In “My First Book,” Robert Louis Stevenson tells the origin story of Treasure Island, a book which I’ve just had the pleasure of reading this afternoon. It begins when Stevenson was a lodger at the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage. One of his roommates was an artist who would spend afternoons at the easel, and Stevenson would periodically join him. On one such occasion, Stevenson:

…made a map of an island. It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence worth of imagination to understand with!

No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island,’ the future characters of the book began to appear visibly there among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.

The map that appears above is, sadly, not the map that Stevenson drew that day. Much later, when he had completed his first novel, he submitted the map along with the manuscript to the publisher. Unfortunately, the map became lost in the post (or, perhaps, the publisher misplaced it). In either case, the horrified Stevenson had to recreate the map from memory, with great difficulty because he also had to comb through his own text to make sure all of the continuity was correct with the new version of the map.

In this, Stevenson was in some way reversing the process by which the novel had actually been written.

I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my plot. For instance, I had called an islet ‘Skeleton Island,’ not knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and stole Flint’s pointer. And in the same way, it was because I made two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on her wanderings with Israel Hands.

I suspect that many a game master will recognize themself in Stevenson’s tale — whether it was the dim recesses of a dungeon, the vasty wilds of a hexmap, or the starlit expanse of a Traveller sector map.

Oft have I found myself peering at a published map and found my eyes drawn down into its enigma: If I stepped onto that street, what would I see? What strange mysteries lie beneath those mounds?

But even more often have I walked in Stevenson’s footsteps, beginning an adventure not with an outline or a scene list, but by seizing graph paper and letting my creativity flow through the geography.

This is not, of course, the only way to begin an adventure. (I am equally likely to start with, say, a revelation list.) But take a dungeon, for example. An interesting arrangement of chambers invites the imagination to fill them, and I find the encounters “peeping out,” as Stevenson suggests, from between the gridlines. The same is true of a wilderness map: My hand will chart the Silverwood before I ever learn what might lie beneath its boughs.

“The map is not the territory.” When dealing with the representation of reality, Alfred Korzybski’s saying means that we cannot capture all the complexities of reality in our representation of it; there is a vast wealth of detail that cannot be captured. But when it comes to imaginary creation, the meaning is almost inverted: the representation of the map is all that exists because the details have not yet been created; but that howling void will, like any vacuum, suck you down into it, providing a lattice on which all the detail of a world can spill out.

I’ll let Mr. Stevenson have the final word here:

I have said the map was most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole… It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important… It is my contention — my superstition, if you like — that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country by real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when the map is not all the plot, as it was in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.

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