Dau: Almaeran region map with conlang

[Tiana]

This map was my submission for the April 2022 mapping challenge, where it won a gold compass in a tie, on the theme of Water. Dau is the Ekaeli word for water and the name of a significant city set by a waterfall leading towards Lake Riana and the sea. A rare piece of personal worldbuilding for me. I decided to repost it here in the finished maps section because I'm still fond of this weird region map which showcases the roads and topography in the area my protagonist, Saerin, lives. She's significantly influenced the settlement in the area. I labelled it both in English and in Ekaeli, not a direct cipher but actually in the conlang.

[HINDSIGHT]

The language adds a lot. I would test out how it looks with handwritten Ekaeli and machine/capital letters for the english. I would also keep some colored elements (maybe the roads and border) in a more neutral color. But maybe those changes would take away the unique look. Good work on a believable alphabet as well, I assumed it was Tamil.

[Tiana]

The language adds a lot. I would test out how it looks with handwritten Ekaeli and machine/capital letters for the english. I would also keep some colored elements (maybe the roads and border) in a more neutral color. But maybe those changes would take away the unique look. Good work on a believable alphabet as well, I assumed it was Tamil.

Thanks for your comment!

I technically have an Ekaeli font so I could do both, but I don't LOVE MY Ekaeli font, it's from like the 3rd draft of the alphabet. I hand-lettered in English because I imagined the same artist was labelling it. Maybe I'll do a variation with an English font after I create another Ekaeli font. It's a bit tricky to do as a font though because of how the vowels float, I think maybe if I cannibalize a Devanagari font I could make it work to type while set to the Hindi keyboard.

It's on its like 6th draft of the abugida (the first and second was just a direct English to Ekaeli cypher, made in 2006 I think) so I should hope it's reasonably believable by now! The last 2 drafts were to make the lettering things that only felt good to draw. The main critique I have is that I went a little overboard and added some letterforms that don't typically show up in the conlang words. I could probably cut them.

While when I began to design it I didn't feel like I was inspired by any real world culture, I would agree with your assessment of Tamil and also add, it definitely functions a lot like Devanaghari, except without an assumed 'a' if there is no vowel marker... saving me from having to make like 80 combined consonant compounds. o_o It certainly came out of all my edits over the years with an Indian region feel for the shape and swoops of it.

more neutral color.

Never! (though I can see why you think it would be a good request, it would surely be more comfortable to view)

I only do that for my clients.

I will never create a comfortably neutral and predictable color version of Almaera. Every single map of it is either impossible colors or garish oversaturated versions of the colors you expect.

This is Almaera, my own lore. The whole place started with the garish concept of a shadow realm with a purple sky and rust red dirt, that was the evil mirror version of the human world where all the evil elves came from when I was 14, which was made by shapeshifters who occupy every part of the world and life. Part of the truce the shapeshifters made with humans was to mark their offspring with garishly oversaturated eyes, indicating their presence, and an agreement that elemental magic was associated with a specific color infests the lore. The planet of Almaera themselves is associated with purple. Almaera is a shapeshifting collective whose aesthetic defines Almaera the planet, and their aesthetic is not one of gentle neutrality. They are the god of Mystery and Chaos, the ever-burning night carnival, of fun and mayhem. Every single map of Almaera has garish oversaturated colors.

This world will burn your eyes.

The border represents the magic system of the setting and its null flow cycle. The colors are lore vital and permeate the themes and concepts within the writing.

It is not so for Carmen, the sister planet of the humans, the real world that the shapeshifters decided to copy and decorate to make their own. When I map Carmen, I typically use browns, greys, or a standard blue/green with a focus on one or the other. The choice for the lurid pink-purple road, thus, is a highly lore-centric one and same with the border decoration. On a map of Carmen you'll still see some of the splashes of yellow>orange>red>green>blue>grey, though I may sometimes reduce it to only green on a Carmen map since their goddess uses green as a thematic color due to her placement in the elemental system. This color flow is disharmonious, I know. It balks at the color theory spectrum. It's very specifically not the rainbow, representing the schisms and divisions and human influenced breaks in the natural fluidity of magic which came from the shapeshifting race who brought magic to them. I quite mindfully inverted the top of the rainbow, discarded purple (because of its already deep ties to Almaera), and in a small way this uncomfortable spectrum represents that the contemporary view of the flow of magic has somehow become irrevocably corrupted. A rainbow is flawless perfection: mar, all, all colors in one. Because of the tampering of humans it is impossible to return to that state so long as the people culturally view that state as the truth.

Fun tidbit: the word Ekaeli is derived from this lore too. Eka means spirit, kae means yes and li means word/name. The language name itself is the agreement the shapeshifters made with humans to accept a spoken/written language. Some of the reason I gave it the feeling of an Indian language is I imagined it to be colonists from Earth who arrived at Carmen only to discover there were two planets when their surveys revealed one, and some went to Carmen and settled on a primarily human world and others went to Almaera and met the shapeshifters, and I decided that the human who made first contact with the shapeshifters was a woman from India.

Ultimately it remains garish because it's woven into the lore as a fact of Almaera... because I'm respecting the meta lore that the human who tampered with it was me as a teenager, and I am thus adhering to her taste and keeping certain decisions she made alive as a now 33 year old! This setting is pretty much 20 years old now, even down to the name of this particular region being Dau, and the person living there being Saerin Vilanar. Saerin and Xan together are the god of Dream. It seems only right to me that a setting designed by a teenager, ruled over by Chaos and Dream, with a city designed by Dream's and dreams alike, which in lore is described as an ever-changing and slightly nauseating place where buildings defy physics and common sense to the human viewers, new art buildings popping up and vanishing with the whimsy and delight of the illusionists who care for it, would be a little garish. And that decision to keep it that way also acknowledges that I understand the teenage me who designed it made it to be a place brighter and more colorful than the pain she was in at the time. Escapist, not realistic. Impossible. A sort of summerland of the Fae, except without the perpetual summer. I've barely done a shred of justice to what I envision.

For me and for my cowriter (she's not a member of the site, sadly!), there is a lot of subtle communication woven into the design choices.

Final fun fact: my signature graphic is an isometric bookmark illustration of Saerin and Xan's farm, from this region! It should help support that the pink/purpleness is very much intrinsic.

And, well... this is an older map of the whole country.



It's not like all my art is that way, in fact I have some quite comfortably neutral art in my portfolio... just this specific place.

[HINDSIGHT]

Thanks for your comment!


Every single map of it is either impossible colors or garish oversaturated versions of the colors you expect.

Great answer.
I like the lore explaining the need for vivid colors, so I´m not gonna argue anything there.
Knowing that, I would suggest looking into ways of showing the lore on the map. Make us understand the significance of the use of colors in the drawing (since the text might not always accompany the map). That could be map-markers, names, colorspecific regions etc.
You could also expand on the idea that these maps are made for a particular eye spectrum, and make it even harder to read. Same as colorblind people have difficulty reading certain color combinations.
If you are going for a ancient/old world I would also concider sligthly altering the colors to fit that timeperiod. I think there is a difference to fx the purple used in Napoleonic times and the purple we have available now.