Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

Never read Orcslayer. Appreciated.

Thanks Blind. My guess is those rivers are fed by underwater springs or small lakes which are not indicated on the map. I could add those of course. I will play around with the swamp tonight and see what works, likely moving the eastern border back a bit, with the vacated area being represented by dry plains and scrubland before it turns into desert. The swamp area is just a rough draft from last night. I did some research and there are cases of wetlands bordering deserts, specifically in Iraq and Egypt.

https://theconversation.com/paradox-...ion%20emerged.

The larger forests need work of course. They encompass a huge area and the task of filling them is daunting. Additional lakes and waterfalls are on the list of things to add. Perhaps some magical terrain too in the denser locations. My intention for both Forests was to add an Elven civilization to both. I try to not add too many icons to area terrain zones (other than mountains) since I dont want it too cluttered up.

The Great Forest has some Elven towns/villages, along with Gnomes, Halflings and Dwarves. I have considered adding a few Orc tribes to the area as well...as a source of conflict.

The Blackwoods are a perfect location for a Dark Elf civilization. If anyone has read the D&D Mystara Gazetteer "The Shadow Elves" for the BECMI line then you will know where I will be going with them. I "may" extend the Blackwoods border a hex or two to the east and west, making it bit bigger. This would also be a source of concern for Megalos since it could eventually cut off the land route to the west. The Blackwood could use some swamps, bogs and maybe a low mountain or two. I envision the Blackwoods as the perfect place for Dark Fantasy and a possible springboard for the invasion of Megalos by the Elves and their inhuman allies from The Deep.

The Orclands forests do have villages in them, but I turned off that layer for the time being. The Yazak Steppes (any everything north of that) is occupied by a Mongolian/Hyrkanian (from Conan) tribes along with tribes similar to American Natives. Their tribal areas are sort of mapped out but I need to finalize them more. I was intending that area to be two separate human tribal groups, but I may combine them into one. Not sure yet.

The map can always use more minor rivers and lakes. I tend to add those as I see fit. The Nomad Lands and northern Megalos call out to me constantly for additional water features. I still have a million forests and hill regions to name. I have the names, I just need to enter them on the map.

Truthfully, every hex would have innumerable small streams and minor rivers along with ponds and lakes of various sizes. It would be impossible to accurately map them all.

I do have icons for farmland, to delineate cultivated areas with significant rural population. If those were displayed folks would see just how empty much of the nations are.

I read this somewhere for population density.

1 person/3-5 square miles for hunter/gatherers
1 person/square mile for pastoralists and their animals
10 people/square mile for horticulturalists
20 people/square mile for primitive agriculture
30-40 people/square mile for more sophisticated but still not modern agriculture
50-100/square mile, possibly more in and around a significant city.

Here is another useful blog post.
https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2017/...-in-brief.html

To keep it simple, the author uses the following:
Cities/Walled Towns: One per 4,000 square miles.
Castles: One per 400 square miles.
Villages: One per 40 square miles.

Cities: 10,000-60,000 people.
Towns: 1,000-6,000 people.
Villages: 100-600 people.
(looks likes a series of d6 rolls to me)

Caithness currently has 62 settlements and Megalos has 149. My math indicates I would need 100-110 for the size of Caithness and 325 for Megalos. Not sure what the point would be though of having all of those towns. The chances of their actual use/coming up in games amounts to almost 0% for most of them. Perhaps a simple farming icon would suffice.

Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

The Solfor Swamp could also be something like the Okovango Delta, fed by rivers from the mountains of Zarak, as you show. So it wouldn't actually have to connect to the River Kashk. If you want it to, though, I would make the Swamp's southern border at the lake.

Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

Agreed. A 100,000-square-mile death zone is crazy; what would an acid-dwelling caustigus even eat, in a UK-sized swamp that's fatal to almost everything?

Let it be a huge wetland (or a mix of wetlands and more; again, it's bigger than the UK), known for its odd, localized acidic swamps, some stronger and some weaker. Plenty of GM flexibility there.

(Where does the 100,000 square miles come from? An eyeballed estimate based on the green patch in Banestorm's Orclands map?)

Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

Far up-thread, I posted some ideas on how the plains areas could hold African-themed cultures and fauna, including alkaline soda lakes. They tend to occur when water features blend into desert areas.

Mildly acidic swamps are realistic due to the presence of peat layers, but but the acid swamp from Orcslayer is pure fantasy, with acid-adapted monsters and water pH low enough to quickly cause burns.

