The Basics about Anieth, Climate, Weather and Some Basic Geography

This is a map that the four of us came up with to show Anieth as you might see if from the air if there were no clouds. It's a tiny area about the size of Brittany or New England at about that latitude. It's warmer and wetter in the west and very cold and dry east of the mountains, which you see covered with snow here. Anieth has three rivers and hundreds and hundreds of little streams and lakes. There is a large marsh in the middle of it and it is bordered by mountains to the east and north. There are very few people compared with what we are used to. The most populated place is in the right lower corner and the capitol there has anywhere from 200 to 5,000 people depending on the time of year. The entire population of the Clans numbers about 20,000 persons. The land resembles Northwest Europe, Britain or Brittany at the time of Crete and Babylon when Stonehenge was being built. The number of people in the whole of the British Isles at that time was roughly 20-50,000 people. Think of any town you know and it may be more than 50,000 people. Imagine them clustered in little pockets of about 200 people each over a huge area like the island of Britain, Brittany or Switzerland, New England, or half of Washington state. To contrast, the city of Zelos had 200,000 people in and around the city. It think this pretty much says it all about the cultural differences between the Zelosians and the Horse People. They had to be nice to each other and travel long distances just to keep the gene pool healthy!

Here is the basic map of the area a bit larger than the size of the above map. This gie the basic river contours and no mountains. This is the basic map we've used to illustrate different features of the landscape and situation.

This map shows the basic names and their names in the language of Anieth, which Pete says is related to the Celtic languages and is very similar to Gaelic. You see here the mountains, called the "Grey Mountains" because they are usually wrapped in cloud, and the Plain of the Horses which is higher and dryer than the lands of Anieth proper because of the rain shadow effect. Like in Brittany or Britain, the weather mostly comes out of the northwest.

In this map you can see the centers of the Nine Nations and how the natives of Anieth pushed them out onto the Plain except for the hostaged Moon Nation on the Bras.

This is another map that will give you some indication of the climate, where the deeper green areas are wetter and the lighter, more tan areas are dryer grassland. The slight texture is to indicate regions that are more hilly or mountainous. The darker green are evergreen trees and the lighter "kelly" green are deciduous trees. However the birchwoods of the east are hidden under clouds.

n this map, we tried to show the pattern of rainfall, deepest in the marshes along the ocean, deeper again as the rain goes over the mountains and then the dry change from forest to grasslands on teh Plain. The variation is considerable, with about 300 days of rain on the coast to less than 90 and half of that in the form of snow on the Plain.

In this map we have placed the areas where these minerals were mined. The Bronze Age brought tin into great demand as well as copper. Tin is not found in too many places in the world as iron is, so in the ancient world of Earth, places like Cornwall had been mined for centuries. In Anieth that place was Massona, and it was the place that you threatened your children with. Life in the mines was terrible. Many of the Horse People got what was called "the gold disease" where they exploited their people to mine minerals for Zelosia. It was thought by some that contact with minerals made a person crazy.