As I mentioned last week, I recently engaged an actual cartographer, the immeasurable Soraya Corcoran, to create a new map for Newfield and just received the finished product last night. We’ll get to that in a second below, but I want to ramble a bit about fantasy maps while I got you here. Now some fantasy authors (Mark Lawrence, I’m looking your direction), don’t really truck with the map, but I stand far on the opposite camp. There’s just something magical about fantasy ma

I know it’s en vogue to bash on Brooks’ books, but the word of Shannara will always hold a special place in my flinty heart. Sure, it’s derivative of Tolkien, but no more so than a weekly D&D session, and no one gets all up in Gygax’s business for daring to include elves, dwarves and orcs. Still, a lot of fantasy purists aim a lot of ire Shannara’s direction I don’t think it deserves. In a lot of ways Shannara may sum up Gen X’s take on fantasy the same way that LOTR did for