Adventurous Professions: Cartographer

A Mapmaker or more formally, a Cartographer, is a fairly innocuous profession that one would not immediately associate with swords and magic and derring-do. A Cartographer creates maps, choosing in which ways to depict an area to ease future travels, to make known political boundaries, and to plot sources of natural resources for continued exploitation. Most fantasy worlds are either mostly uncharted, only partially charted, or containing yet-uncharted places.

Even though a geographic area might be charted, there is room for improvement, and therefore room for a more detailed cartography. So even in a fantasy world where most of the known world is mapped, there are always more maps to be made – maps of dungeons, charting of natural resources, charting of the seas, more detailed maps of an area such as geologic maps, etc. A Cartographer always has something to aspire to, and always makes a good fantasy profession to take.

The Adventuring Cartographer

The adventuring Cartographer’s motivation is primarily money. In a world where most of the land is charted, it can be hard for anybody but the few extremely accomplished cartographers to make a living. Sure, everybody needs copies of maps, but you aspire to something greater, don’t you? You don’t want to spend your life over somebody else’s achievements, constantly copying them over, reminding yourself that you’ve never discovered anything? Once you hear of the local nutters with swords who want to go into the deep woods for no particularly good reason, it might stoke the fire in your heart. You will finally be able to see things nobody has seen, and best of all, you’ll be able to map them. Someday, someone will be copying your maps.

The least charted places in the world will naturally be the most dangerous. This often means the dungeons. A dungeon, once cleaned out by a party of adventurers, doesn’t merely sit there. It is a massive landform that you are unlikely to be able to destroy or completely seal off. It will be resettled and repurposed. Having a map of the former goblin keep will be a great boon to whoever has to travel to it once it becomes the kobold keep, or the orc keep, or the gargoyle keep. Or even if becomes the righteous Paladin Keep. Whenever the cartographer adventures and maps, he or she is performing a service with futurity.

The spoils in a dungeon aren’t the cartographer’s only livelihood. The maps themselves are a commodity. The cartographer will always keep the original, and being the only person able to produce maps of the Dragonfire Caverns is fairly lucrative, particularly if the Dragonfire Caverns are a natural vein of a valuable ore. You’re not gonna be mining that stuff yourself, in all likelihood. But the locals who’ll want to tap those resources once the Dragon is dead will be looking to your maps for guidance.

The Legendary Cartographer

Once a cartographer has explored enough of a fantasy world, it is usually revealed that there is much more to the land that meets the eye. A party of adventurers often find themselves, after a few dozen adventures, face to face with the idea of a layered universe beyond anything they imaged. There are portals to hells, to heavens, ripples of other dimensions, all of which lead away from the land. Laylines and arcane sigils trace continent-wide and perform some function via the great ethers or mana or essences or other energies of the world. Areas where the forest trails off into a fey world, or where dark mists reveal the realms of the dead.

There is an endless universe to chart – and the idea can either intrigue the cartographer or drive him or her insane. A Legendary Cartographer has an arduous task ahead. Where the universal arcane is concerned, it can be extremely difficult to chart. Methods must be devised to trace portals, to glean the lay of extra-dimensional places that may not conform to known laws, and to provide depictions and charts of these places which can be readily understood. If you need a “math for dummies” book to accompany your attempt to map the inside of the Evershifting Abyss, then why even bother with it?

With enough experimentation however, patterns might emerge that can be charted properly, or areas might be discovered that are inexorably bound to other dimensions. A level of predictability must be found, understood and conveyed. This allows the Legendary Cartographer to actually map routes to other worlds, and this achievement would seal the Cartographer’s place among the greatest minds of his or her world. Should this great work spread far enough and be taken seriously enough, it can completely change how the setting operates – for good or ill, depending on what dimensional routes you’ve charted out.

You might not want everybody being able to travel to Hell all the time, after all.

The Benefits of a Cartographer

A party with a cartographer doesn’t get lost as much. Even if you as a player aren’t actively mapping the dungeon as you go on along (and this is somewhat of a lost art to modern games that is really an acquired taste, and I wouldn’t recommend doing unless everybody agrees to it), you can ask the GM to lend a little flavor to your cartographer character by giving you bonuses to finding your party’s way, or by just not having “oh dear, you’re all lost!” sequences. Ask the GM to give you a smile and a nod to your profession – you KNOW that the dungeon is shifting rooms because you charted this room already and you were going forward. You know the way back out of the dungeon even after the miniature quake collapsed some of the rooms.