I’ve been wondering: if Siptah is supposed to be off the Stygian coast, as in Sprague de Camp’s The Gem In The Tower, and Hyborian Age is still fairly analogous to our Earth, why it seems like it’s set in the Pacific-Northwest, rather than looking, say, like Tenerife or Gibraltar or something?
It’s cool looking, but the ‘source book’ you mentioned a few times describes there as being dense jungle foliage, snakes, parrots and slender palm trees.
I get that the designers wanted to do something different to the Exiled Lands’ largely desert-■■■-kitchen-sink world, but redwoods and rolling tundra seems like an odd choice for the supposed location?
Is there an in-universe reason that I’ve not grokked yet for the discrepancy in temperate climate in a south Mediterranean/northern tropic zone? Something like “the presence of Nyarlathotep’s portal to the outer void changes the flora and fauna because it’s cold and/or he thinks it’s funny”?
I might be the only player who even cares about this, but if you agreed it’s something that could be addressed, two options would present themselves:
-Easy: Change the name and set the unnamed island off the coast of the Pictish Wilderness or in the Vilayet Sea. May need to rework the intro movie to be “…taken as sacrifice on a Pictish war canoe after you were exiled across the black river…” or “…on a Turanian slave ship…”, but nothing else will really need changing.
-Hard: The better but much more expensive and time consuming one would be to rework the entire map to be an outer ring of big jungle or mediterranean trees like figs or cedars, alongside cypresses and palms instead of Redwoods, and replace the central green tundra with an pompeii-like ash-strewn, rocky interior blasted by the Maelstrom?