User blog:Aaron Larsen/Coming Soon: Overall Exandria Map Version 19, now with Xhorhas!

Now that an actual map of Xhorhas is in play in the campaign, a revised series of maps updated with the new information has been very much on my radar, but I couldn't really get started on any such major new project until school was out. (May is a crazy month for us teacher types...) So, here's the first draft of the new map:

A few notes:

1. Yes, it's still rather "rough around the edges": I still have to clean up a good bit of the fuzziness created by my resizing and re-shaping the preliminary drafts to fit together with the rest of the Wildemount map.

2. Speaking of which, given how near-linear Deven Rue's new Xhorhas map is and how broadly heart-shaped the empire was in her earlier Empire Map, some "bending and twisting" was necessary but I tried to keep it to a minimum.

3. After some initial trial and error (mostly error) I found the new Xhorhas map to be scaled about 20-25% larger than the previous Empire map.

Once I resized and re-shaped to account for 2 & 3, it started to come together rather nicely, I thought.

4. I had some difficulty interpreting her symbols for terrain features: at first I was confusing her "treeline" for dense forests with her "cliff face" drawing and thought I was going to have to find a way to represent dozens of tiny little flat-topped mesas! (I though wow, this Xhorhasian terrain really is weird.) Well it certainly is weird, but maybe not a much as I was thinking... I'm still coming to grips with how best to represent things like the "Barbed Fields" or the persistent recurrence of moon-like craters... Most of all though, I'm not quite sure that I'm correctly interpreting her markings for swamps/ wetlands/ grasslands, so by all means, feel free to weigh in with any comments/ critiques where I may have made the wrong "call" in interpreting her terrain markings and implementing them on this map.

As always, you friendly neighborhood (amateur) cartographer,

AGL