“Located in the western portion of the Endless Sand Dunes, to the southwest of Celik, Durg’s Puddle is a tiny oasis with a small but clean pond at its center. The place wouldn’t deserve mention if not for the fact that the trade caravans from Celik use it as a resting point on the route that House Mareneth maintains to the southwest.”
Does anyone have any idea what canon might say is out SW of Drug’s Puddle? It’d be sandwiched between the Jagged Cliff and the Deadlands…
The only visible location sort of sw of Durg’s Puddle is the mountain range where the Blue Shrine is situated, other than that, I don’t there’s any canon information
Canon wise there’s very little. From what I’ve seen, even Secrets of the Dead Lands only mentions Durg’s Puddle as one of the last oases before the Dead Lands. There is a reference in SotDL to a recently formed slave tribe, mostly composed of dwarves and ‘in the distant south beyond Kalidnay’. It suggests that the members of the tribe are either refugees from Balic’s slave pits, or remnants of ‘lost caravans along the great western trade routes to the aarakocra nations there.’
If you take the unpublished SotDL as canon, then that implies that there must be aarakocra settlements to the south and west - perhaps in the mountains around Blue Shrine, or maybe even on the Jagged Cliffs, south of the Rhul-thaun settlement of Sunnil.
Is this from the original Wanderers Journal? If so then there were references to other city-states to the south but that idea was forgotten almost straight away.
No, I got it from the Revised Boxed Set.
I’ll check out the original Wanders Journal, just to see what it says. Thanks.
Original CS has nothing on cities to the south only mentions northern cities. “Draj enjoys heavy commerce with the other cities of the T yr Region (and some cities to the north, whose names I do not know).” pg65
“most merchant houses maintain large trading emporiums in five to ten different cities”. p25
Assuming no one’s trading with Ur Draxa, that’s an interesting line, because there are only 10 cities extant - the Seven Cities of the Tablelands, Celik to the South, and Eldaarich Kurn to the North (and Eldaarich does limited trade with House Azeth of Kurn only). Saragar is too far off the beaten track to qualify. Thamasku is isolated and the Bandit Kingdoms don’t strike me as being commerce friendly. Unless villages like Walis, Salt View, Altaruk etc are classed as ‘cities’ for the purposes of this line. shrugs
It is briefly mentioned in the section on North and South Leopolus - the whole purpose of the bridge the dwarves were trying to build was to shorten the caravan route between “Gulg and Nibenany to Balic and other cities south of the Tyr region.”
So initially there were other cities to the north (as mentioned in the Draj entry) and others to the south (as mentioned in the Leopolus entry.)
Nice catch, I knew i read this but my searches this morning kept coming up blank.
This is IMO, one of those “fun” narrative devices that the Wanderer foistes off on we readers from time to time.
Certainly there were cities to the South of the Tablelands /Try region at one time. But probably not within the Wanderer’s (or Dwarves of Leopolus’) lifetime. Or even since the end of the Cleansing Wars.
Is the Wanderer simply being an “unreliable” narrator, are they inducing the reader to wonder about and explore the greater world (and in doing so, throw off the oppression of the SM’s), was the setting just not fully conceived and we’re catching sight of the ragged edges of the setting? Probably a bit of all of them…
I agree but then the roads to the north and south would not be there if these cities were gone as if that was the case the roads to Kalidnay and Yaramuke would still be there. The more likely scenario is that past the tablelands map the world wasnt fleshed out, or even discussed much.
Yes, maybe/probably.
But those are the major roads, smaller roads (less frequently traveled) could still be there and just not appear on a map of this scale.
I think the Wanderer being unreliable may have been a bit retroactive. The setting description, including geography, changed a lot after the initial journal.
The Wander is an unreliable narrator in the sense that we’re getting his/their 1st person account and understanding of things; the Wander does not come across as or seem to be omniscient (like, say, the Watcher from Marvel’s old Silver Surfer cartoon, or What If).
Additionally, the Wander seems to have been incorrect about some things do to further updates/changes to the setting.
Looking at Wikipedia, I see that these make the Wander an ‘unreliable’ narrator, not an Unreliable Narrator by definition.