Today I find myself picking up a thread I started a while back but never brought to completion. I realized that Gladius having no border defenses didn’t make a whole lot of sense, so I established the marchlands with small castles acting as border outposts. Four castles were built by King Rorik of the short-lived Rorician Dynasty (short-lived only because his fool of a son ran afoul of the patricians and was driven from the throne after a mere six-year reign). Randwulf then bolstered the defenses with four more castles.

Our current issue shows up when I was wanting to adjust my maps to accommodate these changes. While I was trying to pinpoint the locations of each of the castles, I noticed myself tripping up on which march was which. The reason for this is because my map of Gladius doesn’t have the conventional “north on top” orientation. The same is true of the map of Byrn. Now, you might be asking why they’re like that. Well, sit back for some story time.

You see, when I first started formulating the stories of my canon, each one was meant to be completely independent of the other. I imagine I was influenced by the RPGs such as the Final Fantasy series that rebuilt its worlds from scratch each game (until we started to see the more recent trend of lateral movement). Well, when I started to digitize all my materials back in ’01, I decided to compile all my stories into a single world and that meant stitching dozens of maps together. I’m rather pleased with the results. I didn’t have to change a whole lot make it work. However, I retained the original orientation of the maps, which leads us to our current situation.

The cheesy MS Paint bitmaps I have were only meant to be a temporary thing and I really need to redraw the maps and maybe this mess with the marchland castles in Gladius might be just the trigger for me to actually make it happen.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment