Geography

Working reference only — no official map exists yet. The Mediterranean Sea serves as the "center of the world" and a real-world basis for comparison, not a literal template. Things will diverge as needed.

Scale

The known continents run roughly 50% smaller than their real-world equivalents. This is a deliberate compression, not a precise ratio to hold Claude or Rich to in every case — but it's the working assumption for travel-time and distance sanity checks.

At 50% scale, Jerusalem to Gibraltar along the North African coast (real-world ~5,000 km) is roughly 2,500 km. Approximate travel times at that distance: - Dedicated courier/messenger (single rider, real pace, no relay stations): under two months - Caravan or ordinary overland traveler (roads, carts, standard rest and resupply): roughly a season — three to four months

Both figures are useful in-world texture — a courier can meaningfully outrun the news of himself by weeks, which matters for espionage, urgent treaties, and anyone trying to get ahead of a rumor.

The Center — The Mediterranean Sea

The inland sea at the world's center is a living sea — full of water, sailed, fished, fought over. All Mediterranean islands remain Myrean Confederacy territory, and the Confederacy's greatest cities sit on the largest of them. The Confederacy is a naval power built on that water, not an airship-dependent one — see The Myrean Confederacy document. Airships exist in Tir Hathar (Catfolk invention — see Catfolk document) and matter to later developments, but they are not a substitute for a lost sea here.

Territory Map — Mediterranean-Analog Continent

Nation/People	Real-world analog
Caldrian Imperium	France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Albania
Myrean Confederacy	Egyptian/Libyan/Algerian coast only, Greece, all Mediterranean islands (incl. Sardinia)
Monster Kingdom / Ssyrathis (Medusa Empire)	Iberian Peninsula (Spain & Portugal)
Dar Ilm al-Zakir	Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan
Giants	Morocco, Gibraltar, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Belgium, Hungary
Dwarves	Alps (Switzerland, Austria), Germany, Carpathians, Pyrenees, Urals
Elves	UK, Ireland, Netherlands

Hungary is settled Giant territory (Zumakim) — not contested. The Giants took it very early in the Long War, around the same time as the sea-draining and the Catfolk Diaspora (see below and Giant Kingdoms document). The Imperium still nurses an old, mostly symbolic claim to it — the kind of grievance a nation keeps alive in schoolbooks rather than at the negotiating table — but there's no live dispute, no secret treaty, and nothing to hide.

Borders Worth Noting

• Monster Kingdom ↔ Dwarves: the Pyrenees, held by Dwarves, sit directly between the Imperium (France) and the Monster Kingdom (Iberia) — a chokepoint under dwarven control.
• Monster Kingdom ↔ Giants: Gibraltar. The single most tense border location on the map — two non-human powers in direct contact, neither of which most human nations fully trust.
• Monster Kingdom ↔ Confederacy: unofficial — the Iberian Mediterranean shore facing Confederacy island holdings. The Confederacy's outer islands are its most exposed, least-defensible territory.
• Dwarves are not one kingdom but a loose collection of mountain kingdoms sharing culture and trade, spread across every major range on the continent (Alps, Carpathians, Pyrenees, Urals) — plus a lost fifth foothold on the farside landmass; see below.
• Dar Ilm al-Zakir is the largest single territory on the map by a wide margin — coherence maintained through the Majlis structure and trade networks rather than military occupation.
• Elves are geographically the most isolated — separated from the continent by the Channel, with only a toe of territory in the Netherlands where the occasional Thorn slips through.

The Northern Reaches

Northeast of the Imperium and the Dwarven ranges sits an abbreviated Poland/Russia analog — compressed well past the usual 50% scale, but still sizable enough to be territory every bordering nation eyes and none has taken. The Ice-Trolls make up its "teeth" — one regenerating species, sexually dimorphic into nomadic, mammoth-riding males ("Yeti") and settled, spider-farming females ("Hags") — a biology-beats-army deterrent in the same category as the dinosaur continent's dinosaurs, not a political or military one, and not malice either: they're naturalists defending the grazing land their whole economy depends on. See The Northern Reaches and Peoples_Unconquered documents.

The Second Landmass — The Dinosaur Continent (African Analog)

Same landmass the Confederacy and Giants already hold partial territory on:

• Myrean Confederacy — coast only (Egyptian/Libyan/Algerian shore, as above)
• Giants — Morocco/Gibraltar corner, as above
• Lizardfolk — hold the interior, unconquered. Dinosaurs as the continent's apex predators are the reason why: no army, human or otherwise, has taken the interior at acceptable cost. This makes Lizardfolk sovereignty a fact of geography and biology rather than an accident of nobody bothering.
• Kobolds — subordinate to Lizardfolk within this same territory, as already established.

