Cartography

Good Morning / Afternoon / Evening wherever you are.

Once again we are on the edge of another weekend and I thought I would drop you a quick update. STELLAR INCOGNITA is ready to go next week and I'm also preparing the January update now, since the holiday season is always hectic. Likewise, 8 DAYS WITH THE DIVA is also getting packed and ready for distribution in mid-December.

Amazingly, I still have time to work on "Fantasy Project" and no fantasy world is complete without a map. So here's a map (larger version attached below). The more astute of you may recognize a lot of the names and their associated bastardizations. I noticed that a lot of adult fantasy games take place in some vague land with sophisticated castles and plate armor, which places them somewhere in the High to Late Middle Ages. The new fantasy world I am developing is based on Celtic mythology and would be dated somewhere around 100 BC to AD 300.

We all have a certain image of ancient Celts. Berserkers with blue woad face paint and mysterious druids (maybe you think of Asterix). At the height of their power in about 400 BC, they stretched from central Europe to Spain to Ireland and in 390 BC, the Gallic chief Brennus sacked Rome. Sadly, the Celts did not write anything down and as the Celtic world slowly dissolved away, who knows what oral stories we have lost? It was at the edges of Europe did Celtic culture endure longer, in the British Isles. But it was only in the Middle Ages that many of these Celtic myths and legends get recorded, so many of the original meanings are probably lost, due to an unneeded overlay of Christian sensibility.

For those aware of Celtic mythology, the game will take a lot of influence from the most famous stories of the Irish Mythological Cycle, the Ulster Cycle and the Fenian Cycle. I also plan to slip some of the Welsh Mabinogi in there as well. Gaelic is hard to pronounce for an English speaker as the rules of spelling are different. Also, there is often no one agreement as to how something is pronounced. I've made the decision to spell things phonetically in most cases, so an English speaker using English rules will get an approximation of how it would be said. So some of the famous figures in the myths like "Fionn Macumhail" becomes "Finn MocHuul" and "Cú Chulainn" becomes "Cu Hollun".

If Celtic mythology is a mystery to you, it shouldn't pose any problem. Hopefully I'll be able to craft a fantasy story that is enjoyable and interesting and without the need for any pre-knowledge. For those that know the stories and characters, then maybe there will be an extra level of interest there where you can say "Oh, I see what Slamjax did there..."