The map and the text

Sargent and Thomas, for the Shadow Elves, sketched out a map and a Gazetteer. At some point their editor was supposed to align the two.

In many cases over at TSR, this last part didn't happen so well: e.g. available Norwold space is less than the full map of CM1, Taladas went out rife with internal contradictions. And then there's Night Below. (Errk!) The ethos was, "let the DM smooth it all over". If we're to do that, first we have to isolate the roughness.

We'll start small. In the small map "Jorlinrath" names a road due east of the City. In the big map, the Jorlinrath cave hosts a Blackstone Hollow "tower" - but many miles northeast of the crossroad. This tower is redundant.

Page 5 in "History as the Shadow Elves Know It" summarises "New Grunland". This is a city, inside a cavern which is "half the size of the capital's" that is, the starry cavern of the Refuge. "Porador" is a farm town in "A Day in the Lives of the Shadow Elves". On the map, New Grunland is the cavern and it is much larger than the Refuge's. Instead the capital is "Jelden" and it's adjacent to a "Larkpoint" castle. There is no town "Porador"; other parts of the text will note it as Grunland's shadowelf clan.

The main text is insistent pp. 7, 8 that the 802 AC plague started in Glantri and hit hardest Alfmyr. The map makes this quite a feat given that Glantri is over New Grunland space; and over Alfmyr, is a lot of Alfheim. That the dwarves are blamed reminds of that old Yiddische kvetch, "goy fight goy and they blame . . ." Alfmyr is on the presumed Rockhome route, however.

The "Geography of the Shadow Elf Lands" p. 17 starts with Lakes and Waterways. Dragon Lake here takes effort to reconcile with the Dragon Lake of the map. The great Sojourner rivers flow slowly away from Dragon Lake in both directions: on the map, they flow from east to west, slightly southbound as well. Northeast goes to a pebbled shore, presumably the Sands of Qedain. That old lava flow on the map corresponds with Naralf's Hole, very much active, and which agrees with an outflow from Orcs of Thar.

That much is reconcilable enough. Less so is this unwieldly sentence:

The lakeside can be crossed on foot from the north canal to the point where the Boiling River flows out into Dragon Lake, but the temperature can be very extreme here at times so the shadow elves have built a series of rope bridges with very tough, fibrous fungal "rope" around the west and south sides of the Lake.

Say whut? This lake isn't sinuous Lake Travis, a dammed-up river. This is a roundish pool. Visitors will see no point in rope bridges "around" (over?) the lake. But wait - there's more! The south side of the lake is all coastline, wide enough at one point to sport a sizeable "town" - 3000+ people - which is named "Dunedea". None of this is in the text. The DM must assume the rope bridges to span the east Sojourner and Boiling rivermouths... which are on the east and north sides of this lake.

Also on the southern shore is the Desert of Lost Souls. Close upstream of major city - and Darokin route - Losetrel. Yeah, the DM's gonna hafta 'splain THAT away too. This horrible place is also connected by way of a wide neck to Elmglow, riddled with presumed-elfin villages. Certainly that neck is wider than that to its own east, the Lands of Doog.

Concerning the southern third of the map beyond the Sojourners and the Lost Souls' Waste, the text says all of this: south of Alfmyr, p. 29, are geonids and maybe extra caeciliae and basilisks. Interesting because the southern third underlies both the Alfheim and Darokin cities. Otherwise, pp. 53, 60 put agents up to Crowlerd via Losetrel.