Some experimentation in order to try to properly integrate Reaper's Coast into that tidy little space between Cyseal and Yuthul Gor. Easy, right...? *cough*

So what I've done, based on my merged cut-scene and cloth maps, is that I've scaled and straightened up the Reaper's Coast area according to the lines of longitude and though it created its own awkwardness, a couple of interesting things became apparent. First I could move the Cyseal/Phantom Forest area actually placing Hunter's Edge where there's a settlement shown on the cut-scene and the coastlines overlap quite well, so I'm inclined to go for that.

This opened up a sort of liability but also an opportunity for where to place Yuthul Gor: I needed to finish off the bottom jaggedy bit of Reaper's Coast with something and... well, there it is. My reasoning also being that as it has a not totally dissimilar climate to Fort Joy, its latitude makes sense, plus it's definitely close enough to Cyseal to explain those raiding parties. It comes at the cost of moving it away from where the original DD map places it, but given that there's no actual detail I've decided I have the artistic freedom to interpret that as "vaguely somewhere in this direction rather than actually right here".

Obviously it's extremely poorly finished and I would need to work on at least the coastline's details but my instinct is that they kind of "feel" about right.

[Linked Image]

Todo:

  • Check the orientation of Fort Joy is still correct: it looks a bit off to me.
  • Decide on that awkward blob of land south of Orobas Fjords: I'm ambivalent about that, might work, might not.
  • Properly integrate the Hunter's Edge map with the outline of Reaper's Coast.
  • Join the Phantom Forest and the Dark Forest as I've always asserted they're one and the same. And probably very big.
  • Look at real-world maps to see how coastlines actually work in detail and add, well, details.
  • Properly follow contour and other demarcation lines, both of existing maps and new areas.
  • Add rivers, lakes, other details in hopefully likely places.
  • Add missing settlements and label everything.
  • Argh panic etc

At present the main thing I'm uncertain about is the exact placement of Arx. I'm still inclined to try to move it all around a bit so it is more south of Aleroth, but in order to create a convincing bay/whatever-it-is-that-Arx-is-in as well as having room to continue the Dark Forest southwards (albeit with a western detour) I may need to make the map even taller, which I'm not 100% certain about.

What the map doesn't include: Nameless Isle and Hiberheim, as my understanding is that they're on different planes of existence, and places like the lizard empire which I'm fairly certain is on a completely different continent. Red Prince was looking to the west, for example.


J'aime le fromage.