Now our Rough Guide to Glamour has gone Electrum, I thought it might be nice to share the first notes I sent Glorantha’s master cartographer Colin Driver while he was working on the map that ended up on p.60 of the book:
The thing I really want to get across with this map is is the relief. I did it very crudely with that grey gradient (steep upward slope) and black bar (Crater Rim), but it’s got to be possible to draw those more attractively. This is about showing the relationship between the Walls (the black outer wall of chunkiness, the white inner wall of Disney) and the terrain (the human-occupied city on the flat lowlands, the magical pleasure palaces and noble estates rising up the rumpled mountainside, with the Imperial Palace of Moonson at the lip of the Crater, and the white Silver Road / Bridge as a connecting thread running through the picture).
Essentially, the top half of the map above is on a constantly upwards gradient (inc. relief features: knolls and crags and ridges, etc.), with Moonson’s Palace as the very highest point in the City, a couple of thousand metres above ground level. Once we rotate it 45 degrees it should be easier to show that just beyond the Crater Wall is a bottomless pit
The lower half of this map is essentially flat lowlands. The ground becomes rumpled and hilly as you move upwards (into the grey zone), and rapidly rises to the Crater’s peaks (the black zone). The City of Dreams and the Old City (the darker red semicircle) are on a raised ridge that sticks out from the Crater – they’re much lower than its crags and peaks, but significantly higher than the ground below (you have to go up staircases to get to the highest parts of the old city).
Silver Road / Silver Bridge: the grey line from the top to bottom of the map is the main route through the city: entering at the Gate of Four Beasts, it rises (via what’s essentially a magical suspension bridge) to the Old City, passes through the Citadel of Halfway, and then becomes a silver arc rising in a parabola towards the Imperial Palace – it actually keeps going beyond the Palace, stretching up to the Red Moon itself, but we don’t need to go that far. I wonder if a cross-section showing the relative heights of things would be useful?
Outer Walls, Gates and Towers: the thick black circle around Glamour is the main city wall, and the 18 red diamonds are its gates. These are big, thick, chunky, impressive fortifications: think of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, or the Gates of Nineveh. Equally impressive is the Inner Wall that separates Inner Glamour (the green semicircle) from Outer Glamour (the pink semicircle), that has a couple of its own gates. The Gate of Four Beasts is the biggest and most impressive of these gates, and should stand out as such.
Inside the green semicircle of Inner Glamour, there’s another circular wall around the City of Dreams, which we call the Wall of Sleep. This is more delicate, fairytale, Disney, Arabian Nights, Mad King Ludwig architecture: the six white dots mark its towers, tall slim minarets. This shines like silver, white marble or moonlight. I think ideally it’d be drawn in white unless that gets confusing with roads (which could be grey instead) (it is still in black on the map above, please correct this).
The City of Dreams is a magical pleasure garden/palace complex for the ruler of the world’s greatest Empire: it’s a Forbidden City, Xanadu, Versailles, Vegas Adult Disneyland for the Emperor’s pleasure. There are palaces dotted around its terraced grounds – some parts are wild grottoes and mountain glades, other parts are terraced hanging gardens with beautiful waterfalls streaming down from the crags.
Outside the City of Dreams are the two green “horns” on the map. (Ignore the waxing & waning labels). The one on the left is the Silver Horn, which is a weird wilderness containing a mix of picturesque ruins, isolated sorcerers’ towers, research observatories, secluded estates where folk be strange, follies, and dark woods haunted by magical creatures. There are no roads through the Silver Horn, or none that you can trust: if you set off into this Forbidden Forest, all those magical creatures, werewolves, wild women and the like are going to lure you off the path and do unspeakable things to you.
The one on the right, the Ivory Horn, contains stately homes, formal planned estates and small palaces owned by the seriously wealthy, all set among landscaped parkland and terraced gardens. These are private gated communities: you could ride between them along well-maintained scenic roads, take picnics on beautiful hilltops, etc. Where the Silver Horn is wild and dangerous, the Ivory Horn has been tamed.
(The City of Dreams is a mix of both, reflecting the Red Emperor’s schizophrenic tendencies and lapses into insanity: if you’re invited to one of Moonson’s parties, you’re never quite sure whether it’ll be a formal togas-and-frocks dinner, an anything-goes pansexual orgy, or a terrifying experience where unlucky guests will be chased across a private hunting preserve by baying packs of the Imperial Family (and their deformed ancestors and descendants), all dressed in animal skins and wielding sharp sickles)
That leaves two significant places on the map.
The Citadel of Halfway is the gateway between Outer and Inner Glamour. It’s a walled citadel, a city-within-a-city that looks kinda like the Kremlin or the Vatican City. St Basil’s Cathedral is actually a feature, as is a Red Square called “Red Square” (which is marked on the map as a red, er, rectangle). The gateway the Silver Road passes through is, of course, the Silver Gate, and it’s possibly a hybrid between the clunky/ chunky/ functional architecture of the other city gates and the Disney fantasy minarets inside the City of Dreams – this is the place where those two styles collide.
And Moonson’s Palace is amazing. It’s all white or silver curtain-walls and towers and lattices and minarets, straight up the mountainside, with waterfalls raining down from the Crater (somehow, don’t ask me, it’s magic), and the Emperor’s House is at the very tip-top of a Crater-rim peak, where the Silver Bridge touches it and then goes hyperbolic up to the Moon itself (I know, it’s just a white line of light on the map, but it’s all kinds of awesome)…