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Smoking Ruins Sketch


Jim

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Might be of use if you are using a virtual table top in the unlikely circumstances that your drawing skills are worse than mine 🙂.

Drawn as there isn't a map without the key and locations marked AFAIK. You can always tell your player that a Eumali with no fingers made a sketch for them.

HTH

Smoking_Ruins_Sketch.jpeg

Edited by Jim
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After reading through the scenario a few times in detail I think that the map (or descriptions) don't seem to line up.

The 'climbable road' is mentioned as being a way to access the east side of the ruins, but the map has it coming up on the south side to the west of the waterfall. This would mean clambering over the stream and the rubble around it to reach the east side. This is not really what is described (p.76).

I suspect the 'climbable road' should be positioned to the east side of the waterfall, probably the road that led to the Merchant's Gate (Location A).

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  • 3 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...
2 minutes ago, Jim said:

@Jason D if chaosium is able to release a player map it would be great if it could be correct so it reflects the description in scenario. I realise this would involve altering the current 3D map though. 

It would be more practical to alter the description of the Smoking Ruins to reflect the map (as soon as TSR needs to be reprinted?). 

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Much like the new map of Jonstown, this map suggests a terraced mesa, with Korolstead occupying the westernmost ledge of a ridge. The way the ridges in the back are drawn suggests to me that those parts lie higher than the hilltop fort and overlook it in its entirety. Unless there is a sacred hilltop dedicated to Orlanth, why would that part of the plateau not be included in the old royal seat?

The weirdly irregular shape of the fortifications must have made sense to the Vingkotling Age builders of the cyclopean walls. Could this layout have started as a glyph consisting of runic shapes put together, interlocking? The southern end might be reminiscent of a Communication rune.

 

Already at the Dawn, this site harbored a population of a thousand. Korolstead became the royal stead of the Heortlings and may have retained that role until the Broken Council and then the Bright Empire conquered the region and took authority into the hands of its imperial delegate Palangio. After the Gbaji Wars, the high council of Orlanthland took over, and may have moved to the later council site. Still, Korolstead remained as an urban center in the EWF.

From the description of the search for the scenario maguffin, even though the surviving structures or ruins thereof stem from the EWF, the settlement has formed a tell - a hillock made from several layers of construction and rubble atop one another, raising the area inside the walls over the surrounding plateau. The layers of rubble and accumulated soil are many meters high, possibly up to the level of the original, cyclopean walls built from those seamless polygonal rocks the Vingkotling era architecture boasted.

The EWF collapsed when all the Dragonspeakers found (possibly limited) liberation in 1042, called by the dragonewts and aided by the Blue Moon cult. The site would have remained occupied well until the imminent arrival of the Invincibe Golden Horde, possibly repopulating after the famine and loss to abduction in the 1042 Pelorian raid by the Carmanians, Dara Happans and Sairdites.

These 78 years, the last three or four generations of human occupation inside the former EWF architecture, after an iconoclastic mob of plunderers had gone after everything valuable or reminiscent of draconic worship, may have re-decorated the site with more traditional Orlanthi murals and statuary.

 

If these stacked mesas are the norm for Dragon Pass geography, there are bound to be sub-basements and access tunnels like the entryway to the upper city of Jonstown at all these ancient hill forts.

 

For a brook creating a waterfall emerging from the lower levels of the tell, there must be an aquifer collecting from a larger catchment area at higher ground, or an artesian well connected somehow to the upper slopes of the Skyreach Mountains, or tapping into some magical underground flow seeking to reach the surface no matter the elevation. The river coming from Axe Hall running down the side of Shadow Plateau and then  joining the Lyksos is another such example.

The presence of such a source of water could have been the reason for the Vingkotlings to choose this ledge over the mountain summit. Still, the absence of any construction further up and the wall facing the cliffs leading further up bug me a bit.

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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