Sacred Ballcourt [19x22]
Hi everyone :)
Today we're releasing our Sacred Ballcourt! This sporting arena is based around the incredibly interesting Mesoamerican Ballgame. The historical rules aren't entirely well known but there are theories that the aim was to constantly keep the ball in play. There are common theories too that the players would strike the ball with their hips which sounds incredibly painful to us!
Several of these ballcourts can still be found around the world and they range so much in size, shape and building materials.
Although this map is heavily inspired by real life locations, this should also hopefully work as a nice arena option for almost any scenario you can think of.
Enjoy!
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Comments (10)
馃馃啔馃 has now moved to Mesoamerica as well
Meso-American figurines of ball players have some kind of padding or armor wrapped around their middle as well as their elbows and knees (and in fact the padding is kind of diagnostic for "this statue is a ball player") so one presumes they would always be striking it with a protected joint.
If I was still running my campaign in Hearth this would've been right at home (along with the Couatl Interior and Exterior maps). (Y'all need to get Team Superhydra back together.)
One day maybe! Everyone's quite busy these days. The Pandemic, unsurprisingly, gave us all a bit of spare time!
Thank you so much for this! Mesoamerican-inspired maps are so rare and they're always bangers
Man I could have used this about a year ago when I had my superhero game traveling through time!
Because Ball is Life! But also? Ball is *death*.
Well, archaeological evidence indicates that the "losers got sacrificed" thing was not the standard, but rather a specific scenario that was blown out of proportion by Christian writers who were motivated to paint the native peoples as barbaric. In short, if they had some prisoners of war who were definitely going to get sacrificed one way or another, having them play ball was just a method of selection, akin to Rome putting prisoners in the gladiatorial arena.
Running a campaign based on the Ixalan setting in MTG so I'll definitely be getting some use out of this!
This map reminds me that the Road to El Dorado would make for a fun DND campaign