Having seen several Forum topics in recent months regarding the creation, and recreation, of maps from various past fantasy settings, both literary and in role-playing games, and despite having several ongoing mapping projects for the Nibirum Community Atlas, I've lately become distracted into trying a map of the Dying Earth, based on the fiction of Jack Vance that used this setting. Vance's Dying Earth writings were one main fantasy influence on the original Dungeons & Dragons RPG, and they continue to resonate in numerous other games now.

In approaching it, there's the complication that there are no definitive maps created or authorised by the original author himself for the complete world he created, and the story descriptions are sometimes vague enough to make constructing one tricky. Prior to the post-pandemic period, there'd been probably no more than five attempts, all of which show sometimes considerable variations between one another, and sometimes split between different maps. This post on the Lost Delights blog from 2020 discusses the five, with image links.

Over and since the pandemic, there has been one more, by Doug Kovacs, created specially for the boxed set for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG by Goodman Games, following their hugely successful Kickstarter campaign to produce a Dying Earth setting for the DCC rules in 2021. There are some images of the map on the Goodman Games store page for the boxed set. Even so, despite this being perhaps the most colourfully lively and more nearly complete of all the maps, the vagaries of the tales mean all such attempts are based on personal interpretations, and thus none are truly definitive.

I'd had my own vague notions of trying to map the Dying Earth, going back more than 40 years to when I first read the stories, deterred previously by that vagueness. Having recently managed to secure a copy of the DCC boxed set though, I thought it might be fun to try to redraw the Kovacs map (and maybe some of the others later) as a CC3+ version. Hence this topic.

For those unfamiliar with the setting, it is in Earth's 21st Aeon (an unimaginably vast time ahead of our own). The following is a snapshot provided in one of the earliest tales, "T'sais", first published in 1950 in "The Dying Earth" anthology of six stories. "T'sais" is the third of the six. Pandelume, a near-god-like mathematician-magician, whose form must never be seen as it would cause utter madness, speaks:

""Earth," mused Pandelume. "A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a white blazing ball. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. There is evil on Earth, evil distilled by time… Earth is dying and in its twilight…""

Add to that that the Moon is long gone, stars in the night sky are very few, that the world is filled with marvels and dangers both magical and technological (there is no difference between them) and has been visited by creatures and beings from what were once distant stars and galaxies, all too now largely long gone and forgotten, and you start to get an impression of where we are!

So, preamble done. Now to the mapping. I chose Ralf's Hand-Drawn Fantasy overland style, as it had worked very well for my attempt at redrawing the Blackmarsh partial world map previously, and this was going to be a similar project. The first complication was there's no scale on the Kovacs map (or indeed, on most of the others), largely thanks to the vagueness in the tales. So I simply went with an approximation of the ratio, and doubled the normal map area to 2000 by 1600 mapping units. Dropped-in a copy of the Kovacs map to trace on the normal BITMAP Layer and Sheet, and started drawing. This is an early screenshot:

It was taken some way in to the mapping, as I'd had a couple of false starts by this point. At one stage, I'd thought it might be possible to split the main landmass in two along the line of that curious river that apparently connects the northern and southern oceans, but it proved much too tricky to get the river width to look right. Given that this style uses the Color Key effect to cut through the land to the sea, that wasn't really necessary anyway.

Most of what's visible here is a test, to see what works and what doesn't, and the odd-looking, truncated river lines will be tidied-up as mapping proceeds. It has been strange to stick with the default Effects settings that use the Percent of Drawing Extents Width here, which I'd ordinarily swap-out for Map Units instead, but as they work very nicely at this level of viewing, all seems well.

The next image shows how the river lines are going to be tweaked, added-to and adapted along the way, just in that Kauchique quadrant for now:

Other adjustments have been made too, in changing the deeper sea contours, and such processes are liable to recur frequently as the journey proceeds, given this is not going to be a rapid process, because of the detailing involved.

