Day 2: What's the geography of your world?
wahoo, an excuse to Post Map!
here is an interactive version of my working map of auspice, complete with some cute little pins! i'll post some images of the maps below as well:
this map doesn't cover
all of auspice—there may be additional islands and such on the other side of the world—but it does cover auspice as it's known to the characters. auspice's landmass is concentrated on this supercontinent, so the map does cover most of the world's
significant geography. auspice spins retrograde, and is host to a colossal panthalassic ocean that keeps the world running hotter and moister than our own on average. (shoutout to unrepentantAuthor for their help in sorting all this out!)
the story takes place across these two continents: dry and desolate senia to the north (red/pink/grey on the political map), moist and forested frith to the south (green/orange on the political map). they collide at the subcontinent of deren, a the temperate, swampy, highly mountainous chokepoint (painted yellow on the political map).
senia is the cradle of civilization on auspice, and was in ancient times a highly fertile region, though it has become nonarable desert over the last several hundred years due to the harmful effects of the harnessing of the qahn (more on this in a later post). it is the ethnic homeland of the sifa people, as well as a number of coastal mvzge tribes. a minority of the sifa people still practice the sedentary qahnic religion and ritually wander the vast desert that once made up the heartland of civilization on the continent; now all that remains are ruins and sacred roads as old as time. to the north of the desert is a virtually uninhabited tundra (painted grey), where penguins the size of two men run free. the majority of the sife have settled into a highly diverse collection of citystates on the continent's archipelago (painted pink), southwest of the desert. this region has a pleasant mediterranean climate.
the continent of frith is mostly covered in dense rainforest—most of the area painted green is a huge jungle called the Sagewood, which has seen little human exploration but is home to a species of sapient birds simply called the wisebirds. the northern head of frith, painted orange on the map, was a mountainous area in time immemorial but has since been weathered away into gently sloping hills and dry plans and savannas sliced through with rivers, with some taiga to the far north. this area, called the frithian lowlands, the giantsrealm, or simply the lowlands, is home to a colossal subspecies of human covered in shaggy fur. this land is highly fertile and hospitable, but guarded fiercely by the giants.
deren is a small subcontinent being subducted by both the senian and frithian plates, and as a result is home to a chain of very young, very tall, ever-growing mountains. runoff from these mountains collects in the middle of the continent, creating a highly marshy environment home to giant, marsh-dwelling creatures called
swamp drakes. these mountains are inhabited by the derrish race, a feudal group of people who arrived on auspice through an ancient numenite portal only within the last several thousand years. the temperate, mountainous environment of the area somewhat resembles their homeland.
finally, the isle of ash (painted white) is an uninhabited island between the lowlands and the sefian desert. its climate is intensely frigid, and the landmass is surrounded in ice, restricting travel around it. the island's extreme climate appears to be somewhat of an anomaly; there doesn't seem to be any apparent cause for its consistently low temperature and persistent blizzards, but the very inhospitality of the island by its nature makes the matter difficult to investigate.
um, that is a ton of text for something that doesn't even end up being super descriptive and isn't particularly interesting to most people, so i will cut it off here.
