Jörðgarð Map of Week #100 - The Lost Passage

MarkOliva

With the 100th Map of the Week we look inside the warehouse in West Fortress that hides the Lost Passage. Its location in West Fortress (No. 21) can be seen in Map of the Week No. 98.

West Fortress is a border outpost that is ruled on a day-to-day basis by Burgomaster Slavěba and Commandant Jiřina, two locally powerful ladies who are as corrupt as Count Prokop, whom they serve. The count, who seldom visits the town, is unaware of the small but lucrative side business run by Slavěba, Jiřina and Květoslav, the manager of the Royal Trading Co. station. It's known to but few in the fortress town. They call it the Lost Passage.

It's a secret tunneled road that leads northward beneath the outer wall of the fortress. For a fee, caravans and travelers can pass in or out of West Fortress, heading from or into the ruins of the Æsir Empire to the north. With the Lost Passage, the fortress provides a secret route to those that it is supposed to prevent from passing back and forth betweeen Slovania and the fallen lands.

The Lost Passage owes its business to King Jáchym in Newhouse. The king started an ambitious project several years ago, one intended to close the border with the fallen lands to the north. Jáchym's Wall is the official name of the project, although many secretly call it Jáchym's Folly. The king has begun building a double wooden palisade wall along the border with deadly razorthorn bushes and choke vines planted between the two walls. The Lost Passage simply runs beneath the wall.

From the outside, the warehouse that hides the Lost Passage looks the same as the two other Royal Trading Co. warehouses directly to the south of it (both numbered 21 on the Map of the Week No. 98). The inside is a different matter. Usually only small amounts of cargo are stashed in this warehouse, items belonging to regular customers who use the passage and who plan to transport these goods at another time.

The warehouse with the Lost Passage is dug out in the center and filled with a brick walled road and a cobblestone road that descends steeply beneath the northwestern wall. From there the road continues on underground to the old logging camp in Southwood Forest north of West Fortress. The brick wall and ceiling and the cobblestone road continue over the full length of the passage.

The graphic above is reduced in size. You can get the full-sized floor plans in two versions:

1. The Fractal Mapper (TM) 8 version in FMP format, fully editable, from our Jörðgarð web page (7 MB).

2. As a JPG flat map of 1360 Pixels x 890 Pixels (550 KB), available from the NBOS website at:

http://www.nbos.com/nox/download.php?id=494

Both versions are released for personal and commercial use under the Open Game License Version 1.0a, which you can read on the Jörðgarð website at:

http://www.vintyri.org/joerdhgardh/joerdhgardh.htm

Next week: Storm Fortress