The Cartomancer's Map

[jshoer]

Wow that is really stunning. I've never seen an inside border detailed quite so beautifully. And the design of the forests is something I might emulate! Love the mixture of stand alone trees against the clump versions. Very well done deffinitely!

Thanks, Epic, I'm really glad you think so highly of that border and the forests. Please feel free to emulate the style! If you look back through my progress, I originally did the forests without the freestanding trees around them, and they sure do make the overall style flow together really well.

Mappy New Year, everyone! I spent some of the eve invoking all Austable's cartomantic changes in one of my wife's fountain pen inks. Here's a quick photo:

IMG_20200101_111352.jpg

In this style of cartomancy, one starts with a base map containing the incantation to render it cartomantically active. Austable du lo Vellumi printed the incantation along the ribbon on the border. It roughly translates to "let the map show the land, and [let] the land be [so]." Then, one makes changes to the base map - usually by pasting fresh paper over the features to be changed, and then drawing new features upon the fresh material. A wise cartomancer cuts the blank material to limit the scope of the changes they have to implement as much as possible. Finally, one invokes the changes by adding cartomantic symbols around them. Usually these include a border, to constrain the magic to a particular region. Scale bars indicate changes in topography. Windroses help invoke changes to fluid flows, including wind and water. When he invoked the changes, Austable also wrote explanatory notes.

Austable would work with many cartomantic maps at a variety of scales, and only regional-scale changes of the Barony would appear here. Furthermore, a limitation of cartomancy is that it cannot affect people or things built by people - which is why those are the only things labeled on this map; they are immutable here!

There's one spot that Austable gave over to his apprentice, who tried to remove a stand of trees. However, he flubbed the ink and his invocation work was messy, and he accidentally not only removed the trees but sunk the land such that it become prone to flooding in rain and high tide. Austable was obviously grumpy about this. He also took a gray-green ink and sketched in the boundary of the lowland and how the road was diverted to more easily cross. He didn't give that apprentice access to the regional map of the Barony again.