AT LAST, YOU CAN SEE WHERE THE BLOODY PLACES ARE

Gor is enormous.

This becomes increasingly inconvenient when everybody in the novels keeps travelling around it.

There is Ar.

Port Kar.

Ko-ro-ba.

Tharna.

Turia.

Torvaldsland.

The Tahari.

Schendi.

The Northern Forests.

The Barrens.

The plains of the Wagon Peoples.

Various seas, rivers, mountain ranges, islands, cities, tribal territories and enormous expanses of wilderness in which something with far too many teeth is probably waiting for you.

John Norman describes the geography of Gor across dozens of novels, but the books were never originally supplied with a single definitive, author-approved world map.

That leaves the reader with two options.

Develop an extraordinary memory for fictional geography.

Or buy a map.

Map of Gor presents the known regions of Norman’s Counter-Earth in a large, full-colour digital map created to accompany Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying and the World of Gor: Gorean Encyclopaedia.

More importantly, it looks like something that might actually exist on Gor.

THE MAP FLOOR OF SAMOS

This is not presented as a modern satellite survey with tidy contour lines and a helpful little box explaining average annual rainfall.

The design is based upon one conception of the great tiled map maintained by Samos of Port Kar.

Samos is a merchant, slaver, administrator, secret agent of the Priest-Kings and one of the best-informed men on Gor.

His chambers therefore make a perfectly reasonable place to find an elaborate geographical representation of the known world.

The map has been designed accordingly.

Land, sea, rivers, mountain chains, settlements and territorial divisions are rendered across a rectilinear tiled surface, giving the piece the appearance of a huge mosaic laid out for study, strategy and intrigue rather than something produced by Rand McNally.

It is a small piece of in-world artefact design rather than merely a diagram.

Print it large enough and you have something that might plausibly occupy the floor of Samos’s chambers.

Admittedly, Samos probably does not have SAMPLE written diagonally across his.

The purchased version is somewhat less obstructed.

GOR DOES NOT COME WITH GPS

There is an important caveat.

No universally accepted, definitive map of Gor exists.

Norman established his geography through prose, often across books written many years apart. Distances, directions, journeys, coastlines and relationships between places have consequently been reconstructed by readers.

Over the years Gorean fans produced numerous maps from that information.

They tend to agree on the broad shape of the known world.

The details can vary.

When this map was created for the official Tales of Gor roleplaying line, those longstanding interpretations were compared and consolidated into a single usable representation.

That does not make it the infallible Eye of God hovering above Counter-Earth.

It makes it Samos’s map.

Which is much more useful.

Samos knows a tremendous amount.

He does not know everything.

Nor has every part of Gor been explored in the novels.

A map used inside the setting ought to contain the same limitations as the people who made it.

FROM TORVALDSLAND TO SCHENDI

The value becomes obvious as soon as you start following the novels.

Northern Gor contains the lands of Torvaldsland, the great forests and regions inhabited by Panther Girls.

Move south and the familiar cities and territories of civilised Gor begin to cluster more densely.

Further south lie Turia and the immense plains associated with the Wagon Peoples.

Beyond and around those lie the Tahari, the equatorial regions, Schendi, great jungles, islands, mountains and enormous areas which remain comparatively little explored.

The map gives all of those names a relationship to one another.

Suddenly “north of”, “beyond”, “towards the coast” and “several weeks by caravan” stop being disembodied prose.

There is a world beneath them.

For readers working through the Gorean Cycle, that alone makes the map useful.

A journey can be followed.

Campaigns make geographical sense.

Cities cease floating independently inside the imagination.

And when somebody is dragged three hundred pasangs away from home in chains, at least everyone can appreciate the scale of the inconvenience.

FOR GAMES MASTER AND PLAYER

Maps do particularly useful work in roleplaying games because players insist on asking questions.

“How far is it?”

“What is north of us?”

“Can we take a ship?”

“What is on the other side of those mountains?”

“Where does that river go?”

“Can we avoid Ar?”

“Why are you laughing?”

A world map lets the Games Master answer many of those questions without improvising geography which will become disastrously important six sessions later.

It also turns travel into something tangible.

A caravan journey across Gor becomes a route.

A voyage from Port Kar can be traced along the coast.

An expedition towards unexplored territory has a visible boundary between the comparatively known and the wonderfully uncertain.

A military campaign suddenly has flanks, supply lines and neighbouring states.

Characters belonging to different cities can point at where they came from.

That creates immediate context at the table.

A man from Torvaldsland and a merchant from the Tahari have not merely acquired different cultural templates.

They come from opposite ends of a world.

FOR READERS

You do not need Tales of Gor to make use of the map.

Gor is one of those settings where a map is arguably more useful to a reader than to a gamer.

The Gorean Cycle has expanded across decades and dozens of books, with journeys taking characters across substantial portions of the known planet.

The geography becomes part of the story.

Port Kar is a maritime power because of where it sits.

Turia exists in relationship with the southern plains and the Wagon Peoples.

The Tahari is not simply “the desert bit”.

The Northern Forests occupy a particular position in relation to civilisation.

The great waterways, coastlines and mountain ranges shape trade, warfare, raiding and travel.

