Comrades!
I appreciate that a lot of people like to see nice clear lines
showing boundaries, but beyond the sensible points already made
about boundaries, just a couple of other observations
- Many maps do have boundaries: the Lunar Map, for example, or the
UW Tarsh and Imther maps. If you mean why doesn't the II Dragon Pass
map have them, doesn't that perhaps say as much about issues of
spacial definition and territorialism amongst the Orlanthi as about
some notional aversion by II to putting lines on maps?
- remember that borders tend to be about control of resources, so
even if your nation/clan/whatever has a very clear sense that this
fertile field or that ford at which you can charge tolls is yours,
you care much less about the wasteland over there or the deepest
woods next to them. So there will not be a clear boundary but some
sharp ones, some fuzzy ones and some no one cares about.
- To those who suggest marked boundaries could be approximate or
subjective, let me say that once a line is drawn on a map it has a
powerful, totemic force. The runes have been cast, the magic of
precision invoked. Many people will take them to be sharp, firm,
canonical boundaries. Then when another map has a different
boundary, the cry goes up about confusion, error and Gregging. Where
lines can be drawn with some precision, which generally means the
right combination of local societies which regard territorial
control as important and a central state willing to mark, record and
preserve them, then let them be drawn. But somewhere like DP? If
anything, I'd say that the audacious Imperial census takers and
surveyors who try to create some neat understanding of the land, its
people and their issues of ownership and allegiance will soon either
be dry-gulched by locals who (probably rightly) suspect they are
just instruments of tax collection or give up in despair when
another carl answers the question 'who owns this land' with an
interminable tale about how Aunt Ernaldora married into the Grey
Flints bloodline, but Cousin Orlev said that it had always been
Three Cows land before Old Brandigar fought off the...and so on.
All the best
Mark