Thanks, HoarseWhisperer. I promise no matter what I'll finish fleshing out the backstory.
Spun about, and tickled into a peninsula, we get this. NE there's a coastal range. NW and SW there used to be coastal hills sufficient to protect the inland flats... but a bit of subsidence breached the sothern barrier, and left an increasing swath of former grasslands as wet, wetter, and wettest. In the present Year of Lunar Ascendance 1,206, the sea level and land level are fairly stable, so the coasts as shown have developed a thin veneer of habitation. That big southern bayis shallow, and several town sites now lie a meter or three underwater, eight or a dozen kilometers 'out to sea'. Matter of fact one of those, the Drowned Vosport Town (as opposed to the current Dry New Vosport) managed to sandbag and dike its way into a sort of Venice-analog for nigh on a century, after the Start Of Subsidence in about YLA 849. Not having nearly the commerce capability of Earth's Venice, it dwindled and sank, as it got harder and harder to keep the houses dry. But what passed for local Notable Personages developed a longstanding irritation for All Territory Submerged, and the House Grendanian still treats the whole of the Jantoos Bogs as a personal affront.
Lucius Grendanian is a fourth son of that line, and Town Administration, Soldiery, and Clergy having been exhausted by his siblings, he had to take up something else. Lucius always did have an overactive imagination, and the Town Annals - besides causing intermittent mold spore asthma - held clues to some intriguing circumstances of the dim past, circumstances that might let him eclipse Juan, Ernesto, and Binjamon. Or which would at least get him away from their beer-fueled taunts, gloating, and thickheaded insinuations. See, Lucius was short in a family of talls, redheaded in a family of browns, and (crowning offense) smart in a family of dims. As fourth son he was also poor, with few prospects for marriage. Some fourth sons took to thieving, others to the sea. Some took up a trade, others went a-venturing. Some turned bard, or worse, poet. Ewww. Besides, Lucius couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.
What he could do was read, and infer, and speculate. He'd met traders from the Dwarven realms off to the northeast, and had chatted with enough to form opinions about their character. Character as a race, that is - as individuals they were of course more outgoing than the norm; most Dwarves being rockbodies and loath to leave their tunnels. Lucius reckoned there wasn't a people less interested in history than these Dwarves, and less interested in past glories. None of his contacts had even known that railways once extended across the Jantoos Plain, indeed that his town (the former incarnation of it) had been a terminus of a line where good Lekhensian Anthracite and Ticksweld Iron were loaded on coastal ships headed for the smithies of the southlands. Nor did any make the connection that a northward flow of trade had trickled supplies of Benrar sherry, Benrar asbestos, and Benrar figs back to the DwarfHolms. The asbestos presumably helped shield Dwarven smiths from forge heat. The figs were apparently a dietary weakness of the day. The sherry, though - that was a rarity even back in the YLA 300's-500's. Today it was a beverage beyond desire, a treasure past the desiring of princes. And the Annals had given Lucius a possible line on several hundred bottles of the stuff. True, odds were that a thousand years had killed its taste.... but that actually didn't matter much. The eleven bottles that were known in the area of Dry New Vosport were more tokens than consumables. It was just KNOWN how terribly, terribly valuable they were; no one ever DARED to open one. Instead they quietly got older and dustier, occasionally changing hands as dowry of payment for an entire estate.
Oh, the map? It progresses. I'm pretty sure i don't want to leave it in the current palette or style, but here's a look at the topography that sunk the sherry and spawned a search, a life of searching, an obsession of monumental proportions, a quest, a.... well, you get the idea.
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