What exactly would a map of warp routes look like? Would it be like the maps on the inside cover of the Rulebook, where you have the squiggly lines drawn from one planet to the next? are those lines the only safe routes through the warp?

Just tryin to figure out some stuff for my current endeavor, and figured it'd be nice to be able to map out some things. And I like cool visual aids.

I second this. We have just used the games masters kit (and some nifty randomiser tables) on dark reign to create a small subsectors worth of planets. We will have to revisit them so a nice purpose made map will look nice.

Im kind of thinking of those warp route maps you get in one of the battlefleet gothic campaign books, or are there other bona fide cannon versions?

Dangerbutton said:

In the roughest terms, yes, the maps on the inside covers of the Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader rulebooks show warp routes. These would be the most stable, safest paths for the passage of ships. Within a sector of the Imperium, those routes would be the standard routes used by merchant ships and similar common travel, as well as normal Imperial Navy patrol routes. Outside of the Imperium, knowledge of stable warp routes would be highly prized and carefully guarded, both to preserve your assets from the attentions of rivals, and so that you have something extra to sell if necessary.

I imagine that true charts of a region's warp routes would look similar, but be far more ornate and detailed, incorporating little columns of letters, numbers and symbols near star systems and other celestial phenomena. These columns of characters would be meaningless to most people, but are a shorthand to convey important information about the peculiarities of the Warp within a given region. Such information would be frequently updated when possible by a ship's Navigator (or rather, by a scribe working to the Navigator's instructions) based on prevailing conditions, arcane calculations and their own observations. The star charts of a sector may be a mess of notation, coruscating pathways and constantly-shifting locations, likely displayed in three dimensions in the form of a hologram rather than the more limited form of a paper chart (though paper 'hard copies' would exist as well, as relics and as additional reference).

That is, at least, my take on the matter.

I agree. I always saw the (rather beautiful) maps on the inside covers of both RT and DH as maps produced by non-navigators to show other non-navigators the stable warp routes between worlds. That's not to say you can't take shortcuts, but it would probably be more dangerous.

Maps produced by Navigators for other Navigators probably wouldn't make much sense at all to normal humans, and would probably take myriad forms, given that the experience of warp navigation appears to be highly subjective.

I disagree.

Warp charts should be extremely complicated, unreadable, or nearly so to anyone without scholastic lore: Astromancy.

A chart should record not a dotted line to another area, but information on current strength and direction, warp reefs, eddies, whirlpools, contra currents, switching points to move from one current to another, etc

Warp navigation is a very messy business and only extremely skilled and well trained individuals with genetic gifts can do it, charts should be appropriately arcane and complex.

I think I like the idea of those maps being warp charts for the uneducated. A navigator would certainly need something with incredible detail, and all sorts of complicated information. However, A map like those on the inside cover of the book would be fitting as a map made by one uneducated, just a rough map of what's going on.

I tend to picture such charts to be a combination of a map and a rutter (A Rutter is a guide book that contains notes on where all the eddies, tides, currents etc are in an area each Navigator would have his own and they where incrediably valuable during the time, they where often coded etc to prevent there secrets being stolen),

So not quite what we would recognize as a chart.