Yesterday I posted a bit of a history of the world I use for my D&D world that has been around since I was a youth. But I forgot a step (you will find I will forget a lot of stuff as this blog continues), the world took a huge change in the late 1980s, early 1990s. I apologize for the quality of the pictures, I had to take them with my phone, I don’t have access to a scanner here in China for some reason.

You will notice a few things, first it is blurry as all get out. Apologies, I am HORRID at taking pictures of things. Second, the size, you can see the tip of my foot in the bottom of the picture. Considering I wear size 14 shoes in the USA (size 50 in China, a size they do not even make here, I have to get my shoes custom made), I did not crop the shoe off so you can gauge the size of the map. It is about 3-4 feet from top to bottom, so it is a pretty huge piece of paper. Lastly, you will notice that the other maps were longer from left to right and this is longer top to bottom, so what happened?

What happened with this (short lived, despite how much work my young self put into it) version of the map was that I got a bunch of this huge hex paper for free and I wanted to use it. In my young mind, free was more important than consistency, so why not! I was about 13-14 years of age when I made this. But you will see a lot more of the world get fleshed out and even some things that disappear in the later version you have seen yesterday.

Here we see parts of the map a bit closer, and think goodness, a bit more clear as well.

You can see a few things that have changed, for some reason, I put the Abysmal Swamp west, south west of the Apuno lands, and Middenlund is not even on here at all anymore, I just leave that area blank. I did add the Jupair-Gimesh Hills, mostly because I needed to add locations due to the fact this map was so much more taller than wider now. It was going to be a land run by beastials as a buffer between the Middenlund and the Apuno Lands. Honestly, I am happy this area disappeared, however I do like the name. Maybe, it will make a return some day, some way.

You can also see the original land that started this all, the barbarian lands of Guardias (shown in a blog post here about a week ago), is also not marked. You can see the city of Norcross, and even the tiny town of Blackwater – even the city of Kobur Nogan and the Rust River, but no title. I did include the Shard plains to the west though. I even included red dotted lines for political borders. No Guardias though. Sorry barbarians.

Here are some close up shots of the same map. You will see a few things here. First, in the north west, The city of Mikonec and the area of Ehee-cheeo, close by Yakpu-Qui and Uhili-Qui. This was a huge, huge mistake. Mikonec was the captial of the Miquatica (a race of Aztecs influenced people) surrounded by the lands of the Tian Tang (a race of people based on China. The new map for these lands will appear here some day). Eventually, the Miquatica got moved to the south lands now called the Ash Peninsula, but yeah… in my young old mind, this was a good idea for some reason.

Here is where the human race of ‘Proth’ came from as well. But where the city was once called Proth and run by humans of the same name, the city is now just known as “The City at the Edge of the World” and is run by elves (Elves are hedonistic, arrogant jerks in this world and yes, these are the same elves that fought a war against the dwarves of Kobur Illid I mentioned a few posts ago).

In the center of the Great Inner Sea are two islands of note (The small island from yesterday becomes a few larger islands *face palm*) the Ram’s Head Isle: which is kind of like Switzerland, no weapons allowed by visitors and basically there for anyone from the Murk Lands to come and trade. The other isle is Voro’s Isle. Voro is the land’s ‘Gandalf’, or ‘Elminster’, accept he does not meddle in anyone’s business (That is ‘The Benefactor’s job. More on them later). He has had very little impact in any of the game’s I have ran over the years. Some of my player’s are unsure if he (or she) is still alive. Even the name changes depends who you ask. Voro, Vorom, Voromyr, are all names used to describe this enigmatic figure. Personally, I like that a lot better than someone like Elminster, who everyone in the Forgotten Realms knows everything about. Heck, some of my players even spread rumors about Voro in order to achieve things in the game, which is always clever.

The last thing I am going to talk about today is the Mer-Succhur Marsh. Named so for the plague of the Succhur. What is this plague you ask? Well, I will tell you. There are various bloated flies that are a bit more bloated than normal flies, and have a red mark on them somewhere (varies from fly to fly). If some one is bitten by one of these flies and is not treated they become a carrier. Eventually (1d4 days adjusted for CON), the character gets weak. At the end of the gestation period, the carriers head swells up like a pustule and bursts, revealing a mass of rope-like tentacles that are evenly spaced around the area where the neck used to be. The neck is now the mouth of the Succhur and the rope-like tentacles now attempt to entangle a near by victim and drag them into the maw (which now stretches to engulf any victim.

For some reason, my players only ventured there once and after meeting a Succhur, they never returned.

I could have added a LOT more detail here, but life calls. Would you like to know more? let me know. Is my grammar terrible? Let me know. Is there anything you would like to see me go over with more detail? Let me know.

Keep smiling everyone. Don’t get bitten by weird looking flies.