Rudmont Escarpment

Not to be all posting too many micro-updates... well, maybe to be that. I'm pretty sure I've got a handle on my cliffs now. I do want to experiment with making some more talus sloped ones, either by adding a bit of slope at the bottom (which I meant to but forgot to on the one posted here) or trying to figure out how to add some rubble, scree and boulders at the bottom of the cliff and make it look OK. But this is pretty close to exactly how I want it to turn out. So much so, in fact, that after I drew the cliff, I added some labels and a few other features to show it in context. That only made me like it better.

There's a road that comes right up to the lip where the big crack is (between Rudmont and Escarpment) and a steep mule and donkey trail that gets you from top to bottom; the only route most people consider passable along the entire length of the escarpment. At the bottom is the trade city of Glittering Simashki, which in addition to this fortuitous location, is also blessed with several springs that come up from an aquifer below the surface; one of the only really good sources of fresh water that is both reliable and capable of supporting more than a few people at a time. The road travels from there along the base of the cliffs to Vuukrat at the northeastern edge of the escarpment, where it finally fades in elevation down to the "normal" level and you can get around it. A river that pours off of the escarpment crosses the road about halfway through on its way to the Indash Salt Sea, an endorheic lake that is slowly shrinking and becoming saltier. You can see the stippling which represents the salt flats for miles along the shore.

As you can probably guess by the names, this is not part of the Hill Country area, which is represented by good old Anglo-Saxon/English names, mostly. Nor is it part of Timischburg, which in keeping with representing Transylvania during the Austro-Hungarian Empire has either German-sounding (the aristocracy) or Romanian (the peasantry) names. I actually, when I made this new stuff, freely mixed names from what was once Old Baal Hamazi and Old Kurushat. That was originally done when I expected that both Baal Hamazi and Kurushat lingered somewhere beyond the edges of the map. Now, I'm not sure that I care to distinguish them clearly anymore. Vuukrat might just end up being a kind of stand-alone colony of its people, with the distant Sinjagat being another one. In this respect, they'll not be terribly different from Lomar, which is also a colonial city of a people who's main locus is somewhere off the map.

Actually, since I still need to develop a bit more what's actually going on in my new Baal Hamazi land, or the old Daemon Wastes as it evolved from, maybe having some ethnic tension between kemlings, jann and drylander tribes is not such a bad idea. I haven't quite figured out exactly how I'm going to rearrange my old elements, and which elements I'll be rearranging in my new version of "the Daemon Wastes."

Of course, the other option is to use some actual hamazin names and replace the names Vuukrat and Sinjagat entirely. But I do like the idea that there is at least a place or two on the map that caters to each of the playable races. Maybe it's a good idea to move Sinjagat, make it closer to Vuukrat, and claim that a small corner of the peninsula is majority jann. And maybe I should squeeze Sharkul back into the map as a ghetto village near Lake Byewick again. Sigh. Maybe it's a good thing that I'm taking just a little bit of time before moving from my first draft to the next draft of the map. Give myself some time to see if there's really anything else that needs to be added or changed or not before I make a nicer map that I'll be more reluctant to mess with.