The Ironcrag Cantons
The dwarves of the Ironcrags, residents of Open Design’s world of Zobeck, are a tribal bunch. They live in their individual cantons scattered throughout the Ironcrag Mountains. This was created for the Dwarves of the Ironcrags gazeteer. I had to create all the heraldry too which was a fun learning experience. Rights reserved.
I like this. Looking at the St. Mischau region, I thought the lake flowed out to the Juralt and to Lake Vorash, but then I realised the river flows into the mountains to the north. This is the sort of idea I had at first when I was looking at Priolo Pass. Since the road has switchbacks, it’s clearly climbing. The fiver right next to it seems to climb over the hills of that gap as well. I thought how interesting it would be to have great gaping caverns and tunnels carved through the rock there to allow the lake to flow out and drain that region for habitation. I realise this world has already been written up, but perhaps a future project could include something like this.
Absolutely. Rivers are a tricky feature to add, as they really pin down your elevations. There are actually quite subtle rules as to what rivers do and don’t tend to do, and they tend to be the features that are most often wrong on fantasy maps. In this case I’d have to say I’m guilty as charged with that river running over a mountain pass. My defence is that it’s actually through a gorge, with the road going up and over the pass to one side. The scale here is very large, so there’s no way to show that level of detail. Of course that’s a bit of a dodge and I should have found a way to indicate what was going on, but that’s the justification.
The river in St. Mischau does indeed flow straight into the mountain, creating part of the underground terrain in the area. I do love the idea of underground rivers – but as this was a commercial project, this was part of the art brief that I was handed. I don’t usually get to introduce new features to the world’s I’m commissioned to illustrate. However if you’re interested in underground river systems you might like this: The Low River