World Map part 1 - Northern and Southern Kath
In the Craft Wars series so far we have seen and heard about far more of the world than ever before. It is time, therefore, for me to attempt to figure out a world map. The maps will be terrible blobs, I warn you in advance.
This essay is going to focus on the New World, and the next will focus on the Old.
Let’s do this.
Basics of the world
Firstly, let’s get the basics out of the way. The world of the Craft Sequence is known as the Domain (to Craftsfolk, at least, but it hasn’t caught on) and is heavily based on our world and our cultures. I strongly disagree with theories I’ve seen on various social media platforms that it is literally our world in a distant future, but it is undeniably and deliberately inspired by countries and cultures we find in our own world. The approximate layout of this world map will, therefore, be based on our own continents, and many of my suppositions will be based on comparisons to our world. HOWEVER, countries as we know them seem…lacking. We have a lot of city-states and empires, but few countries per se.
I will also be bringing in information shared by Max Gladstone outwith the books, largely from last year’s AMAs, which you should definitely read.
Northern Kath
We spend most of our time in the series in Northern Kath, AKA North America. Unlike our world, the northern continent is separated from the southern due to, you know, giant serpents breaking the land bridge. As they do.
So, Northern Kath is going to be this kind-of-but-not-really-North-America-shaped blob:
Northern Kath does not, however, have an equivalent to the USA or Canada in it. There doesn’t appear to be any unified state, either in the style of the 50 US states, or a nation state. Instead, we know of a few spread out cities. If any geographers are reading this and would like to write about how this version of North America would work in practicality, please hit me up.
We are familiar with three major locations in Northern Kath: Alt Coulumb on the east coast (World Sea), Dresediel Lex on the west coast (Pax Ocean), and the Badlands somewhere in the middle, with an insignificant Edgemont somewhere in the there.
The Badlands represent the Great Plains that go down the middle (ish) of the continent, as described in Dead Country: “Several million years before, a vast and shallow stinking green algae sea had spread over what were now the midlands of continental Kath.” This does, to me knowledge, line up with real world geography, but hey I know very little about the Americas.
Alt Coulumb appears to be like New York or Boston, whereas Dresediel Lex is LA. We get the most specifics for DL, as we actually see a map at one point: “Dresediel Lex strangled a giant bay in the continent’s southwest corner.”
So our blob-map of Northern Kath now looks like this:
Where else can we plot onto this map?
There’s the Crack in the World, of course, somewhere in the Badlands. And we have a handful more cities whose locations can be extrapolated from the text, and which have been at times confirmed by Gladstone. Let’s take a look at Regis, Alt Selene, and Shikaw/Chikal.
Regis is first mentioned in Two Serpents Rise; we read that Regis has a “wealth of water”, can be reached by highway going north from Dresediel Lex, and that it is “north west” according to Tara. I’m placing it in the vicinity of Seattle or Vancouver in our world.
Tara also mentions “the Maw” as north west in the same description as Regis, but as that is the only reference to such a place I haven’t placed it. Ideas for what it represents and where it might be in the comments please.
Chikal and Shikaw are two names for the same city, that seems to be the nearest city to Edgemont (which is in the Badlands), and on the way from Edgemont to Alt Coulumb. It has frozen winters, wide boulevards, and its gods are “grizzly combines.” Not 100% sure what that latter phrase means, and if it has any connection to our world, but I don’t think it helps with geography. It’s the main location in the Choice of the Deathless Game, and I recall it seeming like an unusually generic city for the Craft Sequence when I played, no stand out features like DL or AC. There’s a reference to “the Greatwater.”
Given the name, cold winters, and Greatwater, I am putting it as equivalent to the cities around the Great Lakes - Chicago is my first thought, but I think it could be any of the cities in this sort of part of the continent.
Our third Northern Kathic city with some level of detail given is Alt Selene. We hear a lot about outbreaks and Craft rulings, that is has “death/ghost cults and warring spirits,” and that some horror befell the city in the God Wars, a siege that became a massacre. It isn’t until Dead Country that we learn more about its culture. Tara’s mother grew up there, and ran away with her father from the aforementioned massacre, going west to Edgemont.
We also get this particularly evocative description: “Her parents raised her for high scholarship and masquerade balls and all the aristocratic whirl of expatriate high society in antebellum Selene.”