Given that some of the soda lakes in the Rift Valley are high enough in pH to slowly cause damage, a modestly acidic acid swamp (e.g., about as strong as strong vinegar) wouldn't be that much of a stretch, if you could come up with a suitable cause.

One possible explanation is that the swamp area overlays large petroleum deposits, which off-gas hydrogen sulfide, which percolates through the swamp water to produce sulfuric acid. In most places, the water isn't that acidic, but in areas with the most hydrogen sulfide the acidity can get dangerously high such that it causes slow chemical burns. Over time, the local flora and fauna adapted to the acidic environment, filtering out acid when taking in water with the effect that pH gets really low to the point that there are areas of near-pure acid.

Or, you could just say that the acid effect is magical; either an effect of the Banestorm or the result of some dark magic happening deep beneath Yrth's surface.

Where you've got corrosive liquids, the underlying rock needs to be inert enough to prevent reactions from happening which would create caves and cause the corrosive to leach into the ground.

I like the idea of an old meteor crater in an area of relatively inert rock which created a depression. This area gradually filled with massive amounts of clay to hold the water in, except in cases where there are hydrogen sulfide seeps.

In areas near the swamp, you could have amazing caves due to hydrogen sulfide action. The same area might have petroleum seeps and methane blowouts, including places where the methane has been set on fire, creating natural "eternal flames" or "hell gates."

Edit: The fact that the acid swamp borders a major river system argues against large highly acidic areas, since the acid would tend to be diluted. The presence of a river system means that you could have extensive wetlands, however, like the Pripyet Marshes or the Everglades. That would seriously complicate humanoid expansion from the eastern part of the continent to the western area. If you like the idea of hydrocarbon-based hazards, Out In The Middle of Nowhere is also a good place for any obvious coal or petroleum deposits, since they'd be massively exploited if they were any closer to civilization.

Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

All excellent ideas. I updated the file today.

I also uploaded a blank map, with only terrain features. No labels or structures of any kind (other than canon Elven ruins and Djinn Towers). I hope this will be useful to folks who want to play in the immediate Post-Banestorm Era.

On my to-do list today is to tweak the mountain chain on the eastern slopes of the Nomad Lands. It needs to extend north more and meet up with the Barrow Wood and the village of Ossary. In fact, the whole chain probably should be a little more dense by a couple of hexes in some areas. I did add some information on the method that I will be using to calculate urban areas for the map. The parent document is from "Magical Medieval Kingdoms of Western Europe". At least with that I have a guide to follow as to how many urban settlements (town and up) to place on the map.


Acrosome - excellent idea on the delta. I will read up on that today. A perfect solution in my mind to this area.

tbone - I counted the hexes on my map, by hand. It worked out to 100,000.
There is a slight scale difference between the watercolor map and the hex map, but it close enough not to matter in the grand scheme of things (I consider it an "Artist Interpretation"). On my blog the watercolor map has a hex grid overlayed which works out to roughly 26 miles per hex. It has been somewhat challenging to translate between the two. My map is based on a coastal outline and a hex grid of Ytarria which I did not create. I vetted it a few times and it is very close to what is presented in the book. If you want a smaller Ytarria then you could reduce the scale to 20 miles per hex. It would not matter much.

Perhaps the Casutiguses are the degenerate remnants of the Dark Elves which caused the Banestorm, mutated by their own folly? What do they eat? Adventurers mainly...likely not for nourishment though. They probably just like the taste.

Pursiviant - always giving me good ideas. I need to make a list of them today. I will read up on the Soda Lakes today.

Interesting article about an alkaline lake in Africa.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...-stone-445359/

Meteor impacts are always fun....so are crashed spaceships with exotic leaking power cores which cause mayhem with their surroundings.

Concerning geography, you seem to know more than your average bear. Hobby or Profession? You should have written the geography section of Banestorm. I would have been easier for all of us I think.

Ideally (when the map is saved as a PDF) I would like to have the map terrain labels act as a hyperlink to a Wikipedia article concerning that type of geographic area. It would give the user an idea of what the area is actually like. So, you click on say "The Great Desert" and it will take to you the appropriate article concerning a desert. I know it can be done through Inkscape. I just need to learn how.

