Thorn's Chronicle: The Karrnath's Realm, Eastern Glittering Lands
by Robert J. Nuttman, Jr.The (still very much in progress) map of the Eastern Reaches of Loktar's Glittering Lands.
Yes, I now it doesn't have any labels yet. Here's a hint: the "fort" in the upper left is Fort Cruth, and the big ol' river is the Magos.
Actually, my map is more-or-less 1000 AC -- "Thorn's Age" if you will. The Glittering Realm is very much on its last legs: Much of the land is uninhabitable, due to the poisonous fumes from the lake of lava in the western cavern. The "city" has barely enough population to be considered such. The fungal forests barely produce enough food for the inhabitants, so much of the sustenance for the Eastern Realms is stolen from the Karameikos and Darokin shipping lanes to the north and south of the Black Peaks.
One of the nice things about this Hexmapper -- swap some terrain symbols around, and voila!-- you can move forward or backwards in time, so actually making the map for "Golden Age" Glittering Lands wouldn't be too difficult.
I really like your notes regarding the "outer lands" -- indeed, in the Glittering Lands' heyday, the holdings would have extended well beyond the great caverns and galleries beneath the Black Peaks. This location's proximity to Fenhold is not entirely coincidental. I think Loktar might have had an aqueduct, drawing from the Water Gate's lake that drowned Fenhold, as the main water supply for these Eastern Realms. Damming up the drainage channels would have created a great reservoir smack in the middle of the Realm. When Fenhold dried up, the dwarves would have had to rely strictly on snowmelt collecting from the Black Peaks. The drop in water level would have cut off water to many of the more distant caverns, which were left to crumble to ruins. And then, of course, there was the Syharwehrf's Doom, that came down upon the Eastern Realms, haunting the survivors into the present day.....
I'm terrible with timelines, and will have to compare notes between The Five Shires, Rockhome, and Alfheim gazetteers to see just what happened when. If I remember rightly, the Handmaidens, trapped around 980BC, could have encountered surface scouts of Loktar's invasion force, which would have been spread all along the breadth of the Black Peaks and Cruth Mountains, massing for their invasion of the Hin's lands in another 20 or so years (c. 960 BC?)
Interesting, to see how close these Eastern Realms are to the Valley of the Hutaaka, which, as we know, is the site of the ruins of the Blackmoor Colony Belerophon, which was a research station supplying the as-yet-unnamed World Mountain outpost, at the very western fringes of the Blackmoor Empire in the Beastman Crusades....