Creating a map of Greater Balazar has been a long term aim of mine and I am now finally starting to get around to it. The first step has been to scan in the maps of Balazar and the Elder Wilds from the reprint of Griffin Mountain. These don't have a scale (and therefore are not maps as my old geography teacher would say, they are just pictures). Then I have scanned in the relevant part of the Genertela map from Glorantha - Genertela Crucible of the Hero Wars. I have taken the Elf Sea as the point of comparison between them and measured that on both maps to get a scaling factor of 4.2 between the Genertela maps and the Balazar maps. Since the Genertela map is at a scale of 1:11,000,000 (i.e 1mm = 11km), the Balazar maps must therefore be at a scale of 1:2,619,047, which we could probably call 1:2,600,000 (i.e. 1mm = 2.6km). Now we have a scale for the two maps and can try and superimpose the Balazar maps on the Genertela map.

The result of this is shown below:

This starts to show up a couple of problems, especially with the Rockwoods.

The big problem is that the southwood swing of the Rockwoods round the Highwood basically wipes out Dagori Inkarth on the other side of the Rockwoods, which the trolls might not like very much.

On the interesting side, it shows the the top of the Elder Wilds map is pretty much the top of the Rockwoods and the Hell Crack is only just around the corner, beyond the Gork Hills - some kind of synergy there seems inevitable.

Now to fill in the map...

The first stage is to block in the altitude lines at 500m intervals and put in the other main geography - rivers and forests. Somewhere on the web I found someone claiming that the Elf Sea is 1000m above sea level and the Rockwoods go to 4000m, averaging 2500m (not really that high).

Here is a link to the blocked-in map - now 500Kb, so don't look over dial-up!