Of the twenty-something fantasy city-books highlighted in the #Hammondal biblio, Eidolon (and Sel-Kai) might take the "pleasantly surprised" award, because I've never been a Shadow World fan (still not) ... But my preconceptions were unfair to this book, which is Really Very Good. While it has some of Amthor's usual tics, they often end up serving, rather than undermining, the design. Dragon magazine called it the jewel of the Shadow World crown, and I agree.
More demographic mapping today. This is an early draft of the four dominant cultural/faith/language clusters as represented by Human inhabitants. There are no "race cultures" in the Candle Islands, though there are plenty of people who believe there are. For example, the spots of red are Saman Humans (Humans who are culturally Fjurin, Rolig or Grazny), which many Imperials dismiss as "Humans who think they're Dwarves I guess?"
I'm seat-of-the-pants about #WorldBuilding in some ways, but there's some arbitrary math guiding the scope of #Hammondal. The most important is probably the 1/8th rule, which says I cannot explicitly describe more than 1 location in 8 ... for every building/etc I describe, I need to leave 7 for the GM and/or later development. This is both a maximum and my target, so I'm trying to get very near to that 7:1 ratio but without exceeding it, price-is-right style. [continued] #TTRPG#TTRPGDesign