What Lies Outside Our Borders in the Redlands

[Seylos]

We all know and love the Eurth map, but there has been a question that has always been somewhere in the back of all of our heads.

On Eurth we are all familiar with the following type of borders in the green area:

The lands of civilization! Countries that we all know and love and roleplay with. It might be Argis in this example, but it's civilization enough.

But

What about this area in red?

Well, throughout the years, the empty part of the map was always considered something very simple. We know there are people there, they are probably organized, but they don't do anything of note. The red land has always been the place where new nations emerge… but they've always been there lurking silently and invisibly.

Something that came up in a recent voice call was the participants sort of musing about what these lands are, or who are in them, and what it means for the world of Eurth. Especially as the conversation had started out as thinking about all that empty space in Alharu. What is the mystery of these “redlands”.

(Disclaimer: I'm not using this thread to change what we currently consider them. Simply explore concepts)

What I'd like to hear from the community is simply, in your headcanon what is going on in these redlands? Or perhaps let us know what you would like the redlands to be?

My personal headcanon has always been the official stance. People exist there, but they do nothing of interest to any of us active nations. But I have been thinking more on it, and I love the idea of these redlands adding a sense of mystery to our wurld and possibly add a deep layer of lore to Eurth that expands heavily on why our nations are the way they are. For instance, that most of Eurth is in general chaos and that our player nations are the lucky few that are the bulwark against societal collapse. We don't interact with these redland states because they are too volatile or unstable to have normal diplomacy with and pose extreme/impossible difficulty in bringing to heel with normal military force.

[Ymutz Mizlan]

My headcannon is that the red lands are mostly normal nations that have, for a variety of reasons, little political influence on a glubal or regional scale (with regards to Alharu, the red land is primarily rogue/failed states, especially more inland).

[Pentium]

This question was the main inspiration behind “A Hostile Eurth” that I posted recently, my own personal head cannon would be some kind of unknown disaster in the past that caused a large fracturing of generalized civilization and forced many people to take up nomadic tendencies, or adopt warlord like policies to create roaming empires and several outwardly hostile factions.  The redland states and tribes are unwilling to come back into generalized society after such a long tradition of nomadic or warlord like tendencies, but also don't have as much power to be a major threat to the nations that exist directly.  

This idea does make certain things more difficult, like land trade and travel.  You'd need convoy style escorts to ship most things through any border that isn't shared with another nation.  But it would give us some cool potential for discovering lost civilizations, or destroyed ruins that haven't been able to be explored in their entirety due to the difficulty of expanding outward.

It would also make expansions a bit easier for people, there would still be the challenge of a military conflict potentially breaking out due to the expansion, but it wouldn't be causing a diplomatic stirrup or incident because of the chosen method of expanding.  

The main part would be the mystery, something like the Bronze Age collapse.  We have very little understanding of what happened, but we are left to discover the bits and pieces that remain after the fact.

[Orioni]

What lies outside our borders?

• Nations we engage with.
• Nations we don't engage with.

How do we explain their sudden appearance?

Personally, I've always attributed this to a new character coming to power. For example, a new head of government is elected, and we seem them begin to engage with the wider world. That doesn't imply there was no previous contact, just we don't have a written record of what came before. Something like that.

What about their disappearance?

• Bad luck, or a sudden event, or no interest in publishing news stories. Sort-of what's going on in @Sunset Sea Islands: military leader plots a coup and closes off the country. ICly we know the islands are still there, just not what's going on.
• What about players who leave? That's more difficult, because it involves the decision of canonising a player's lore or scrubbing everything. And scrubbing is a lot more work.

So what's in Central Argis?

Going through our maps archive, I made an overlay of the 20+ versions. Here is a cropped version of all the countries that have existed in the area. Only a tiny area along that river valley was never occupied before.

[Tagmatium Rules]

21 minutes ago, Orioni said:

What lies outside our borders?

• Nations we engage with.
• Nations we don't engage with.

How do we explain their sudden appearance?

Personally, I've always attributed this to a new character coming to power. For example, a new head of government is elected, and we seem them begin to engage with the wider wurld. That doesn't imply there was no previous contact, just we don't have a written record of what came before. Something like that.

What about their disappearance?

• Bad luck, or a sudden event, or no interest in publishing news stories. Sort-of what's going on in @Sunset Sea Islands: military leader plots a coup and closes off the country. ICly we know the islands are still there, just not what's going on.
• What about players who leave? That's more difficult, because it involves the decision of canonising a player's lore or scrubbing everything. And scrubbing is a lot more work.

So what's in Central Argis?

Going through our maps archive, I made an overlay of the 20+ versions. Here is a cropped version of all the countries that have existed in the area. Only a tiny area along that river valley was never occupied before.

There's a lot of that I don't remember

I definitely don't remember Delamaria having those islands in the Qingming Sea.

My take on the blank areas on the map has always been that they're unrecognised nations.