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Wyvern

Wyvern

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Wyvern
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  • Community Atlas: Embra - Wooded Places

    As usual, the last part of this "Places" set covers the various roadways appropriate for the group, with four such streets:

    The first two have some focal aspects determined by their respective featured texts, though the third, Holloway Dew is a slightly sunken routeway, flanked by dew ponds, except for the large, circular, labelled "Dew Pond" at the street's right-angle turn, which is actually an aquifer-fed lake, not a dew pond at all! The names here are a mix of the almost-ordinary, the nonsensical and the weird, though a couple along Moonshadow Field are intended as mildly humorous, as My Newt, smallest property on this road, is a tiny tavern (apparently - this is Faerie, however), while the Endless Stand Inn originates with the old work-related "task" of sending the new person down to the stores for a long stand... Glittering House adds a bit more magic though, as it's only there so long as the White Moon shines upon it (another of my early literary influences was behind this, Errwood Hall in Alan Garner's novel "The Moon of Gomrath", from 1963).

    Loopysue[Deleted User]AleDpablo gonzalez
  • Community Atlas: Embra - Wooded Places

    Last of the individual Wooded Places is this group's segment of the Twilight Market, Green Market, where instead of the colourful and unusual tents and awnings of many other parts of the Twilight Market, all the stalls are set into the colourful and unusual vegetation, or grown from it in one way or another. It is a Faerie Wooded Place, so what else?

    There might be an argument too that having started using some of the Mike Schley treehouse symbols from very early on in the Embra "Places" mapping, it was inevitable I'd sooner or later want to use more of the "ordinary" trees from it too. That despite the fact I've grown to love the Fantasy Town mapping style during this whole Embra mapping project; there's something very satisfyingly 3D about the woods it can generate with a little bit of effort, for instance. Should anyone be wondering, all the trees, bushes and flowers (= tiny varicolor trees) were placed individually, not using the CC3+ random drawing tool options, throughout the entire Embra collection, incidentally.

    Loopysue[Deleted User]
  • Community Atlas: Embra - Wooded Places

    Wooded Place 5 is Wistful Hollow Chapel:

    This was naturally somewhat easier as a drawing, with more random than planned vegetation, if still with a few substantial trees, and a lavish scattering of flowers across the Chapel's grounds. I picked the base map - yet another castle-form, who'd have guessed? - because the outline for what became the grounds looked like a very sketchy drawing of a prehistoric stone hand-axe, even though that has no bearing on the map or its contents at all!

    Indeed, the Chapel's primary inhabitant (not even mentioned in the featured text) is a living, golden, Oriental Dragon that provides advice to the deserving who come here. That wasn't simply on a whim, but because there's a genuine church (the High Kirk of St. Giles) at the real-world city of Edinburgh that has a Chinese Dragon decoration in it. It wasn't hard to see that Embra needed something similar.

    The map ended-up looking rather different to a lot of the larger Embra maps too, as the size of the buildings needed to be on a suitable "draconic" scale, so they almost look as if the map's in one of the smaller border frames, for all the map scales alongside clearly show it isn't.

    Not all the illustrated structures are full buildings, as the "Interiors" toggle view demonstrates:

    The Gates to the grounds are simply covered gateways, lychgate-style, while there's a tiled-roof walkway crossing the path between the Chapel and Side Chapel, not a linking building.

    [Deleted User]AleD
  • Community Atlas: Embra - Wooded Places

    Not content with the complexities of a spiralling maze-like design, Wooded Places map 4 was to be a complete maze, the Hydras In Smoke Maze, no less. An apparently overblown title, though one that may make more sense if you consider the woods hereabouts are always notably misty - hydra/hydro-"smoke", or very loosely "water-smoke", if you will... This one DID take quite some time to complete, as it's a big maze. Firstly, the whole map:

    Then a closer view of just the mapped place:

    And for anyone wondering, yes it's THAT Mrs. Trellis (from the very long-running "I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue" BBC radio comedy series for those unfamiliar; don't worry if this is strange territory, as she features in the series only occasionally in confused, reported written speech). Here, she comes complete with a strong North Welsh accent, now and then lapsing into full Welsh when stressed, albeit also transformed into a powerful Faerie being, serving the most exquisite cream teas.

    The handful of buildings have interior views as well:

    To help anyone struggling to define the maze pathways, there should be an extra toggle in the Atlas FCW file to show just that layout:

    As you'll likely have realised, the choice of what went where within the Maze was very deliberate, such as the circular Tennis Court, the hexagonal Bowling Green and the Bandstand with no room for anyone to sit and listen to the music nearby, when other locations would have been clearly far more "suitable", had this been anywhere other than a Faerie city, at least.

    Loopysue[Deleted User]
  • Community Atlas: Embra - Wooded Places

    The third map in the Wooded Places set gave me an opportunity to try something I've wanted to do for a long time, map some spiral patterns in woodland. Those sufficiently familiar with fantasy fiction might guess the idea originated in the "Mythago Wood" tales by Robert Holdstock (the original novel, "Mythago Wood", was published first in 1984), which made a lasting impression on me from when I read them back then. The final map though bore only a mild, passing resemblance to its original base. Thus came to be Spiral Glade Park:

    The details are a little tricky to see at this resolution, so again, we can try a somewhat closer view of just the map part:

    For those wondering, yes, Sleeping Lotus Hill does have a simple sketch of the sleeping Fey woman in white of the map's featured text, and her spiralling golden hair, surrounded by lotus blossoms. There are also a lot more flowers scattered across this map, as with several other of the Embra Places, of course. The PDF and text file notes suggest some possible benefits from traversing the spirals, and a warning regarding the curious grassy hummocks mostly hidden by the lotuses...

    Loopysue[Deleted User]