Trap Sheets

[The_Usernameless_Horror]

I am sorry if this is common knowledge, but did you know that cartographers often insert non-existent landscape features into maps? The reason for this is to catch anyone who breaks the copyright of the map, and such maps are therefore known as 'trap sheets'. However, I can see this has quite a high potential for use as a red herring in CoC game. Any thoughts on this?

[CAThompson]

Yes, yes I can. Now do you have an example map? Or know where we could find one?

[The_Usernameless_Horror]

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_165.html gives a lot of info on these maps including some Rand McNally examples.

[The_Usernameless_Horror]

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_165.html gives a lot of info on these maps including some Rand McNally examples.

I would imagine these are fairly incongrous features in general that don't decrease the usefulness of the map, such as tiny alleys, dead-end roads, standing stones ... that kind of thing.

[The_Silent_One]

I have an idea:

The group is hunting for a sorceror, who gets wind of their plans and sends them a trap. It takes the form of a brand new map with a few planned, former, or nonexistant streets. They end up finding these streets, looking perfectly normal and very real. Upon taking one of these roads they will find it empty, devoid of all animal and human life. Thinking it a dead end or some such nonsense they turn back, only to find the whole town like the false street. However, at least one character must not follow the group. That player must then find the sorceror and destroy his copy of the map before he is able to permenantly trap them there.
The map was created as one of several gifts to the sorceror from the Outer God Daoloth in exchange for elaborate sacrifices. Because of the Render of Veils' impeccable understanding of perception, the village looks exactly like the existing town, but differs in three ways: 1. It has (and in one case, lacks) streets the town doesn't. 2. It is strangely dull, familiar, almost like a sepia-toned photograph. 3. The mirror-world is unsettlingly empty with a dreadful calm about it. There may be one or two disheveled, shadowy drifters wandering around, looking maddened or drugged. Pehaps there is also something rather nasty in this living example of Capgra's Syndome, perhaps two or three. Night-Gaunts? Lloigor? The Nameless Mist? Daoloth? Something worse?

[Nollvane]

I have also heard that the publishers of Who's Who in America and similar books include (or used to include) biographies of fictitious individuals as copyright traps. Perhaps their addresses are on these "paper streets."

[Zoran]

I have also heard that the publishers of Who's Who in America and similar books include (or used to include) biographies of fictitious individuals as copyright traps.

Encyclopedias and dictionaries too.

From the article Not a Word in the 29 August 2005 issue of The New Yorker:

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you'll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled "Flags Up!" Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die "at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine."

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. "It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright," Richard Steins, who was one of the volume's editors, said the other day. "If someone copied Lillian, then we'd know they'd stolen from us."

So when word leaked out that the recently published second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary contains a made-up word that starts with the letter "e," an independent investigator set himself the task of sifting through NOAD's thirty-one hundred and twenty-eight "e" entries in search of the phony. The investigator first removed from contention any word that was easily recognized or that appears in Webster's Third New International; the remaining three hundred and sixty words were then vetted with a battery of references.

Six potential Mountweazels emerged. They were:

...earth loop — n. Electrical British term for GROUND LOOP.

...EGD — n. a technology or system that integrates a computer
......display with a pair of eyeglasses . . . abbreviation of eyeglass
......display.

...electrofish — v. [trans.] fish (a stretch of water) using
......electrocution or a weak electric field.

...ELSS — abbr. extravehicular life support system.

...esquivalience — n. the willful avoidance of one's official
......responsibilities . . . late 19th cent.: perhaps from French
......esquiver, "dodge, slink away."

...eurocreep — n. informal the gradual acceptance of the euro in
......European Union countries that have not yet officially adopted it as
......their national currency.

Those interested in learning which was the fake word should check out the article.

Regards,

Zoran