I've been thinking about Five's excellent comments about states and the borders of a post-state world on one of our previous discussions. And since this Lemmy community is intended partially as a repository of resources for players and GMs, I thought I'd gather up some of the cool maps I've been looking at, and organize them into categories of options/inspiration for anyone who is thinking about what a region outside the more-lore-established Nation of Pacifica might look like.
Five suggested a few really cool options, the first of which was the overlapping zones of the historical lands of indigenous peoples. The setting already features a massive, successful Land Back movement, so it would be quite reasonable from a lore standpoint to restore these wherever possible, or to establish a sort of hybrid mix with modern landmarks. This interactive map is also very useful: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/10/1127837659/native-land-map-ancestral-tribal-lands-worldwide
The next was Watersheds and I really love these maps. To paraphrase Five: in a world where states no longer exist, borders that still have importance are those drawn by nature. People still need to coordinate over land and water management. They give some wonderful world building suggestions though I'd also suggest that as Fully Automated! Is in the transition to a post-state world, but is not there yet, that there's excellent potential for factions, feuds, drama, and plot hooks in the existing states losing relevance to watershed organizations that overlap their territory and authorities, but don't necessarily encompass all of them.
The cool thing with watersheds is you can aim for huge nation-sized chunks of land, or tiny town-sized boundaries, all depending on your needs.
The last one I'll include is biomes. These are another natural boundary, though often a softer one than the watersheds.
And there's no need to restrict yourself to just one new way of redrawing the map. Societies are messy, and often slow to change. It wouldn't be unrealistic to end up with a mix of all of the above, along with existing cities and state or national borders too. Here's one example, though it's alt-history rather than scifi.
I hope this is useful, and if someday you're playing the game and redrawing the map, I'd love to see what you come up with!
I found another really good one:
Apparently John Wesley Powel proposed forming states along watershed boundaries in 1879! Here's a map of what that might have looked like.
What a cool idea! I like the idea of swapping things so rivers are in the center of the state rather than forming the borders, with the watershed split in half by state lines. In some ways that'll better fit how people interacted with rivers, central to their transportation and industries and habitation.
Did you read the text too? I'm just flabbergasted that this guy had this brilliant idea, and the railroads convinced everyone that science magic would make it rain everywhere. Our civilization is truly absurd.
I did, his prediction about conflict over water was obvious yet prescient. I suspect the train company's theory of hydrology was presented along with stacks of green paper but maybe that wasn't necessary