Is there a reference that gives the latitude and longitude for locations on Toril?
maelgwn
Newcomer
I have the old FRIA but wondered if there was a considered reference that lists the lat/long of the major locations on Toril?
Answers
The only thing a have found on that is this map, but that really only gives an overview on the world level. As far as I know, there aren't any official sources, so everything is fans trying to approximate.
Monsen's right in that virtually everything that tries to equate the Forgotten Realms setting to anything genuinely geographic has been done by the fans only. Part of the problem is that the size of some of the continents were changed at different times, and as the setting developed through various novels written by different people at different times, there was never a single basis on which any of this was hung. It's extremely irritating!
Even the official TSR 1990 "Forgotten Realms Atlas" by the great Karen Wynn Fonstad shows nothing of any latitude and longitude lines, though she does demonstrate very clearly in that just how little of the planet had been even approximately mapped by that time.
The only thing I have come across is a mention on the Candlekeep.com site in their FAQs regarding a map in "Faiths & Avatars" (TSR, 1996) regarding where the equator is. I found that via this discussion post on the Forgotten Realms Wiki site, which mentions the same map shows the canonical lines of lat and long, though so far as I can tell, while there are some lines shown, none have labels attached.
It's worth noting that Ed Greenwood has said that Waterdeep sits exactly on the 45 degrees N line on Toril, and Toril is more or less the same size as Earth. The Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas gives an equatorial circumference of 23,992.03 miles, so assuming that adds up, you should be able to extract from there.
My world map tries to align the three data points we have (Waterdeep at 45N, the equator from Faiths and Avatars, the circumference from the FRIA). Not sure if it entirely works out.
https://atlasoficeandfireblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/05/a-map-of-the-forgotten-realms/
Also, we have the issue that Ed Greenwood keeps changing things, like recently revealing there's a hitherto unknown continent SE of Lantan, but not where it is, plus things like not knowing if Laerakond is still on Toril post-Second Sundering (Ed says yes, WotC have refused to comment), and Ed's conception of the world has become rather different from WotC's "canon" conception.
Whenever I see that whole-world map from the FRIA, I keep wishing that I'd spent more time georeferencing the original source material. There are some systematic errors near the world seam (which runs in quite an unexpected location) and I was never entirely clear on what the map projection was supposed to be. I had expected that it was placeholder art (thus the weird mountains), but it turned out to be in the final product.
The grid in the right-hand picture should have been a square grid if I'd done it correctly. The weird handle peninsula in the far north (green arrows) isn't supposed to be anywhere near that shape!