Sanly Bowitz and environs...

[mearrin69]

Hi all,
I've added a few more details since the last WIP thread post (link) and I'm going to call this one done. The September/October lite challenge "The Town" caught my eye and I wanted to give it a go. As I started playing around with it I started getting a deserty vibe so I went with that (despite the river) and then the odd building shapes sort of put me in the mind of post-apocalyptic. Combine desert and P-A and you get one of my favorite books, A Canticle for Leibowitz.

So, there you have it...and here's the village of Sanly Bowitz and its vicinity, a few hundred years after the events of year 3,174 as described in Fiat Lux (part II of the book). The village that would eventually become Sanly Bowitz was a small collection of hovels at the time Lord-Mayor Hannegan II, ruler of the Texarkana empire, began his conquest of the western plains. Balked in his attempts, through a scouting mission unknowingly led by renowned scholar Thon Thaddeo Pfardentrott, to use the Leibowitzan Abbey as a staging ground for his raids on the Empire of Denver, Hannegan laid siege to the abbey and declared the Holy Roman Church, as led by the Papacy in New Rome, a non-entity within the Empire.

The order of Saint Leibowitz weathered the storm, as did the residents of Sanly Bowitz. In the centuries following Hannegan II's reign, the Church was reinstated and the Leibowitzan Order grew in renown (in part because of the reluctant praise it received in the secular world from Thon Pfardentrott) as the source of much lost knowledge.

Sanly Bowitz, as it had come to be called, became something of a tourist attraction, especially after the construction of a modest cathedral on the spot of Fallout Shelter, the ancient ruins first discovered by Brother Francisco of the Order centuries prior. Within its altar are stored several relics of the Blessed Leibowitz, including numerous doohiki and thingumbob as well as the original blueprints found by Brother Francisco. Above the altar, encased in hand-blown glass, rests the skull of Emily of the Golden Tooth, St. Leibowitz' wife prior to the Flame Deluge and his sacred vows.

The town truly began to prosper when Emperor Hongan Lupas (Mad Wolf), the first Texarkanan ruler of plains nomad descent and a true friend of the Church, ordered an crew of his best sappers to redirect numerous water sources into a channel formed by the ancient roadway running to the south of the town. In mere years the town quadrupled in size as new residents flocked to the formerly parched lands.

Yeah. Okay. Little flight of fancy, mostly off-the-cuff to explain the map. Hope you guys like it.
M

Edit: Drat! Needs a rose. Totally forgot. I'll design something suitable and slip it in at some point.