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Reinforcing the Scale

Posted on March 12, 2021

From time to time it is worth reinforcing the scale of Dragon Pass and the Holy Country. So basically, Dragon Pass is about the size of Northern California from the south shore of Lake Tahoe up to the Oregon border.

So at the beginning of the Third Age, imagine plenty of refugees fled from the Sacramento Valley to Sacramento and down to places like Stockton or San Francisco, similarly plenty of folk fled from the coast to places like Medford. That’s the scale we are operating on. These refugees spend the next two centuries in Esrolia and Heortland – and may not have been the ancestors of the people who returned to resettle Dragon Pass in the 1300s and 1400s. They aren’t keeping some giant notebook about the secrets of ancient tribes from a thousand or two thousand years ago. They might have the equivalent of Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography, with the names of places from the Second Age, but these are just names, with little attached to it:

And so those early settlers might have referred to Ogorvaltesland, Storn, and Selkos – pretty quickly they replaced those names with more useful ones: Balmyr, Colymar, the Far Place.

But now it is centuries later, and those old names are largely forgotten, except by a few sages and scribes.

So in this map, Nochet is placed at about San Francisco. Sacramento is somewhere around in the Stygian Marshes north of the Shadow Plateau (which seems right to me). Heortland is out in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Stormwalk Mountain is somewhere in Yosemite National Park.Kero Fin is somewhere in rugged Plumas County. and it looks like the Shaker Temple is somewhere near Mount Lassen (also seems appropriate). Furthest is somewhere around Mount Shasta, and Mirin’s Cross is at Grant’s Pass.Whitewall is at Lake Tahoe – which is a world away from San Francisco. Clearwine is somewhere in the Sierra Valley, and Boldhome itself would be east of Reno. Dagori Inkarth is out in the Black Rock Desert (also seems right to me). Pavis County is somewhere out in the wastes of central Nevada. And Arcata is deep in upland Aggar!

Jeff Richard

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