At one time, it seemed like most fantasy novels came with maps. Not the highest quality maps since they were printed on cheap paper on a page size that greatly limited the amount of detail allowed. Everything from Fritz Lieber’s Faffhrd and the Grey Mouser books to Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern and Hugh Walker’s Magira series featured maps of fully-realized worlds. Even if many of the locations were never visited by the characters, they were mentioned in passing and existed as part of a larger setting.
cover art by Richard Anderson
In this modern digital age, I’ve been reading more books in digital format and the focus seems to be less on the extras that are part of a physical book. The Amazon Kindle reader skips right past the cover and acknowledgements to the opening of the first chapter. When I started reading Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames, I was drawn in by the characters and the setting. I was thinking the book would be very much in line with Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy or something very much in the vein of other books best described as grimdark, which is not my favorite sub-genre, but very enjoyable in the proper mood. Kings of the Wyld is something very different in a way I can’t quite quantify, much more an epic retelling of a grimdark Dungeons and Dragons campaign that started out in college and then sat on the shelf for a couple of decades before the characters were brought back from retirement for one last gig. The book literally takes the idea of getting the band back together like an aging rock band and runs with it.
Naturally, with a setting like this, I became curious whether there was a map since none was included in the e-book I was reading. Even a fan-made map is enjoyable and well-made ones have a way of becoming canon or otherwise enhancing the reader’s experience. At least, that’s true for me. What I found instead was the author’s website with maps that included the author’s original hand-drawn map, illustrations, a soundtrack, and more. Increasingly, the web has opened up new vistas where authors can expand on their creation in ways that the limits of physical and digital books cannot, much to the delight of fans like myself.