Jonstown Geology and Architecture

[Joerg]

Looking at the very nice Jonstown map previews, I was surprised at the mesa-like structures of the Jonstown hills - those slope symbols used by Greg in his original map can be interpreted as something else than vertical inclines. For comparison, look at the original map of White Bear and Red Moon, which has just slopes outlining the hill territory of upland Sartar, and compare the William Church map in RQ2 or the more detailed version of it on the Dragon Pass game board which resolves those hills into lots of slopes of varying inclinations.

We know about some mesas in the region - Pegasus Plateau and Larnste's Table being the most prominent.

 

Whenever I see a relief - whether in person, or on a map - I wonder what forces would have created this landscape. (Blame my early school experiences for a fascination with glaciers, maps, and how one leads into the other.)

Relief is created by the forces of orogeny - forces which push up or deposite elevations - and forces of erosion, and occasionally major cave-ins (or dragons taking to the wings, or giants rising up) leaving depressions.

 

The primal force of orogeny in the region was Larnste, the Soul Arranger. He had been given the job to erect a mountain range to deal with the conflict of two peoples - some sources talk about strife between Aldryami and Mostali, but it might as well have been giants and dragons. The way Larnste sowed the Rockwood Mountains was not how the forces of stasis would have imagined that, though - rather than isolating the two populations from one another, he split each of the communities with the mountain ranges, allowing them to develop on their own, furthering change. Later on, the gap he left (known as the greater region of Dragon Pass) became a center of traffic, another expression of the Movement/Change rune.

Larnste fathered Kero Fin by pushing her mountain seed especially deep into the earth. From these extra deep roots rose the highest peak of all of the Rockwood Mountains, isolated because Larnste became fascinated with the Dragons and Dragonewts. He might have helped provide the immature dragons a way to become True Dragons despite their neotenic birth, introducing them to gradual change rather than the normal draconic way of emerging with the full birthright of a dragon.

 

Kero Fin started out as a solitary peak, but she was successfully courted by Veskarthan (Lodril) multiple times, and their children pushed up out of the earth around the Mother of Mountains. Their mightiest son towards Prax was Quivin, who grouped a number of siblings, offspring or other followers around him, forming the Quivin peaks.

Quite a lot of lesser peaks arose around Quivin. Some were visitors who remained, like Thorgeir's Cow. Others may have been less successful siblings or offspring, pushing up but never quite breaking through, or pushing up and then facing unfriendly neighbors. And a few may have taken the ancestral inheritance from Larnste to heart and roamed the area as giants or their livestock, or they left the region.

Similarly, newly hatched dragons - the foremost of the dragonewts who had hastened through their developmental cycles - would lay down between such peaks, meditate for a few centuries or millennia (as far as that makes sense for the cyclical experience of Godtime), and then gathered the lands around them to take to wings in a much grander stature than they started with. Some would settle down again, and enter another period of meditation, often confused with sleep or even death by the lesser beings crawling across them.

But most draconic ranges would have awakened during the EWF, when draconic energies converged on this region, and humans actively sought to awaken these entities or to become one with them. Some few humans succeeded as individuals, others as collectives.

One of the later feats of orogeny was initiated by Larnste again - when he stamped the squirming PreDark monster Krarsht, the shock did not only leave his footprint in the geography of Heortland, it also pushed up a range of mountains between Quivin and his brother whose original name we do not know, but whose corpse we know as Stormwalk. That range became the accepted border between Tada's kingdom and the lands of the husbands of the Earth Queens in and around Ezel, and both sides built these up higher - by magic, or - for a bit of the Sambari Pass - even by stacking slabs of rock into a wall. (This may have been in connection to Orlanth commisioning Aedin's Wall around his Storm Village in the Storm Realm.)

 

All that point force lifting up the crust of the Earth Cube did raise quite a bit of that away from the deeper layers, and may have left behind hollows.

Fossil evidence e.g. from the descent into Snake Pipe Hollow proves that all the upper bedrock away from the volcanic or otherways basaltic peaks pushing up transformed deep material once had been underwater. However, even during the highest extent during the Flood Age, the Storm Gods had kept this area free from sea coverage, which means that those fossils must be way older, from before any myths of gods, giants or dragons of the land.

The merfolk tell legends of how Bab, the cube of food and nourishment, formed and then rose inside the primal waters. Even as the Earth grew, taking in raw Creation from the Chaosium, the Seas and its earliest beings partook of it, wore off the living matter and then excreted the stuff they would take little or no nourishment from, forming the layers of limestone, possibly depending on cycles of marine life development, sometimes depositing reddish stuff rich in ochre, at other times leaving white or gray stuff behind dominated by chalk. And these layers would sometimes have been deposited on the backs of tendrils of water boring deeper into the rich nutrients generously provided by the Earth. And so, tunnels filled with water may have been present inside that surface material even long before the cube broke free of the upper end of the Sea, starting the Green Age.

That way, we don't even have to wait for rainfall and resulting leeching of that toprock for cavities to have formed in that material.

Come the Earth Shakers, huge hulking beasts stomping down on these surfaces, causing many a cave-in while leaving other such elevations intact.

 

Such massive cave-ins following now collapsed tunnels are the best justification for limestone mesas like those shown for Jonstown that I can come up with. Water erosion doesn't quite cut it this way, and glacial erosion doesn't usually leave mesas. These mesas being pushed up later doesn't look right, either - however rounded, new mountains rise up as phalluses, not flat top-heads.

 

The access tunnel to the old hill-fort is nifty. I would guess that Sartar had it built.

I do wonder why the city expansion did not make use of that nice upper mesa. Is that some sort of sacred pasture? In any case, it looks like a patch of very secure pasture - no way to raid any cattle grazing here.

Where does Jonstown get its water supply from? The upper mesa might serve as a catchment area for cisterns under the hill fort, and the lower city might have wells. The Issaries Hill houses would need a cistern, too.

Most houses seem to have sensible slanted roofs to push any rainfall to the sides of the houses. The bottom floor masonry, upper stories timber and filled frames (possibly bricks, possibly masonry, possibly wattle and daub) does look faintly like the oldest still standing parts in ancient European cities, but function does define form and material.

The southern wall is in a state of bad disrepair, and so does an area inside the walls south of the main city gate and north of those gaps - possibly the consequences of a fire, or siege engines/magics.

Any post-Dragonrise uprising would probably have been staged from the inside of the city. I don't see any events like Flashman in Kabul with a strongly reduced remaining garrison that was spared duty at the New Temple dedication (at the time probably left here as punishment for bad behavior or at the very least for slacking, missing out on the sacrificial feasts), which makes me wonder what force would have attacked the walls of the lower city from the south.

 

I hope we will get a map for the part of the city north of Issaries Hill - it is all hidden in the isometric view.