The elves of Tir Thelandira don’t know much about arcane magic. The magic that priests and druids can do? They understand that just fine. Basically, god does magic for you*. Simple. But wizard magic is something they don’t understand. And if you don’t understand it, you can’t teach it. And, in a society that can’t teach magic, there’s only one type of mage that can exist: wild mages.
A wild mage named Selaira lives here. She wasn’t the first to be born with an innate gift for magic, but she’s the first to really investigate it, to try to learn how it works. She’s the first to do experiments and write books about her findings. At the moment, she’s teaching other wild mages to better harness their abilities, but she’s starting to suspect that she can teach magic to people without an innate gift. If she figures that out, magic might go from being a rare gift to a widespread ability that affects every part of society.
Considering the major role that magic plays in other elven societies, this is a bit like peanut butter being mere moments away from the discovery of jelly. A very exciting moment in history, to say the least.
Next, I’ll be drawing the Chateau D’If. This is a 16th century island prison just south of France. Part of the book The Count of Monte Cristo takes place there. I’ll be drawing it as best I can with the limited amount of reference material available. Which is to say, I can’t find a proper floor plan, so I’m going to have to make some stuff up. Still, I think it’ll make a great map.
Anyway, I’m gonna get to work on Classy French Alcatraz. Let me know what you think of the map!
*I know this isn’t how everyone interprets it, but that’s how it works in my games.
the more you work on this project the more i want to use it for an iomandra campaign (a setting chris perkin’s homebrewed and shaed the lore of in a column he had about dming)
Well, I’ve only got four more maps to draw for this before it’s done. Although I’ll be working on other islands in the same world for much longer. The next one will be very different from Tir Thelandira.
just this project in general, iomandra is a flooded world
This is neat, I especially like the shady-mushroom porch.
One question: There are no barriers on the windows or exterior stairwells. Is the climate so nice they are unnecessary? Are they just not shown on the map? Or is weird elven sorcery keeping the wind and rain at bay?
They’d probably cover the stairs with a board or something normally, but I wanted it to be clear where the stairs were, so I drew them uncovered. And the PCs would move the covers to get up there, so that’s how they’d see them anyway.
I love this map! It’s so detailed and beautiful.