The Traders' Rim

[jshoer]

Though far out on the edge of the Cathedral Galaxy, the layout and performance of the wormhole channels within the Traders’ Rim makes this region vital for speeding commerce and communication among many galactic states.

CathedralGalaxy_TradersRim_210605.jpg

The people of the Traders’ Rim were quick to capitalize on this advantageous placement, earning their name from the Imperium and Harrow’s Core to Shobah and the Sector Republic. Traders from the Rim are some of the few people grudgingly accepted into the Free Worlds, making them a tenuous link between that region and the inner galaxy.

I'm working through dedicated regional maps of each nation in the Cathedral Galaxy, filling out the larger universe as I go. I've been enlarging sections of the original galactic map, which I drew by hand, photographed, selectively inverted, and then colored and labeled in Photoshop. Each region gets annotated with the homeworlds of its people, some lore and flavor, and then its own unique focus for that particular region: here, available resources and local trade goods.

This map makes me think of games like Race for the Galaxy, and immediately makes me wonder how to design a game making use of its routes and resources...

The illustration on this map also shows one of the wormhole anchors. Wormholes are multi-dimensional tunnels punched through three dimensions, so they would appear to us as spheres. I decided to take a bit of a different spin than the usual gate-in-a-ring construct (like we've seen recently on The Expanse) and instead make a spherical wormhole in a lattice cage. Ships fly through the lattice openings and into the wormhole's event horizon, emerging from another point and flying out through that lattice. As the lore text explains, points on the map indicating multiple connections would have multiple wormhole stations either orbiting one another or orbiting the same star or planet. I tried to draw the warped appearance of the cage where it's behind the wormhole opening; ultimately things that are more directly behind the wormhole appear smooshed into a bright band outlining the sphere. Unlike a black hole, though (which appears elsewhere on this map), you can see stars on the other side. I'm pretty happy with this depiction.