Dinosaurs run continent-wide, not confined to one region — but at natural-apex-predator density, not saturation. Think lion-equivalent numbers for something like a T-Rex: rare enough that a sighting is a genuine event, not a random encounter roll, and concentrated near water sources the way real apex predators cluster, rather than evenly spread. This keeps "dinosaurs everywhere" from meaning "a dinosaur every ten miles."

The continent's shape is kept as a real-world Africa analog, shrunk at the same ~50% scale as everything else — which means its climate bands hold roughly the same relationship to latitude they do now. That implies a Sahara-equivalent arid, sparsely inhabited band across the north, separate from and in addition to the dinosaur-driven wildness of the interior further south. That empty north is a second, independent reason Confederacy and Giant territory clusters where it does (coast and the water-adjacent Gibraltar corner) — not just avoiding dinosaurs, but avoiding true desert as well.

Open: precise interior boundaries, whether any other nation beyond coastal Confederacy/Giant territory has a foothold on this landmass.

The Farside Landmass and the Dried Sea (Catfolk Homeland, Now Goblin Territory)

Off the dinosaur continent's coast sits a second, separate landmass — roughly the size and shape of a Mexico-analog (working name: "Mexico," proper name TBD) — mostly jungle. It sits close enough to Africa that the water between the two reads as an enclosed sea, not open ocean, its character partly inspired by the Nile, the Yucatan, and the Caribbean — winding delta channels and island chains, now all salt flats, dry channels, and exposed reefs instead of open water. That enclosed body is the world's actual dried sea. All the texture originally drafted for a Mediterranean-basin dried sea — salt flats, stranded ships, exposed ruins — belongs here instead.

The southern connection to Africa: Mexico and the dinosaur continent actually touch at a southern point, forming the seabed's enclosed basin. That connection is marked by two large volcanoes (unnamed — see Open Questions) flanking a narrow crossing, which keeps ordinary travel and cultural crossover between the two landmasses down to nearly nothing despite the physical link.

Catfolk homeland: Before the sea dried, both shores — the dinosaur continent's coast and Mexico itself — were Catfolk ancestral territory, and Catfolk civilization there was fully Aztec/Incan-coded and thoroughly maritime: cities on both coasts, a fleet that used the sea as a highway rather than a barrier. Catfolk ruins are scattered across all of Mexico today — the physical remainder of a civilization that no longer holds the land. See Catfolk document.

The draining: Very early in the Long War, the Giants dried the sea, with the Caldrian Imperium lending a hand. The mechanism was rivers internal to Mexico itself: the Giants redirected the landmass's major rivers to empty into the open ocean on Mexico's far side instead of into the enclosed sea, and the basin dried out from there. This is no longer treated as a tightly held secret — it's known, or safely assumed, well beyond whatever small circle used to guard it. It was an act of war: draining the sea broke Catfolk civilization and took the Catfolk out of the Long War entirely, scattering them into diaspora (the Catfolk Diaspora) rather than defeating them in the field. See Catfolk and Giant Kingdoms documents.

Dwarven ruins: A mountain range on Mexico's far side — opposite the volcano crossing to Africa — was once a Dwarven holding, a fifth kingdom alongside the four on the main continent. The Dwarves were driven out by goblins after the Catfolk Diaspora and never reclaimed it. Old Dwarven ruins remain in those mountains. The Dwarves were never complicit in the sea-draining itself — that was purely Giants and Imperium.

Goblin takeover: With the Catfolk gone, goblins — previously a much smaller presence — spread to fill the vacuum across Mexico, including eventually pushing the Dwarves out of their mountain foothold. The Giants more or less expected this, if they didn't outright intend it. See Goblins document.

Gold, and a dragon: Mexico holds more than its fair share of the world's gold. That wealth is a real part of why Mexico has its own dragon — the Feathered Serpent, ruling a Demesne built on goblin labor, gold, and sheer charisma, with a Regent and Seneschal both drawn from Dwarven and Catfolk remnants who never left. See Dragons document.

Open: exact placement/scale of Mexico relative to the dinosaur continent and the rest of the map; names for Mexico itself, the dried sea, the two volcanoes, and the lost Dwarven mountain kingdom; how "known" the Giants/Imperium role in the draining actually is on a nation-by-nation basis.

Open / Undeveloped

• Shape and extent of the dinosaur continent beyond the coastal claims above
• Exact placement and scale of Mexico and its dried sea
• Any additional landmasses beyond the three established here
• Placement of the Dragon [Courts/Wyrmrests/Demesnes — naming TBD] — likely spread across multiple landmasses given their small number (3, possibly 5) and reclusive nature
• Whether the "small-ish continents, bigger than islands" instinct from earlier map discussion still applies beyond these known landmasses, or whether the world is trending toward fewer, larger landmasses as previously discussed