Revised map

Because the file is now large enough that I can't even upload it to blogger without loss of quality, so I've put the most recent version on Google Drive instead. Unless I somehow screwed it up, it should be viewable to anyone with a link. The thumbnal will give you the blogger version of the file if you enlarge it, but it's also a link to the full resolution version.

A few changes are cosmetic. I normalized the font to a single font, and got all of the city/town names at the same size (some of them were just a step off, but it started to get noticeable to me.) I added the wave painting on land to represent furrows and tilled fields. Not sure that that looks super great, but I don't really have any other options, sadly, that look any better. Is there really nothing in the asset library for large stretches of farmland on world-scale maps? That is kind of odd.  (Honestly, in a hand drawn version, I'd prefer just straight hatch lines over the waves anyway, which would work equally well on water or land for what I want. But we get these wave forms with peaks and troughs that look like water, and I have to live with it until I can think of something else. Maybe I can upload textures as an asset to paint with?) Oh, and I decided to change the little square icons representing towns and cities to little hand-drawn icons. I don't really like doing that in hand drawn maps that I make, but I think it works fine for this kind of map. Plus, I'd never do it on any other style map, so it was kind of fun to make use of a tool that I otherwise don't use. I did forget still to add one thing; a scale. So I guess a little bit more tweaking is in order. I imagine the scale to be on the order of magnitude as the Middle-earth map, although a bit smaller.

The other changes are a bit more substantive, and mostly include filling in some stuff where there were overly large, overly blank areas before, which I didn't like. In particular, the Goldenwolds area was a really big blank area with nothing to do except travel across it, and south of the Haunted Forest in that prairie there wasn't much going on. Let's talk briefly about what was added:

1) The strip along the Copper Hills sandwiched between the Haunted Forest and the Goldenwolds had a bunch of farmland added. I now see that as a bit more densely populated; not with villages and towns, necessarily (although a few are marked) but with much more settled farmland. In a way, I guess I see it as a slightly less utopian Shire. Or maybe it's just as utopian, but my version of a utopian, agrarian society is a bit different than Tolkien's.

2) The Plateau of Leng and Unknown Kadath are added as a big landform right there in the northern Goldenwolds. I realize that this makes its location not at all a secret; in fact, there's a road that gets a decent amount of travel between Lomar and Bucknerfeld that passes within sight of the plateau for days, and another road from Bucknerfeld to Pineytop has it visible from the other side as well. That said, it's extremely difficult to climb up the steep cliffs of the plateau which are very tall; probably moreso than is obvious from this representation here. On top, it is high enough elevation to always be cold, and most of it is above the elevation snow line. Not only is climbing it difficult, but the evil reputation of the place has spread far and wide, and people know to avoid it. Most prefer to not even look at it as they pass, if they can help it.

3) On the western shore of the Darkling Sea I've added the Tazitta Death Cult lands. This is a savage people that I made up, initially for the Baal Hamazi section of Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, but given that the area I put them in is similar ecologically to the Goldenwolds, I think this is a good place for them. Imagine, again, a combination of the Comanche and the headhunters of the East Indies. On top of that, they paint or tattoo themselves to resemble skeletons; black with white bone markings, and they kill and behead (and sometimes eat) people who pass through their lands. They are considered an insane cult of daemon worshippers by most, but then again, nobody has ever really managed to document their societal practices and live, so nobody knows for sure what they believe. They are within a very hard days ride of Leng's eastern edge (more like two to three days of long travel otherwise) and that's one of the few practices known for sure; several times a year, young bands of Tazitta braves make a pilgrimage to Leng. What exactly they do there is unclear. They make travel through this section of the prairie very hazardous, and as you can see anyway, the settlement patterns and roads take great pains to avoid getting even very close to their lands. Even moreso than the avoidance of Leng. Leng may be a malignant tumor on the surface of the earth, but it doesn't aggressive go hunt you down; you have to go to it to be harmed by it. Not so with the Tazitta. In this respect, they resemble the Comancheria, and the pains with which famous drover trails, like the Goodnight-Loving, went out of their way to stay away from them.

4) Further south, I added the  ruins of Rabb's Hill as well as a large section of burn on the northern fringe of the Thursewood. This small town was about halfway between the much larger regional capital of Dunsbury on the edge of Lake Byewick, and the towns of Roanstead and Burham's Landing, which are keys to reaching Waychester by boat through the Waychester Bay. (Waychester is otherwise unreachable, which is unusual being such a major regional center. I see it as not unlike the Euxhine Sea holdings of the Greeks during their age of colonization, though—they didn't follow land routes to get around, but almost exclusively sailed.) Rabb's Hill was attacked and destroyed overnight by a vicious surge of violence from the thurses of the Thursewood. Luckily, thurses are savage and unorganized, so they were unable to capitalize on their quick victory by marching elsewhere before armies from Waychester and Dunsbury converged on them. Although often called the Battle of Rabb's Hill that drove them off, it was really more like an extended engagement across a wide area. The thurses lit fires in the forest to smoke out the hillmen, but this was turned against them when the hillmen proved disciplined enough to drive them back to the fireline with their shieldwalls. In the end, thousands of thurses were pushed into the fire and burned to death, and the population has been decimated and quiet in the generation or so since that battle. (Although scouts are reporting signs that the population may have rebounded somewhat and the Thursewood may yet again be a danger full of the furious thurses.) The old burn area is still fairly barren; the black skeletons of trees stand out from the low-growing, quick-sprouting shrubs that have moved in in the meantime; new trees are still small. The forest isn't expected to return to its original state (or something like it) in the burn area for at least another two or three generations.

5) Although this wasn't a new change that I just made, I think it's worth pointing out that I've extended Timischburg eastward, as can be seen by the Timischer village of Dragomiresti all the way out on the Chatterwash River. This puts Eltdown more firmly in the Timischer camp, although it's still one that has a fair number of hillmen living there, and it does have a hillmen name. At the peak of their past expansion, the hillmen went all the way to the Knifetop Mountains and through the Haunted Forest, although the dangers of the forest eventually led them to abandon their efforts to expand up the Chatterwash watershed and avoid the Haunted Forest and its environs.