So in the past few days I had been working on a map of the city of Lüm, which is something that I figured it would really help to have before getting much farther. Up until this point, I'd been coming up with "wards" of the city ad hoc without too much consideration for how they all fit together—but it would be much easier, and lead to a more cohesive result, if I came up with a map, with all fifty "wards" labeled, so instead of having to think up a new ward each week I could just pick one from the map that was already defined, and I could see where it was and what other wards it neighbored. I'd finish with the ward I was working on, Rosemary Hill on January 18, and so on the 19th I'd be having to choose my ward for the next week, and I hoped to have the map done before then.

Well, I didn't. But I did make some progress. I didn't have a nice, clear map of the city with all fifty wards labeled, but I did have a very rough map with twelve wards labeled. Here's what it looked like:

The red, orange, and yellow overlays represent the average income/class levels of the shaded areas: red is high income/upper class, orange mid-income/middle class, and yellow low income/lower class. This was inspired by a map by another City '26 participant, Jon Davis, who used that color coding for their map of their city, New Babylon, a midwestern city for their RPG Crime Wave. When and if I get this map in a presentable state and publish it (outside this blog), I won't use that color-coding, but I found it useful as I was designing the city and planning out its neighborhoods. As for the other colors, the bright blue is a lake, the green is woodland, and the brown is relatively high and dry ground, as opposed to the marsh that surrounds the city.

As stated in the introductory post on this blog, this post was backdated and actually posted on the 24th, so this is the version of the map I posted on the 19th to the Garblag Discord^[1][2], but that doesn't mean it's actually the latest version as of the time I wrote this post. I have been working on the map since then, and I've already made significant changes and additions since I posted this version of the map. I won't bother posting the updated map at least until I have all fifty "wards" labeled, but I'm up to twenty-four wards now, so almost halfway there.

Anyway, even if I hadn't finished the map by the 19th as I'd hoped to, it did at least somewhat serve its purpose in helping me choose the ward for the next week, as I did choose one labeled on the rough map—the Glades. So that's the ward we'll be detailing next...