Just a short post today, with a neat little preview of the state of the project so far.
Lining Up Mystara, mid-January 2016 Progress Snapshot
It’s really starting to come together! In fact, we’re almost out of official hex maps to add to this picture.
The next significant steps are sorting out Davania, and of course aligning the continental maps to what we have here.
I said I’d finish it by mid-February, and I’d say we’re on track. Having said that, the minutiae — and actually creating maps to detail all of this area in finished form — is obviously going to take a lot longer.
So what’s the big deal about Norwold? Well, for more than 10 years, I’ve been making references to Norwold being a headache. Anyone who has tried to fit together the maps themselves will already know why.
To put it bluntly, they just don’t fit. What to do?
Let’s take a tour through this mess, and see if we can get it sorted out once and for all. I’m writing this article to record my thought processes, and I’m the first to admit that I don’t know what the solution will be — and I won’t decide until I reach the end of this article.
Behold, the Arm of the Immortals, at 24 miles per hex!
After spending the morning writing the previous article, I spent the afternoon and evening whipping this up.
Arm of the Immortals, 24 miles per hex
The Brun outline from CM1 allowed this expansion, providing a guide for the coastlines. It was quite a good match, except for the top left and bottom right of Dragon 200’s map. But this is no problem — at most it results in two or three extra rows of hexes in a couple of locations.
The bottom half of the map is from Dragon 200, with shallow and deep water added in. The tip of the Orc’s Head Peninsula is visible on the right — for now, just enough to see the dimensions of the Strait of Yalu. I will undoubtedly expand the map to include the Orc’s Head Peninsula and the whole of Yalu Bay before long.
The top of the map is divided in half, with the right hand side adapted from Red Steel and Savage Baronies, and the left hand side (including the plateaus) completely my own invention.
I noticed that the Endworld Line doesn’t come all the way down to the Arm of the Immortals, so I have left a gap between the mountain ranges in the north. The idea is that the mountains in the top left are the beginnings of the Endworld Line.
This is very much a work in progress, so feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts, ideas, etc.
