This chapter has taken a long time to get to work on, partly because I’ve been busy with other things, but also because it’s quite hard to put this part of the process into words. I’ve accounted for what we have to go on from official sources (which is not a lot) and what my sources of inspiration are, and that leaves very little except to get to work on the actual map. So without further ado, allow me to present the state-of-the-art equipment I will be using to draw the whole thing:
(whirring noise)
CONCEPTUALIZATION [Impossible: FAILED] —
Yes, that is just a paper drawing pad. There are people out there who can make absolutely incredible maps from scratch on the computer, but unfortunately for you and me both, I’m not one of them. So I’m going to do this the old-fashioned way, at least for the time being, and the first step to that is to draw a rough overview of what the entire thing should end up looking like. This can and probably will be changed later on, but it’s still going to be important to have as we delve into the various districts of the city.
To briefly recap what we know of the city, it’s on the north coast of a large island, at the mouth of a river, with the centre of the city located in the river delta while the suburbs stretch out on either side. In the west, Jamrock is nearest the coast, with Faubourg to the south, Couron in between the two and the city centre, and Coal City off to the west of both of them. In the east, we know less about the overall layout, but Le Jardin is presumably quite close to the city centre (I’m going to pencil it in sort of opposite Couron), Stella Maris is along the coast and St-Batiste is in the hills east of town. These are almost certainly not all the neighbourhoods in the city, but they’re the main ones we know about, so I’m going to assume they form the major districts of the city.
My first attempt at this, before I decided it was going to need proper treatment in text, involved drawing directly off of the teaser map discussed in part one — literally, I put it up on my computer screen, pressed a sheet of paper against the screen and copied the lines with a pencil. The result ended up looking like this:
I wasn’t too pleased by this — the harbour looks too small, the rivers make no sense, and neither do the little islands at their confluence. Assuming the Esperance is a river with a reasonably high displacement — which seems likely, since a river delta will only form if the river gives up a high enough volume of sediment — it’s unlikely that the current would allow that kind of small island group to form in the middle of the river. It’s also weird that they seem to originate from completely different angles, though that’s pretty easy to explain away by having the river in the southwest be a tributary that only joins the Esperance right before it empties into the sea. As for the harbour, well, I made a valiant effort to expand it (and to redraw the river meeting) before giving up on this draft.
As I hinted, I won’t be continuing with this particular draft, but I am going to draw a bit on it as we move along. I especially like the rivers on this, but I am going to have to change them up a bit to accommodate the size of the harbour. On the map made by the devs, the harbour gets about as much space as Martinaise does, but Martinaise is a few hundred metres across while the harbour is said to be big enough that the local RCM patrols have to travel by car to manage the distances.
The other problem with it, although you can’t really tell from the pictures I took, is that the angle is off. Revachol is on a bay, and the financial district in La Delta is said to be visible across the bay from Martinaise. I did end up taking some creative license with that, since the scene in question specifically mentions the skyscrapers found there, which are likely to be visible from quite a long distance even if the shore isn’t directly across from Martinaise. But, after a few tries, I’ve come up with what I feel is an acceptable overview of the city and starting point for future endeavours.
This map only shows coastlines, but even so, it doesn’t show all of them. La Delta will need several more river distributaries and canals before I’m done with it, and there’s probably going to be smaller rivers joining in from the east as well as the west. But that’s for the future. For now, the only rivers I added in that weren’t in the old map are the Esperance itself, its largest distributary to the west — the two encircle the core of La Delta in sort of the same way the Hudson and the East River encircle Manhattan — and a couple of outer canals that I imagine having formed part of the fortifications of colonial Revachol, long since made obsolete and turned into parks.
These fortifications also help us explain how Couron and Faubourg got their names — the French word couronne means “crown”, here referring to the crown of battlements surrounding the city (on which the neighbourhood was at least partially built), whereas a faubourg is a part of a medieval or early modern city that lies outside its fortifications. Areas of Paris like Faubourg St-Honoré and Faubourg St-Denis got their names because they lay outside the medieval city walls, across from the St-Honoré and St-Denis areas of the city proper. As such, we can imagine the early suburbs of Revachol following the same naming patterns — Christianity, of course, doesn’t really exist in this universe, though judging from St-Batiste, they do seem to have some conception of saints. Anyway, over time, the individual areas blended together in the popular imagination (except for Couron), until eventually le faubourg just became synonymous with the working-class suburbs west of the city writ large.
East of the city, we have Le Jardin, which I’m still not quite sure where it goes — I have a pretty firm idea of what it will look like, taking up a long slope uphill from the east riverbank, but I don’t really know how to square that with the battlements and the area needing to be somewhat close to the centre of the city. I may end up revisiting it. Stella Maris was less troublesome, since its location is pretty easy to infer from the name (Latin for “star of the sea”) and the fact that it’s mentioned as one of the Coalition beachheads during their campaign against the Revachol Commune. I’ve given it a harbour with moles, which I imagine would’ve been used for fishing at one point but now mostly hosts yachts owned by the city’s upper crust, and a smoother shoreline than that west of the city which I imagine could have some good beaches.
That’s about it for now. I made one (1) original drawing for this chapter, but it is a big one, so I hope it will be enjoyable. Join me next time (whenever that may be) as I focus on… well, probably Jamrock and the harbour, since, once again, that’s the area we have sources for, but I may also flip out and do something completely different. As ever, I reserve the right to change my mind.