Gladstone is very deliberate in his language, as a rule. “Antebellum” is an interesting choice for an American author, with its connotations of the South before the civil war. We also know that this city appears to be significantly Black, and that in the Domain, Kathic Blackness does not mean descent from slavery, but immigration. Tara’s family are Black, of course, but Gladstone also mentions “the transformed immigrant Glebland pantheons of Alt Selene,” and Glebland means Craft!African.
In terms of its location, I’m putting it generally south-east - partly from real world geography, and partly because of the travelling-west-to-Edgemont thing. In Wicked Problems Dawn thinks about “the bays of Alt Selene”, and we also read about a shipping container going to Alt Selene, so it’s clearly on the coast.
There are probably a variety of cities that could fit all or most of these hints, but the talk of masquerade balls and ghost cults makes this non-American think of New Orleans. I don’t have enough real-world landmarks (Florida panhandle, for example) to place Alt Selene where New Orleans is, to be honest, which is a bit of an oversight but hey. So it’s going generally south-east.
Assuming I am right about these three locations, our map now looks like this:
Do we have any other information about Northern Kathic locations?
Not as much as you might expect, to be honest. But here’s everything I could find:
“The cities of the frozen north” referenced alongside Shikaw. But cities obviously implies multiple. How far north are we talking? The Canadian/US border kind of north? Halfway up Canada north? Arctic circle north? Not enough data to decide.
Kovak, mentioned when Tara visits the Godmountain in Four Road Cross, and notes that it has good rail transport to DL, Regis and Kovak
And that’s kind of it for Northern Kath. For a while I thought Oxulhat might be in Northern Kath, but it seems to be Southern on further inspection. And then we have the Fangs…but they’re getting their own section.
So this is our final blob map of Northern Kath (pre-Fangs):
Southern Kath
We have spent very little time in Southern Kath other than our sojourn to the spirecliffs, so this section will be much shorter alas.
There are quite a few references to jungles and rainforest and, unfortunately, “zombie-worked plantations.” There’s a one off reference to essentially deforestation, and some to necromantic earth mining. Cities seem to be largely coastal. All of this sounds accurate to what I know of South America - other than the zombies, of course. However, skeleton kings commanding indentured workers on plantations doesn’t sound that far away from corporate-led deforestation of the Amazon for soybeans, timber, and cattle ranching…
In terms of named locations, we have Ajaiatez, Oxulhat, and Sin Calavan. Let’s go in reverse order.
Sin Calavan has only one reference in the books so far (I don’t have the full game text to hand, alas). The skazzerai shard that caused the spirecliff infection was on “a container ship out of Sin Calavan bound north to Alt Selene.” This implies to me that Sin Calavan is further south than Ajaiatez but not a great deal else.
Oxulhat is mentioned first in Two Serpents Rise as a “frontier of the old Quechal Empire”, a “desert citadel”, and as having a historical connection to Dresediel Lex but now being in a different ullamal conference. I had thought it might be on the same continent from this reference, but we later read that the markets in Ajaiatez “[drew] Oxulhat and the Southern Gleb with them.” Chakal, a Quechal deity, is said to have been killed in the “southern Oxulhat skirmishes” but that doesn’t tell us much about location.
And that’s it for Oxulhat. Given the Quechal connection, I’m putting it at the northernmost edge of the Southern Kathic continent. As the Quechal culture draws from Mesoamerican cultures, I generally consider it to cover most of what was the horn joining the two continents prior to the whole Fangs incident. Perhaps Oxulhat and Dresediel Lex represent the southern and northernmost extremes of that old Empire?
Now to Ajaiatez. We know from Choice of the Deathless that the heart of Ajaia’s realm is jungle and a Greater Ajaian River Basin, but the only part we see in the series proper is the semi-destroyed spirecliffs. Ajaiatez appears to refer to the whole area under Ajaia’s domain, as the spirecliffs are referenced as a “Two Serpents Project in Ajaiatez,” though later we are told workers were evacuated “mostly to Ajaiatez” and that Initiate Feltan’s initiation involved being in the “poison jungles south of Ajaiatez” which makes me think it’s more of a city. Not super important for my blob-map but I felt I needed to share the confusion. In Choice of the Deathless, the main character flies to Tassadon to visit Ajaia, so perhaps that is the city name?
I don’t know which side of the continent it’s on, only that it seems to be between Sin Calavan and Alt Selene. We also see one of the Serpents show up there at the start of Wicked Problems, so does that mean it’s relatively near to Dresediel Lex? The Serpents are huge, but not huge enough to span the entirety of central America, surely? They’re able to slither down the boulevards of Dresediel Lex, they CAN’T be big enough to stretch between continents.
