I've read one book so far as part of my 2023 reading plan (Pirates Guide to Freeport), but I'm also in the middle of three concurrently, and I bounce back and forth between them. The first is The Halfling's Gem, although my son accidentally took out my bookmark. Because I wasn't very far into that book and I also haven't picked it up in a few weeks, I'll probably start it over. I'm also about a third of the way through Five Fingers: Port of Deceit and when I'm done I'll do a brief compare/contrast with Freeport. And the last one is The Shackled City. This isn't really a book, per se. I'm reading the entire adventure path in its original form in the Dungeon Magazine adventures, and counting the entire adventure path as one book, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through it.
Cauldron fixes one of the main problems with this type of set-up; the fact that volcano cones tend to be quite dry and well above the water table, by having a lake at the bottom of the caldera. How exactly this lake stays sealed up given that the volcano is riddled with "dungeons" and caverns is unclear, but then again, D&D is fundamentally kind of stupid sometimes. Besides, I'm less interested in replicating exactly the premise of Cauldron and more in doing so in the generic sense; a town build atop a low extinct volcano, with a road that snakes around the cone on the outside leading up to walls along the top, and concentric rings of streets and buildings going down towards the center, where a permanent source of water provides for the needs of the town.
While conditions at all three of the volcanos of this type that I've visited are rather dry, the Idaho one in particular is interesting, because it was formed as the North American plate migrated over the Yellowstone hotspot. The hotspot is now further to the east (in Yellowstone National Park, obviously), but maybe not as far as you'd think. R Mountain is about 60 miles directly west of the Grand Teton peak, which is part of the Greater Yellowstone province, and only about 80 miles southwest of the West Yellowstone gate town to the park. The greater bulk of the Yellowstone area, like Yellowstone Lake, are quite close as the crow flies, although as the car drives, you have to go a bit out of your way quite often. It's not hard to imagine that these calderas could exist in a more forested biome not unlike Yellowstone itself, perhaps.
Although my Dark Fantasy X map has been in need of an update for some time, it's only going to be a minor refresh, and the addition of some new details that I've come up with since I drew the original. I'm not reorganizing anything significantly. Bucknerfeld, as I've talked about just a bit before, is the among the most northerly and certainly the most westerly of the Hillmen cities, at the northern terminus of the great Sabertooth Mountain range and near the salt flats of the slowly drying Indash Salt Sea. While coming up with this geographic territory, I was no doubt heavily influenced by the idea of ancient Lake Bonneville slowly drying up and turning into what today is known as the Great Salt Lake. Bucknerfeld would therefore have a geography not unlike northern Utah. While much of it is semi-arid, the Wasatch and Uinta and other mountain ranges nearby are thick with heavy forests of aspen and pine, and the valleys are often lush with plant life. Some of this is artificial; farmers have been irrigating fields and crops for well over 150 years in the area now, but much of it is natural. Even in the mountains where no crops or irrigation has happened, like the Tushars, the higher elevation gives them more rainfall and therefore more plant life, while the desert stretches on the much lower floors below.
North of Bucknerfeld is the corridor between the Plateau of Leng and the Indash Salt Sea, and caravans passing through from the west have to travel through this route. The Wolfwood, the Vajol Downs, and eventually the rich and exotic cities of Volek Szemenok, Vuukrat and Simashki lie either northwest or west of Bucknerfeld along the Great Northern Road.
South of Bucknerfeld, on both sides of the Sabertooths, are small hamlets and settlements of hillmen. The east side is greener and heavily forested, while the west side is dry and leads into the Boneyard basin. The foothills here are called the Cactus Balds, and this is the most recent expansion of hillmen settlement. I talked about this briefly in the intro to the fifth column of the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER 5x5 Front, so I won't belabor it here. Bucknerfeld is, however, the urban(ish) center of commerce and political power in the area.
And here's what I'd like to do with Bucknerfeld; model it, at least physically, sort of on Cauldron from the Shackled City. Now, there won't be dungeons and tunnels all underneath it, and if there are fragments of lava tubes and whatnot, they'll be completely filled with water. The "lake" at the center is more of a pond, or tank, but because it does go deep into the old lava tubes leftover from ancient eruptions, there's actually a ton of old rainwater stored there; enough to keep the town supplied effectively indefinitely. From the top of Bucknerfeld caldera, you can see Leng in the distance to the east, and the salt flats leading out to the glittering water of the Indash Salt Sea to the west. To the north are the dark eaves of the Wolfwood, at least on a clear day, and to the direct south is the great mass of the Sabertooth Mountains. You can also see several of the foothills settlements of the hillmen from the top.
The town itself is walled, but a road spirals around the caldera, and oddly built houses and buildings line the road, attempting to account for the steep slopes that they're built on by being quite tall on one end and rather short on the other. The town also spreads around the foot of the caldera, although inside the caldera, a map of Cauldron could easily be more or less substituted for one of upper Bucknerfeld. The Great Northern Road (this will be one of the small details amended in my newer version of the map) passes directly through Bucknerfeld. After the dark age associated with the fall of Baal Hamazi and the withdrawal of Kurushat from the region, this road was little used and fell into disrepair. Traffic from east to west and back is once again tentatively starting to establish itself along the road, but so far nobody has been willing to spend funds to repair the road and most of the old coach house stations have been long abandoned, so the journey isn't quite as smooth as it was in prior centuries.
Finally, as mentioned briefly in the prior post linked above, as a caravan town, although it's founded and mostly populated by hillmen, it will have a relatively large number of comers and goers; transients, and people who represent interests abroad who live here too. This is the part of the Hill Country where hillmen are most likely to run into a jann or kemling; in fact, they're almost certain to in Bucknerfeld, as quite a decent number of them live here.
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