the evolution of alethustria

ready for a trip down memory lane? way way back in 2019 i crafted my first map for alethustria. i drew it myself on paper with a pencil and scanned it with my printer - the result is below!

3/08/2019

as you can see.... it's a little rough around the edges. but it's got heart! i also put a little piece of paper on top of a spoiler (which the party knows about now) where there's a giant vortex in the middle of that gulf... and they only learned about that recently! i've always had irons in the fire.

eventually i found a free software for mapmaking that i turned to for a more thorough and also more legible look at alethustria.

3/19/2019

about a week or two after the first map i put this together. of course this map has its own issues... no color to speak of, for one! but this is where i really started getting voracious for seeing my dreams realized of a really quality map. and so the search for the perfect software continued...

until 2020, when i found wonderdraft. that was the day everything changed, baby. take a look:

5/29/2020

with the power of this new software i went in. i was so happy to have high quality graphics to go with the image in my mind of the world i created. however, this too was just the start! i still had no idea how to really put the software to use. so, i kept working on it. and time flew...

1/20/2022

about 2 years later in 2022 i put this out. in this version you can see i finally added some color to everything. i think it helps a lot with visualizing biomes for the players. i also added a new landmass called faerenil to alethustria.

1/24/2022

hilariously, this version only came out 4 days after the last. here i made the colors of alethustria a LOT more vibrant and added notations for the various oceans, mountains, and continents of the world at large.

1/7/2023

it took a year for the next version to come out. in this 2023 version you can see the one glaring change of me marking out the continent of dregonus as it's unexplored in the lore of the game. i also added a few more markers to locations and changed the color of some lakes and rivers to match the actual colors of their water.

1/12/2024

today, we have what i lovingly call "version 4.1" of alethustria's map. it doesn't offer a super obvious change to the previous version except for one - the alteration of blackpool into daiven's lake. this is due to the actions of my wonderful players, who discovered a secret and unveiled a hidden tomb of a very important triton in history.