Mountain Maps (Patreon)

I hope everyone likes maps because I have some more behind the scenes stuff to share with you all today!

You've all probably noticed that like 90% of our stories are set in Southern Ontario, and the reason for that is pretty simple. That's where we live, & it's a lot easier for us to write stories that are set in places we're familiar with. 

Eg. Lunaville (aka Orangeville) and Amytown (aka Georgetown) are both set in places we've frequented a lot so we have a pretty good feel for the locations. Mara & the gang are out in the east end of Toronto (suburb known as Scarborough) not far from the area where we grew up. BotC was set in downtown Toronto, and we're pretty familiar with the city from frequent visits.

Missed Connections was kind of an odd one, we've never been to the Aegean so that involved a lot of research. But we're very familiar with the hotel in Bloomsbury where Lexi stayed for the first few chapters, we've stayed there ourself a couple times!

Anyways back to the topic at hand, when we started working on Mountains of Magic, Jess picked the venue but we knew absolutely nothing about the the location where Tori & Alpine were camping. We don't know anything about serious hiking either, all our 'serious' camp experience was based on canoeing. 

So we spent a lot of time researching the Gaspesie National Park, and Jess filled us in on the long-distance hiking stuff. 

In order to accurately write that story we needed to study maps and satellite photos of the area, we read hiking websites & found pictures people had taken on the ground, and we looked at official park literature to get an idea of how it all worked. (That was another challenge, almost everything was in French and no-one in our system really speaks the language)

*** Note: If you haven't read Mountains of Magic yet, the next paragraph and the map contain very mild spoilers for chapters 1 through 10 ***

Anyways, over the first 20 or so chapters of Mountains we used a total of four different maps, but the one I'm going to share here was the main one. This covers chapters 1 through 10 and it's pretty detailed wrt topography and layout of the park and the path the International Appalachian Trail follows through it. I've also indicated the campsites our heroes used, and a few other locations where notable events happened.

Moving on to Green Canyon Magic, we've never been to Europe at all, so when Lucy commissioned a Mountain-verse story to take place in Austria we were pretty clueless. After looking at the various parks and wilderness areas she picked Thayatal National Park, and we got to work learning what we could about the park. 

We weren't able to find any topographical maps of the area, but we did find some websites that described the landscape and included pictures of the canyon. Some of them were even in English too, which was a huge help! ^^

In lieu of a detailed map of the park & surrounding area I've been working with a satellite photo that I've marked up myself to indicate the various details. Considering we've never been there in person & literally everything we know about the area comes from a couple websites & some photos, we're not particularly confident we have all the geology & landscape details correct? But it's the best we can do.

The most recent addition to the mountain-verse came courtesy of Aster & Yuki, who wanted a story set in the UK. Unlike with Green Canyon Magic we already had a canon UK location in the mountainverse, Cairngorm National Park in Scotland. There's also been mention of a pair of catkin sighted near the border of the park, but there's no reason Gaia can't have picked more than one set of representatives from the same location so that's not a problem.

Anyways, like with the first two stories we started doing our research. Fortunately there were several resources available including some comprehensive maps of the area. 

Amusingly we've been running into language issues while researching this story, despite it being set in the UK. Turns out a lot of the smaller details in the park have Scottish Gaelic names, & no translations or explanations provided. Eg. something called "March Burn" runs parallel to the "Lairig Ghru" trail, & it took us a while to decide "Burn" in this context probably means creek or stream? Maybe? idk lol.

As we've only had one chapter so far of Magic of Ben Macdui the map doesn't have a lot of story detail on it yet, but that'll likely change as things progress. Primarily it depicts the final leg of the main characters' planned hike, the location of the impossible mountain, and the site where the characters were camping at the time of the earthquakes.

One final note, all 3 maps indicate the range of the 'no tech / no electricity' zone, but if you check against the map scale, you'll find the 3 zones all have different sizes. 

When we were working on Mountains of Magic we decided the mountains would suppress electricity / technology for a 10km (6 mile) radius. That wasn't a big deal in middle-of-nowhere Quebec, or for Banff National Park out in Alberta. There's gobs of empty space all over Canada, where you can go dozens of miles before finding a house let alone a town or something.

Looking at Europe we quickly realized that even in the 'remote' national parks, villages and towns were everywhere. So the no-tech zone in GCM is probably only about a 6km radius, and that still wipes out all power to a dozen villages, plus Retz which is a sizeable town. And half of Znojmo is impacted too.

Same with MBM, the radius of that no-tech zone is around 8km or so, and that's taken out power in a couple hamlets (too small to appear on that map) along with the village of Inverdruie. 

It's funny, I guess it never occurred to us that there'd be towns & villages inside of parks? Afaik we don't do that here. A park is a park, you don't have full-time dwellings inside them. Maybe there's the odd research station or ranger station, but not houses and definitely not towns or villages. The only exception we can think of is some cottages inside a provincial park, but the cottages aren't permanent residences & the government owns the land, they just lease it out.

Anyways, that's it for now. we hope the maps help folks get a feel for the locations where those stories are set!