First Venture Into the Silverlands

Last year, Rob Conley over at Bat in the Attic put up a terrific post outlining a method for how to set up a fantasy sandbox. Take a look at that before reading further, because I'm going to be following his steps, probably fairly closely.

Silverlands is going to be a very traditional D&D setting; this means that all of the various D&D races and classes will be built in. I have little intention of stepping outside of the rules to devise custom stuff (but there will be exceptions to this, as we'll see later on.) At the same time, traditional or not, I have no desire to go back to the dark ages of mapping by hand along with late-night trips to the 24 hour copy place. So I'll be using modern tools, starting with Fractal Terrains Pro and Campaign Cartographer 2 Pro.

With that in mind, I present the world of Melantea:



The world map was designed using Fractal Terrains Pro from a random base and tweaked significantly, then exported to CC2Pro and thence to JPEG. All fairly easy thus far. The developed campaign area (the Silverlands themselves) are obviously going to be much smaller than the whole world.



The region pictured above is called the Attalosean Reach, so named for the great seafaring empire of Attalos which once held sway there. The continent of Inutheyn lies entirely within the region, as well as portions of the landmasses of Ghulan and Larnet. Much of eastern Inutheyn is civilized or nearly so; most of the west is wilderness or occupied by inimical tribes of humanoids... and possibly worse. It is in these savage expanses that the Silverlands lie.