Somewhat strangely, I found I was adding the map detail much as if it were hand-drawn in reality, from left to right:

As each of these snapshots shows the progress from an individual mapping session, it took several days to get to this stage:

Which is where things are currently; clearly, with lots more still to do!

Resurrecting this topic, as another, but much larger, map in a similar style has recently come to my attention, as a version of it was recently republished by the H P Lovecraft Historical Society as a period prop to accompany their latest Dark Adventure Radio Theatre audio show, "The Blood Red Sphinx". It's a 1932 pictorial map of the Greater Los Angeles area:

The reason I can post it here, is because this version comes from Wikimedia, and that's where you can find a much larger, higher-res version (albeit the Index list is STILL too small on the largest version to read clearly!). Its colour palette reminds me of the beautiful E Prybylski Watercolour style, from the 2023 Cartographer's Annual. All we'd need is a vast array of suitable building and other object symbols to match 😉😁!

Sadly, a very familiar concept here too... Just keep plugging away as and when time allows, much like myself, Shessar 😁!

Naturally, I wanted to continue the overall hand-drawn theme here, now using Ralf's more recent Hand-Drawn Dungeon style:

I did think of adding a surface map too, but decided against that, and just showed a simple Entrance cave, which is open at ground level, leading down and inside. Rather than use another fill style here, I reused that for the inner section of the Tomb, with a scatter of small rocks, as the entryway is supposed to be half-buried and not that easy to access (noted in the PDF description).

The two main blocs underground were determined from lightly adapted versions of the notes in the Inkwell Ideas book that accompanies the "Trailblazer" geomorphic dice set, the "Dungeonmorph: Book of Modular Encounters - Delver, Trailblazer & Voyager Edition", with the names again provided via the "Nomicon". The Spectral Minotaur Maze layout was enlarged a little compared to the actual dice design, including a few extra doors, because although the dice-only version was good, it didn't feel quite "mazy" enough here, which changes also brought in the sliding walls concept, to further muddy the waters.

In the Atlas FCW file, with luck, there will be toggles to allow the five Sliding Walls to be switched individually from one position to their alternates. Here of course, I have to show five different illustrations, for all the changes in each are very slight, best-seen if you save copies of all six images and switch from one to the next as a slideshow.

The shot above is the default view. This shows the moved W1 wall:

This W2:

W3:

W4:

And W5:

There is, as noted on the map, an actual Spectral Minotaur, Javeng, to defend the Maze, plus six more that he's created over time from treasure-seeking adventurers. Like all the undead here, he's powerful and reforms even if destroyed, plus the strong magics that operate and maintain the complex mean none of the undead can be turned away by priestly characters, while unattended doors close on their own, and markers in the Maze vanish or are moved. The Minotaurs can't leave the Maze area at least, hence why the floors are so clearly differentiated.

The Tomb area is constructed around the square Spiral Descent Passage. I'd have been happier with stairs that didn't have that black "corner", as they can work less well on maps such as this, which show multiple levels on the same drawing. However, I preferred to use just the symbols currently available in the style, and they don't look as bad here as those which simply cut through and remove part of the lower stairs, making it seem they've crumbled away!

The Treasure Chamber should have a boat and a wagon in it, although as neither are present as symbols (yet!) in this style either, I made-do with what there is. There are also five skeletons there as well, but that looked a little too cluttered and "samey" with the current options, so the room contents overall are just a sketch-reminder version instead. The PDF notes say more, of course.

Deeper down, the Rock Trap triggers via the lowest step on the third staircase, hence the trap marker there. The whole wall section fronting the hidden room pivots to block the Descent Passage up, then the damaging rocks roll right down to the door to Tomb G. A short while later, magically, they all roll back up to the secret room to reset!

The General's Tomb (he's the only one here not undead; a legendarily masterful leader in life, famed for many great deeds) is floored and roofed with green marble, with a black marble platform for his large, brass sarcophagus, with illustration-engraved brass wall panels all around. No green marble available here, so I improvised with an RGB Matrix Process effect. And spent ages tweaking it to look reasonably OK! The platform is the varicolor closed pit symbol, stretched to become rectangular.

