Lohwand: Come Together

The Beetles - Abbey Road

Things are starting to come together with my Lohwand campaign. I'm advancing on a wide front, what with tinkering with rules (see my Armatura posts), and pondering map scale, to doing research on the Roman World. All aspects of the Roman World. Lots of reading: books, lots of books, magazines and PHD papers from Academia.org not to mention the online sources: blogs, re-enactment sites, and the like. I'm going to have to set up an "Appendix N" page to highlight the sources.

As stated before, the Tharkallan Empire is my Rome. I even called them the "baddies". Sort of an evil empire, with the goal of World Conquest. That was probably a bit harsh. Lohwand certainly has other "Baddies" and to say that the Tharkallan Empire will turn out to be the worst of the lot is a bit pre-mature. It might not end up that way at all as the campaign plays out, for it is my intention for it to play out as it will, with only as minimal direction from myself as necessary.

Comparing Tharkalla to Rome, I see I've already got things backwards, giving them Britian (i.e. Granbretton, in my campaign) before they have Greece or Egypt or Spain. (The Lormyrian League region, Stygia and the region bordering Shem on my Lohwand maps.)

Lohwand

That is fine. It's a fantasy campaign after all, not a historical one. I'm afraid they aren't going to get to Aegyptus/Stygia for a little while yet as there is an internal revolt they have to suppress first, in the provinces of Voria and Bisset.

This is not my idea completely, but rather comes 1) from the Everway card results for those provinces and 2) the arrival of the comet, which I posted about earlier. The comet has quite innocently provided an interpretation of the Everway cards that might just fit!

More later...

Later...

The Heartland Provinces

The Western Heartland

Some more mapping, this time trying to detail a bit more the Heartland Provinces of the Tharkallan Empire. Borrowing names from popular works liberally here: Michael Moorcock's "Elric", Greg Stafford's Lunar empire (Glorantha), R.E. Howard's Conan stories, Tolkien, ERB's Barsoom.

The Tharkallan Heartland Provinces I listed previously: Jharkor, Dharijor, Dharjiin and Doblian. The Western Heartland consists of Kostaddi and Karasal, recognized only after they were conquered and incorporated into the Empire. The Heartland Legions are raised in these six provinces.

The other Tharkallan provinces, like Nemedia, Voria, and Bisset, do not have the same status; the legions raised there are the equivalent of Ancient Roman Auxiliary legions. They do not serve in the province they were raised, but are posted elsewhere in the Empire. 

Map Scale

I've decided two things, or at least am pretty sure about two things: 

1) I'm going to use kilometers as the unit of measure. I had toyed with using tsan (from Tekumel) but decided it was too much monkeying about and would needlessly complicate things. (A tsan is 1.333 km);

2) I think I've settled on how "big" Lohwand is, making 50 km roughly the width of the capital 'O' (Font: Book Antigua).

I've been playing around with making scale rules to show on the maps. I just have to come up with a way to ensure they remain consistent at the various zoom levels as I highlight one region or another. I think the key is to insert the scale into the region before I zoom in to do a screen-cap, move it about to a suitable spot where it isn't too much in the way, and then do the "print screen" to put the image on the clipboard. I didn't do that for the second map shown above. I just sort of fudged the scale "by eye".