Urt's Outer Skin

The Barony of Ystern is situated in the south-east of the Duchy of Foxhill, and sits at the confluence of the Ansarna, Steva and Brudon rivers. A small barony and once wealthy region, that was almost entirely destroyed in the War of the Seven Shamen over a hundred years ago. It owes its recovery to the survival of the monolithic castle situated on a cliff over a bend in the River Ansarna, and the annual spring fair when the dwarven and gnomish trade caravans come down from the mountains to the south and east. Despite this recovery, much of the land has been reclaimed by forest and the fey creatures that reside in it, and only narrow strips of land close to the roads and the rivers that they follow are farmed. The old town of Ystern now lies in ruins, and the smaller, better fortified Ystern Shades stands on the opposite bank of the River Brudon, with the brooding Castle Ystern watching over from the northern bank of the Ansarna. There are several small villages and hamlets along the ro...

The next stage of my mapping process is to create 24 mile per hex versions, but using a "look through" to the underlying 8 mile per hex maps.  This is done by taking the water layers, scaling them down, and then taking the underlying terrain from the 8 mile per hex maps and approximating what would be the best fit for the terrain at a more zoomed out scale. 24 miles with hex overlay 24 miles without hex overlay

After several months work (and having to isolate of Christmas and New Year), the map of Alphatia is finally complete.  Admittedly, this is almost entirely based off Bruce's work (and Thorf's superb realization of that), but it has been intricate and challenging to complete. ( Link to full file ) The key intricacies of this work is to attempt to align the files with the underlying world map from the Masters set, especially when you compare that to the overall map at 72 miles from the Dawn of the Emperors set (the comparison maps are all locked at Specularum as their "point of origin"): As can be seen by the time you move across to Esterhold, the Dawn map is out by a couple of hexes, or approximately 150 miles. Not small beans. When it comes to creating the contiguous maps, there are a number of factors in play: For the continents, attempting to line up the available sources (largely the 72 mile maps from DotE and the PWAs to the Masters map).  This involves a bit of cu...

It's been a bit stop/start on this, but I'm fairly happy with how it is turning out.  The Imperial Realm of Glevum (pop. ) is the personal fief of the Emperor of Thonia.  Although not the largest by area, it is the most populous and the safest area in the Empire.  Most visitors to the Empire never leave this land. Even here though, much of the land has been reclaimed by the forests, humanoids, undead and the Irith, leaving ruined settlements and hidden secrets in their midst. (Link to Map) Glevum - the capitol of the Thonian Empire. Harewood -  a large town in the east of the Imperial Realm.  Situated on the Hare River, it is a prosperous trading post, but is over looked by the Burning Hills of Ximan to the north-east. Greyling Tye -  A small town to the south of the Greyling Barrows.  This was once a prosperous farming region, but several hundred years ago, a great evil awoke in the Greyling Barrows, and now the town is heavily fortified and undead ar...

So finally, I have completed my map of the Isle of Dawn.  This is scaled at 92.5% of the map from the Dawn of the Emperors.  This allows it to fit neatly in the space as indicated in the Master's map.  Also as part of this, there was a slight re-jigging of the positioning of the Alatians compared to DotE, but nothing major, scaling was kept consistent. The map itself was based largely off my previous Isle Dawn map (over ten years old now), along with Thorfinn Tait, Simone Neri, Ignacio Ramos, Thibault Sarlat. (Link to full image) Below is a overview of the general progress.

This wasn't originally going to be the next map I put out there, but as I'm (very) slowly reworking the Isle of Dawn, I thought I would finalize this. As I have mentioned before, the Isle of Dawn is re-scaled from the original. This allows it to fit correctly in the space on the map from the Master's book, without pushing the surrounding islands into other landmasses.  However, this also means that a decision needed to be made about scaling and positioning of Ochalea (and also the Alatian and Pearl Islands).  After a lot a of messing around, I decided to work with not re-scaling these but adjusting the positions of the island groups relative to each other. Ochalea itself is based on work by Thorfinn Tait, James Mishler, John Calvin, Giampaolo Agosta. The southern areas of the Isle of Dawn are based on work by Thoirfinn Tait, Simone Neri, Ignacio Ramos, Thibault Sarlat. ( Link to full size image ) Also, for those that are interested, I've added a scaled down version o...