(Not going to lie, the Serpent showing up totally threw me when I read the book the first time. I thought it was metaphorical for ages, but nope, actually there.)
The coast around the spirecliffs has a churning ocean, called the Maelstrom. I wondered if this was Fang-y originally, but then on reread there’s a line saying that there’s a debate as to whether it is a natural formation of currents around the spirecliffs or a response to the energy from the shard. So not Fangs. EXCEPT, in the same book the word maelstrom is used to describe a part of the ocean in the centre of the Fangs! Is this the same maelstrom or another one? Someone help me.
Ajaiatez is south of the Fangs, we just don’t know how far south. Dawn’s disruption to the markets on her travels to the spirecliffs are described as “moving south from the Badlands to the Fangs to Ajaiatez.”
With such minimal information, I have relied fairly heavily on physical maps of South America to help place these locations. Thus, here is my extremely vague blob-map of Southern Kath.
And now, let’s get onto the Fangs.
The Fangs
The Fangs are one of the two known geographical formations that are dramatically unlike our own world. A few thousand years ago, during the Contact Wars that brought Iskari and Camlaander invaders to Northern Kath*, the Quechal Empire used the Twin Serpents to try and stop them. What happened instead was the Cataclysm.
(*note that because of the SECOND geographical formation, the Skeld archipelago, Domain!Contact wasn’t the same as our world. More on that below.)
“Centuries ago, when High Quechal and Iskari fought the Contact Wars, our high priests sought to use the Serpents as a weapon. They drew Their blood to drive engines of war. In this folly they broke the continent in half. Only the Fangs now remain of all that ancient empire.”
We don’t know exactly how this happened, what the engines of war were, and what the Serpents actually did, but the outcome is the same: no Central Kath land bridge, and no more Quechal Empire.
We read that “refugees fled north to transform the village of Dresediel Lex into a metropolis” and that “on calm days you can see all the way down [through the ocean] to sunken Quechal cities overgrown with coral.” Millions died, and the Quechal Empire was no more.
Originally when we learned about the Fangs, I imagined this kind of slotting together thing, kind of like how you can see where Africa and South America would have fit together millions of years ago:
But that doesn’t work with Quechal cities sinking, really, does it? So I’m now inclined to think it’s more like if Central America shattered into pieces, with the fangs being land sticking up in the ocean rather than up and down from the continents. I could have sworn I remember a reference to the “Shattered Sea” but my searches are coming up with nothing, so it seems I imagined it.
We don’t see a great deal of the Fangs, but we hear some useful details. Mal talks about kayaking through the Fangs when she was younger:
“Some of the bays are still tainted by the Cataclysm, so the kraken and sea serpents and the other big monsters stay away. Wards on the kayaks deal with little ones.” A tall wave rolled beneath their feet. “The ocean between the Fangs is warmer than the Pax, shallower. On calm days you can see all the way down to sunken Quechal cities overgrown with coral.”
But we also know that the Fangs are not all calm, given this reference in Wicked Problems:
“Here was the great stone head, dredged from the maelstrom in the center of the Fangs, where the old Quechal High City sunk during the Contact Wars.”
Although the land was shattered, there are still somewhat liveable places. We read about Caleb and Mina on a field trip to the Fangs, with a reference to a pyramid and the jungle. The map I mentioned in the Dresediel Lex section also shows “blue lines wound…south into the jungles of the Fangs.” There’s also a reference to “Deathless Kings throughout the Fangs” which makes me think there must be some people and resources there, for the Deathless Kings to exploit. We don’t hear about any cities or cultures, though, so I have no idea how populated they might be.
Not a great deal of information, alas, but if we look at our real world geography of Central America, it seems that forest stretches south from southeastern Mexico, so those would be presumably be the jungle bits of the Fangs.
So let’s add some shattered islands to our blob-map:
Probably could have shattered the edges of the two continents more, but I have already committed to pen, so this is what we have. And…I reckon this is the best we can do for the Kathic continents. Any thoughts? Have I missed or misinterpreted any references, do you think?
Next time, we’ll look at the Old World - Craft versions of Asia, Africa, and Europe, along with the second entirely unique geographical formation: the Skeld Archipelago.
What do you think? Let me know!
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