Still better than Apple Maps – Chapter 7, Prologue 45

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…cough. Cats have an awesome natural sense of orientation, while humans have developed the art of creating precise, abstract representations of the world around them to a dwindling height. The En’ilef…seem to be unhappily stuck in the middle. At least judging by the standard of K’ip’s effort here, which might, however, not be representative of his species as a whole. One would hope so, at least.

That said, his effort isn’t actually that much worse than some I’ve seen from human RPG players. >_> Our species’ aptitude for map-making is definitely not inborn, but I guess that’s not much of a surprise. But pen-and-paper RPG players need to assign someone out of their group the task, and not all groups chose wisely. Early computer RPGs also (practically) required players to draw their own maps, and computer magazines of the day regularly published dungeon maps in their hints sections. I think Bard’s Tale III (1988) was the first RPG to feature an auto-map and thus relieved the player of the need to map manually.

Naturally, some players were always awesome at creating maps, and a few even actively enjoyed the task that others considered onerous – but, you’d probably have a hard time finding any En’ilef who enjoys something like that. ‘Mapping‘ is close to ‘napping‘ as a word (especially with K’ip’s kind of penmanship), but as an activity, it’s just too far removed from both napping as well as eating to fit an En’ilef pattern of enjoyability, I think. >_>

We’ll have to wait and see how useful K’ip’s map will turn out to be on the way back. Assuming there is one, and this is not one of those ‘dungeon of no return’ thingies.*

More on Thurs…uh, Monday.

* Most of which don’t entirely live up to their reputations, anyway.

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