Dragon 183 Terra Leãoça, 8 miles per hex

Bruce Heard very deftly dealt with the constraints of a single magazine page in his Voyage of the Princess Ark series, fitting his design for each new nation into a single half page map. But every now and then a particularly problematic area came up; such was the case with the small Vilaverdan colony of Terra Leãoça, which fit into a single bump in the coastline south of Bellayne and east of Herath. It would surely have been possible to present this area as an attachment to the map in Dragon 180, but since this didn’t happen — and since it was not possible to expand a map east or west due to the one-page format — it ended up as an extra little map in Dragon 183.

The map itself presents an arid little beach colony, with a new symbol indicating shoals along its coastline, and another new symbol to represent its lone mountain peak. For such a small map, it’s amazing that it provided not one but two new tools for Mystara’s cartographic toolbox.

Replica Map (November 2020)

Sources

• The Voyage of the Princess Ark Part 30: Web of the Wizard-King, Dragon 183 (July 1992)
  • Page 47 map, inset map, and key (Cartography by John Knecht)

Map Types

The Atlas of Mystara includes a few fundamentally different types of maps. The colour of the castle wall border on each map shows which category it belongs to.

• Replica maps (white castle border) are exact replicas of primary source maps. They present the world of Mystara as the original source materials depict it, warts and all. No attempt has been made to fix errors of any kind — even typos. As far as possible, replica maps use the same art as the original maps, though in many cases they are colourised. These maps are the main source material of the Atlas of Mystara, forming the base of all of the updated maps.
• Updated maps (green castle border) present the Atlas of Mystara’s consistent view of the world, with all errors, alignment issues, and so on fixed. They use standardised hex art and fonts. Anything not marked as a replica map is an updated map.
• Chronological maps (yellow castle border) provide snapshots of Mystara at the end of a certain year in its publication history. In effect, they are updated maps created from a limited list of sources. The years in question appear in the title of each map.
• Fan-made maps are unofficial maps created by other fan cartographers. As such, they do not follow the Atlas’s castle border colour scheme. The Atlas presents these maps in their original form, with the permission of the cartographers. The Atlas considers these maps secondary sources, and updated maps of areas not covered by official maps make extensive use of them. In a few cases, the Atlas also presents Replica fan-made maps (red castle border).