To be honest, what I am doing is amateurish. SJG really should contact this guy, Thorfinn Tait,https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/

Thorfinn does hex maps for just about everything, dozens of them, all in Adobe Illustrator with a level of quality that I could only dream of. He has mapped the D&D world of Mystara to an incredible level of detail...and that area is far larger than Ytarria. Give him some guidelines and creative freedom and he could take Ytarria and map it down to 8 miles per hex easily. IMO, Yrth has always languished because it lacks adequate maps of the campaign areas. This guy could solve that problem and take Yrth to a new level of professionalism for SJG. A very small investment really.

SJG - contact him! Ytarria deserves the Thorfinn Tait treatment.

Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

That is one big patch of green! A perfect place to hide some acid swamps, regular swamps, and lots more.

I think I mentioned this before, but the scales don't seem to match that well even within Banestorm's maps, between the big continent-sized map and the smaller maps. But as you say, artistic interpretation (and the imprecision of old-time maps) cover that, so it's all good.

Nah, I like my Yttaria large. Very large.

And detailed, too, at least for the GM's map. So I really like what you're making here!

Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

Hobby, backed by some college courses, way too many nature documentaries and a lifetime interest in believable fantasy/ science fiction cultures, creatures and worlds.

Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

If you don't have access to Orcslayer, here are some other bits of tid about the Swamps of Sulfor and the Caustigus.

Swamps of Solfor: The water is actually "soupy acid" which can be deeper than 2 yards in places (deep enough to fully immerse a human). Wide hummocks, possibly floating masses of material, act as paths through narrow channels filled with acid. The lighting, at least in places where the caustigus hangs out, is unnaturally dark (Darkness Penalty -5) despite the lack of trees on the battle map. The acid which burns flesh at the rate of 1 HP/second and armor at the rate of 1 DR/2 seconds - very powerful stuff. Reptile man hide is immune to the acid effects. Earth, some types of stone and rare unspecified organic items are also immune. Everything else gets eaten away at 1 HP/sec for soft materials or half that rate for metal items. The acid retains its properties if removed from the swamp.

Since reptile men are immune to the acid (but can't drink it), it's a good place for them to appear.

It would be an easy play on words to make Solfor = Sulfur due to the hydrogen sulfide stench.

As written, the swamp is portrayed as being too big to conveniently avoid and about a day's journey to cross.

All that argues for a possibly large natural less acidic swamp, but with areas of magically augmented concentrated acid and gloom.

Caustigus: It's unknown if it's a unique creature or not. I'd argue that it's a species, since its stats aren't that impressive (DR 2, HP 16, Move 4 - an easy kill for a party of dungeon delvers except for its fast-regenerating arms and preferred habitat.). It's "aquatic" in that it lives in the deeper parts of the acid pools and looks vaguely like a giant four-armed octopus, but with hands at the end of each tentacle. It's an ambush predator which can surface unobserved and will attack at an advantage. It can also pop up in any acid hex on the battle map, even though the channels aren't contiguous. That means short-ranged teleport or burrowing or ability to swim under floating mats of stuff (peat, masses of dead grass?). Its touch is caustic, but its primary attack is to grapple, pull victims into the acid and drown/dissolve them. It's extremely sensitive to light, to the point that even torches will partially blind it and it lacks DR on its eyes, which makes it a less than impressive foe once the PCs know what to do. It's sapient (IQ 10) but vile-tempered and murderous, so it could easily be a mutant dark elf.

Since it's magic, the caustigus doesn't necessarily need to eat. If it does, it could just filter feed on acid, adding organic matter and minerals (i.e., tasty adventurers and their gear) for nutrients and flavor.

Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

The Orcslayer write-up does hint at a unique creature, without saying so clearly. Banestorm takes your view that it's a species, mentioning caustiguses (plural).

The book also calls the creatures solitary, so an encounter should be with just one. I agree with you that it isn't much of a challenge for most PC groups. The trick for the GM will be to play up "drag a PC into the acid, disappear, pop up somewhere else" tactics.

Still, it's a creepy and dangerous figure for any normals living near the swamps. Local legend might hold that it's a unique creature, if two are never seen at once; locals might even believe it unkillable. "My son saved me by sinking an axe into the demon's head. It sank back into the soup like a dead thing... but now some boatmen say they seen it again just two nights ago."

Re: Completed Ytarria Hex map with terrain added
 

I will be reorganizing my thoughts about the wetland region this weekend. There is no compelling reason to have such a large area present in that part of the continent. I think it causes more problems than its worth, especially for migration across the desert (both ways). Keeping very localized makes sense to me, likely around the southern most rivers.