckily, the "heretic" issues in the sticker album are mostly in the comic and doesn't affect the map that much.
I would take the following way:
- Use the map from RotW as a base
- Add the places and points of interest from the Sticker album map. If these contradict the RotW map or any other more canonical lore, leave them aside.
- Add the places from QorDaq's collection, plus any other we may find.
- When there are places that are mentioned but not localized in HQ sources, for which the location can be found in Warhammer sources, and this doesn't contradict any information in HQ sources, then, and only then, the Warhammer information is used.
- From these sources, make a "plain" map with just coastlines, places and names - no graphics, formatting etc.
- Taking this as a base, make various "graphic" maps.
Beautiful ones. Practical ones.
In-game ones that look like hand drawn on parchment.
Incomplete ones etc pp.
I would recommend to agree on a free map-making software to use, so we can share work and use and edit the maps other members provide. I have used
https://sourceforge.net/projects/autorealm/ with satisfying results, but there may be better choices out there (automatically fractaled coastlines may be useful when creating a new world from the scratch, but not so much when trying to closely redraw a costline on an existing map. Perhaps we should even use a simple vector drawing software (incscape?) and leave the mapping refinements for the last step.
*
One could implecitely include the Morkar of Warhammer lore in the distant past, but he is not mentioned and definitely doesn't play the role as in HQ.PS.:
QorDaq, could you please replace the acronyms with full names in the citations? May be even truncated, but in a form that leaves them recognizeable at a glance. Just copy the list in a text processor and do a quick search and replace.
