Map of Zar

Bit quiet on the writing front; I'm editing Poisonroot when I can, but there's not been a lot going on.

Except...

I moved house. Again!

Anyway, the cat woke me up at 7.30 this morning (Sunday) and I decided to use the time wisely. My D&D group are journeying into Zar, and Trip's next story will take him there as well.

Some notes on Zar:

The heart of the Science and Industry College, Zar is a kingdom ruled by brothers, Iknis and Aknis Thunderheart; High King Iknis rules in Fjornik while Low King Aknis rules in Loknir. The SIC is based in Fjornik, although there are research centres all through the country.

The smallest of the five countries of Ehrian, its people tend to be short and hardy, fighting the snow and ice with the fire in their hearts. The further north you go the less inhabitable everything becomes; Fjornik, almost the most northerly settlement, is a bastion against the cold, heated by arcane technology developed by the SIC.

There will be lots of other notes about Zar as I continue to build it.

The font used is Colwell. I used Photoshop to make this.

South-Western Lyria - Map

I'm playing a game of D&D with the fantastic John Aggs at the moment. I made some of the maps available to the players as part of the game on the basis that they'd have seen them or, in one case, be given them.

John was kind enough to produce this:

A third map

The capital city of Lyria is a city called Fennica. I'm well aware that a lot of my place names end with an 'a'. Something to iron out. Anyway, it can be found here and it is intricate to say the least. I owe quite a lot to a program I downloaded from this site and it was initially a pain to use. Once I played with it a bit and modified the results through Photoshop I had a very serviceable map. I'm not going to be adding more to it until I've written something, as I didn't want to tie myself down just yet, but I think the time has come to write something for definite, even if it's just character profiles. Expect something this evening or tomorrow morning.

Bookwise, I've recently finished The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on the Kindle. It's pretty good; some of what I'd consider to be the lesser-known stories simply because the enormously popular ones are the ones that get rolled out time and time again. It was very enjoyable and some of the amazing feats of deduction were very interesting to read. It's a little disappointing, in some ways, that some of the deductions are truly impossible for the reader to follow; I enjoy a story where I can try and work out what's going on in my own head before the story gets there, or at least make an educated guess. A lot of the Holmes stories seem to rely on the smudge of black ink on the thumb of the man who came to call three days ago that we just didn't know about. Very enjoyable though, and free!