Once those relationships are visible, parts of the setting which previously felt like isolated names begin fitting together.

Keep the map open while reading.

For a ninety-nine-pence accessory, it can save an impressive quantity of page-flipping and internet archaeology.

GOR AS A WORLD, RATHER THAN A COLLECTION OF SLAVE COLLARS

The popular image of Gor has never been especially cartographic.

Mention the setting and people generally think of slavery, scanty silk, collars, swordplay and several million pages of philosophical argument about whether somebody is kneeling correctly.

The map is a useful reminder of how much actual worldbuilding accumulated behind all that.

There are different climates.

Different cultures.

Different economies.

City-states with rivalries and spheres of influence.

Tribal territories.

Major trade routes.

Navigable rivers.

Deserts.

Grasslands.

Forests.

Jungles.

Mountains.

Archipelagos.

The setting ranges from northern cultures evocative of the Norse world through great urban states, desert peoples, plains nomads and equatorial jungle societies.

Above all that sits the science-fiction premise: Counter-Earth, hidden from Earth on the opposite side of the Sun, its technological development deliberately restricted by the Priest-Kings.

It is a surprisingly large place to spend all one’s time in a paga tavern.

AN ARTEFACT, NOT JUST A UTILITY

A straightforward modern map would arguably have been easier to make.

It would also have been rather dull.

The tile-grid presentation makes this version distinctive from the mass of conventional fantasy maps.

It looks architectural.

Something meant to be walked around, pointed at and discussed by men planning voyages, wars and conspiracies.

That also ties directly into the source material.

When the map was discussed during the original 2017 Q&A for the Gorean RPG, the intent was explicitly described as recreating one possible version of the tiled map floor belonging to Samos in Port Kar.

The physical look therefore tells you something about the world at the same time as the labels tell you where places are.

That is precisely the sort of thing an RPG prop ought to do.

WHY IT WASN’T JUST PUT IN THE BOOK

Colour.

And size.

The two principal books of the Gorean RPG line already had quite enough to fit into them.

Reducing a world map to a little black-and-white page embedded in a large reference book would technically have included the map while making the thing considerably less useful.

The map was therefore released separately so that it could remain large and in full colour.

This digital edition allows you to view it at useful scale on a monitor or tablet, or print it according to whatever size your equipment and ambitions allow.

DriveThruRPG currently lists the download at approximately 3.19 MB.

No rulebook is required to understand it.

It is a map.

Technology has not yet managed to complicate those completely.

THREE RATINGS, NO SALES QUOTES

This is one of the comparatively rare products where there simply is not a useful pile of prose reviews to quote.

DriveThruRPG currently shows three customer ratings with an average of 4.3 out of 5.

There are no written customer reviews attached to those ratings.

So there will be no suspiciously convenient quotation here about how a customer found the cartography “life-changing” or wept openly upon finally locating the Vosk.

People rated it.

Apparently they liked it.

That is all the evidence permits.

A MORE CONVENTIONAL ALTERNATIVE

This is the original tiled Map of Gor.

A later alternative, Cartographer’s Gor Map, was subsequently produced for people who wanted something more conventionally geographical and less abstract in presentation.

Buy Cartographer’s Gor Map from DriveThruRPG

The two serve slightly different purposes.

The Cartographer’s version looks more like a map produced by a cartographer.

This one looks more like a map a Gorean potentate might have covering his floor.

Which you prefer rather depends on whether you are navigating a campaign or decorating Samos’s chambers.

COMPANION BOOKS

The map was created specifically to sit alongside the two principal books of the official Gorean roleplaying line.

Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying provides the complete tabletop roleplaying system: characters, rules, equipment, combat, creatures and guidance for adventuring on Counter-Earth.

World of Gor: Gorean Encyclopaedia is the large setting reference, gathering the people, places, cultures, customs, castes, animals, plants and terminology of the novels into an A–Z reference.

The three products fit together neatly.

The roleplaying book tells you what characters can do.

The encyclopaedia tells you what everything is.

The map tells you where the hell it is.

FORMAT

Map of Gor is a full-colour digital map download produced for the officially licensed Tales of Gor roleplaying line.

It depicts the known geography of John Norman’s Counter-Earth and is styled after the tiled map floor of Samos of Port Kar.

The current DriveThruRPG file is approximately 3.19 MB.

This is the original tiled version of the map, rather than the later Cartographer’s Gor Map.

KNOW WHERE YOU ARE

Gor has been expanding since Tarnsman of Gor first appeared in 1966.

Cities were added.

Cultures appeared.

Characters travelled.

Empires fought.

Ships crossed seas.

Caravans crossed deserts.

Tarns crossed almost everything else.

Eventually the place became large enough that remembering where everyone was required either extraordinary dedication or stationery.

Map of Gor provides the stationery.

Keep it beside World of Gor.

Put it on a second screen while reading the novels.

Use it to plan journeys and campaigns.

Print it for the gaming table.

Or simply spend ten minutes looking over Counter-Earth and discovering that a place primarily famous for slave girls and men shouting about honour contains rather more geography than you remembered.

Samos has a map.

Now you can have one too.