Lady Zhembo, yet another spectre, betrayed her lover, the General, to his death, was caught, executed and cursed to remain here, perpetually mourning him. High Priest Chetseng, the strongest spectre in the complex, who in life set the curse, is here to make sure she never leaves.

Next time, it's a return visit to Peredur, to find a suitable location in Ruma Helrevy there...

As mentioned in my latest post regarding the Temple of Nidag maps in Alarius, the next maps in this series were going to be visited upon Kumarikandam, somewhere in the Xinxing Region on the great Tiantang Grasslands:

Looking over the extant Atlas mapping for this area showed a number of possibilities, as relatively little had been mapped in more detail here previously; essentially just the settlements of Shinsato and Ylangxi. Having already established, from adapted materials in the Inkwell Ideas book that accompanies the Trailblazer geomorphic dungeon designs I'd be using here, that this was going to be a combined maze and tomb, I wanted somewhere more out of the way to place it, and eventually settled on the Mingjue Ruins, next to the map's top edge:

The various pictorial structures on this Xinxing map are, as so often, overscale, as that orange square outlining my selected place is actually 20 miles per side!

Thus, when zoomed-in to just that area, the ruins stretch almost right across the whole zone, here with the usual numerical grid added, with one-mile squares, so I can randomly place features of interest subsequently:

Preferring to try to work with what this showed, rather than simply reducing the region occupied by the ruins, I decided that something weird must have happened in the past to create the huge areas of dead forest all around that enormous chasm, and which was perhaps associated with why the ruins were here, and so seemingly extensive. Thus rather than all being structural ruins, I instead made the ground across the ruins area especially rough, with low, grassy hills and rockier tors, as well as some genuine old structures, given it's frequently hard to say modernly whether this or that grassy knoll or tor is really a natural feature, or an ancient ruin, without detailed investigation. Being in the tropics too, around 15°S latitude, the grasslands were set as having very tall grasses in season, to help further disguise the nature of the land here.

While I didn't prepare a series of WIP shots while preparing this map, I did a couple of test images to check if the symbol scaling I'd settled upon was working satisfactorily, which give an impression of what had been decided and where, all prepared using Ralf's new Hand-Drawn Fantasy style:

This one was very early in the process, with only a few features, beyond sketching-in much of the existing terrain, but it gives an idea of how I'd opted to lay-out the are-they-aren't-they ruins.

The following image was much further along in the mapping, and was done as a test to check the font sizing and effects as much as anything. The Tomb of General Chengdai, incidentally, is the site for the dungeon map here, hence why it's already been labelled:

A few further tweaks were necessary subsequently, of which perhaps the most major was swapping-out all those brown broken tree-trunk symbols for more of the simpler black-line dead trees, mostly because, having had doubts earlier, I realised it was a bit confusing/distracting for some of the smaller feature symbols. This was so even after I'd added the rest of the labels. Which brings us to the final version of the map:

Options for what the various features were, were determined using random tables found throughout the "Knave" 2nd edition RPG rules, published by Jacob Hurst & Swordfish Islands LLC, with most of the names determined also randomly from tables in the "Nomicon", published by Mythmere Games.

I chose not to add any streams, just ponds, partly to sustain the overall feeling of ruination hereabouts, partly because I felt allowing GMs to add minor brooks wherever might seem interesting, was a better idea. I did add a comment about this in the PDF notes for the Atlas, as well as notes on the various labelled features.

There was one further very late change, following the publication of the latest free Hand-Drawn Fantasy monthly symbols for cliffs, in late January. I toyed momentarily with adding those new cliff symbols along the visible edges of the Canyon, but that proved unworkable, as the mapped edges were already drawn, and the symbols couldn't be easily fitted to them. Instead, I hand-drew some little vertical "cliff-lines" along those same visible edges, which seem to help enhance the existing darker effects shading around the Canyon edges. Many ended-up hidden by the Canyon's label, but at least I know they're there!

With this completed, it was time to head underground (next time)...