the Elyden Globe Project - part 1

I’ve reworked the base map after deciding to go for a simple black and white image that I’ll paint once it’s stuck to the globe. That should keep the printing costs down and help me exercise my painting skills, which I haven’t used in ages.

Gores + nullambit - finally

My work on the map also led me to cracking something I’ve been flummoxed by for a long time now - the Nullambit.

The Nullambit: is a region and supranatural phenomena that spans the globe, at an angle to the equator. It is equidistant from the Atramental and Firmamental fonts (the Black Fountain and the Menisucs; at 8o57’33”S 27o56’20”W and 8o57’33”N 152o03’40”E, respectively) and is the farthest point from the two regions, circumventing the globe of Elyden.

The closer one gets to the Nullambit the weaker the effects of the Atramenta and the Firmament become, making shaping and technarcane use a lot more difficult. The farther one moves from the Nullambit (and closer to the antipodes of the Black Fountain or the True Meniscus) the stronger relative shaping becomes and the more pronounced the respective effects become. Within a radius of 10 - 100-miles of the antipodes survival becomes close to impossible, with both the Atramenta and the Firmament coming up many horrific and inventive ways of debilitating and killing mortal life there.   

TLDR: it’s another equator at a tangent to the real one, whose poles are the two magical fonts, which are antipodes.

Nullambit 3D

I’d been struggling to get this properly depicted on a map and after lots of maths, messing about with projections, flipping things back and forth, I gave up, knowing I’d have to revisit it at some point. When I end up wasting loads of time on something without progress, I;ve learnt to let it go, and then come back to it later with a fresh perspective. And lo, that’s what I did and it worked.
Now I can go back and add the proper Nullambit to my finished maps and the atlas maps too.

So now that’s out of the way I can concentrate on the actual map, though I won’t be going overboard with the labels (mostly due to the annoyance of having to split up names between gores)! - so just nations, capitals, major cities and landmarks that are pertinent on such a scale, sea routs, trade routes, rivers and the lagest geographical features.

#elyden, #fantasyglobe, #globe, #fantasycartography