Blood, Gold, and Lizards: Lucan's Clock Starting Area

(This post was delayed due to life and visiting parent.  All parents have now visited this year and life is...being worked on.  This is clearly The Year of Everything Happening at Once with all the pain-in-the-keisters that come with that.)

Here is the second of two maps of the starting areas.  They are representative of what the players will get as a starting map.  This one is notable for its blank spaces.  The "entrepreneurial seafarers" (read: "pirates") that make up most of Lucan's Clock for the most part don't care about what's beyond the coast.  They can see a big range of mountains deeper in and have notated them on their maps, but they're seafarers, not landlubbers.


This is the Lucan's Clock area (1 hex = 3 miles):

The Valley of the Landsharks was a promising spot for a colony...until the eponymous landsharks noticed the colony and started treating it like a buffet.  There are minor streams and seasonal creeks in the valley so there is water to be had, but little in the way of areas safe from the landsharks.  The valley is suspected of being much longer than shown, but no one has explored past the branching of the valley.

The Dry Plateau is up above the arable river lands and other than one expedition to verify it did not connect to the Valley of the Landsharks, it has not been particularly explored.

Lucan's Clock clings to the cliffs near The Falls, the point where the Farmer River spills over a cliff-side into the bay.  There are numerous ledges along the cliff.  Some ledges have buildings on them, some just the fronts of structures dug into the cliff.  All are connected by (relatively) sturdy bridges and ladders.  Most ledges have cranes of various sizes to haul up merchandise from either ships and boats in the bay or from lower ledges (depending upon clearances).  The croplands shown almost supply enough food for the colony at a subsistence level (pirates are not very good farmers and the crop yields are low as a result).  As the locals want to live better than that, this makes foodstuffs expensive and additional food is purchased from New Zwicke (and sold at a markup) or taken as part of the booty from raided ships.

~*~
The terrain icons indicate the center points of the hexes at the next scale up (1 hex = 15 miles).  I might keep the actual symbols there in the final version of the map I hand to the players, but I will probably just put in a generic symbol of some sort.  That should help me keep the mapping accurate as the players explore.