I've been working on version .2 of the map for the last three weeks or so; my apologies for how slow I'm going, but the NCAA Tournament is a harsh mistress. My hope had been to get version .2 out before "Sethra Lavode", but I doubt this will happen. I am not ready to post version .2 yet, but I wanted to give you all a status update, and solicite your help on a few issues I'm having. 1. Starting with version .2 and until we hit version 1.0 (that is, a map we all are fairly happy with), I'm going to use a much simpler map style, as this will make changes easier to make. 2. I no longer intend to document version .1. Instead, the documentation for version .2 will include both .1 and the changes in .2 as a single document. 3. I will save each version of the map image for "historical purposes" as was suggested here, but I don't think I'll maintain the old notes; that is, there will be one document that explains the latest version and that's it. This document will explain the entire map, not just the changes between the current version and the last version. When I released version .1, I was bogged down in three issues, and I kept going in circles on them, and I finally made the decision to ignore these three issues and get version .1 out there for everyone to begin discussing. The three issues I had with version .1 are (no text references here, I'll supply them when I post the document for version .2): 1. "Dragon" I could not make head or tails of Vlad's marching path from Castle Black to Mount Drift. It seemed to me he marched nearly 900 miles in 3 days, which is ludicrous. Assuming he marched from dawn to dusk, about 16 hours a day I'm guessing, that's 900 miles in 48 hours, or nearly 19 miles per hour. The world record for the 100km marathon is a little over 6 hours, and works out to be about 10 miles an hour. So Vlad would have gone almost twice as fast as the fastest human on record, without even noticing it was a particularly fast march. With a full pack, even! Since I released version .1, however, I've gone back to Alexx's Timeline, and he shows it took 7 days to reach the Eastern River. I had it at 3 days, Alexx at 7, I went back and double-checked, and it turns out I missed a couple of lines like "it rained for the next two days." Anyway, this went a long way towards solving the "Dragon" problem. I now believe Vlad marched almost due north, on the west side of the Eastern River (but not within sight of it) for 7 days, then turned east (or maybe northeast), crossed the river and stood at the foothills of Mount Drift. During those 7 days, he marched in the vicinity of 800 miles, which works out to about 7 miles per hour... still an awfully fast march but... well, I don't know enough to call that impossible. 2. Rivers I've previously mentioned the "crossing rivers" problem in an email with the subject line of "Geography: Candletown". Please search the mailing list to find my explanation of that problem, which still remains unsolved in my mind. 3. Newmarket Paarfi says Newmarket is 60 leagues from Dragaera City, or about 180 miles. Tazendra and crew travel 165 miles north-northeast of Dzur Mountain and cross the Eastern River on their way to Deathgate Falls. From that ford, Tazenda tells Piro that Newmarket is 30 or 40 miles away. So Dragaera City should be, at most, approximately 205 miles from this ford. That puts Dragaera City north and a little west of Dzur Mountain, and EAST of Adrilankha.... This makes the empire even narrower, east to west, and I was already uncomfortable with how narrow version .1 is (and a number of you remarked on its narrowness), so I ignored Newmarket so I could put Dragaera City further to the west, which made more sense with a number of other passages. However, Brust's recent posting in which he said he can only think of a single geographical mistake he's made has caused me to revisit this issue. Version .2 will include Newmarket, and thus Dragaera City will be much further east than it is in Version .1. This suggests the Adrilankha River takes an even more radical shape than the one I suggested in the Candletown email... There is a meadow directly on a line between DC and Dzur Mountain that is 300 miles north of Adrilankha... by moving DC to the east, I have to swing that meadow to the east as well, which means the Adrilankha River goes north and then east... and, to avoid crossing the Yendi River, it then appears to snake back to the west, run north for a while, then east, then back south so that Khaavren can cross it on his way to Redface... Unless someone can explain how rivers can cross... I'm not sure I mentioned it in the Candletown email or not, but it occurred to me that the Adrilankha and Yendi rivers might flow into a lake. Yendi from the NW, Adrilankha from the NE. Then, at the southern tip of this lake, two rivers flow out. Why this would happen, I don't know, but we already have a precedent since the Eastern River and the River From Faerie both flow out of a single lake, one to the east, one to the west. So, perhaps someone looked at this pattern, and said, "Oh, the Yendi river flows in from the northwest, then flows out to the southeast, and the Adrilankha river flows in from the northeast, then flows out to the southwest." Is that an acceptable "river crossing?" Does anyone know of a real-world example of such a lake? I would imagine the two rivers flowing out of the lake would be assigned new names. And even if this solves the river crossing problem, it still doesn't explain how the Grand Canal fits in... Anyway, I imagine version .2 will not be released until after I've added "Sethra Lavode" to the mix. Thank you all for your patience. Bryan Newell (http://bryann.net) My future crouched with bared teeth in the dark places of my mind.