Darnassus's Temple Grounds Rendered on Old Parchment — Print & Oil Painting

Like the other charts in this collection, this is a painting of a document. A warm ochre sheet, scorched and darkened at all four edges, sits inside an ornate metal border with interlaced knotwork at the corners and a stylised emblem worked into the lower right margin. A ribboned cartouche across the bottom carries the city's name in wide spaced capitals, and the whole sheet is lit flat and evenly.

The geography is drawn with real economy. Violet brown cliffs and hatched ridges close the left and right sides, a pale blue lake and a run of waterways occupy the middle, and the inhabited ground is laid out as green terraces stepping around them. Buildings are indicated by small green and tan blocks in tight clusters rather than by any attempt at plan drawing, and dotted paths link every cluster to its neighbours.

The lettering is the content, as it always is with these. Seven places are named across the sheet at three sizes: an oak at the top, a druidic enclave at the left, terraces for craftsmen, for warriors and for tradesmen ranged down the right hand side, temple gardens in the middle, and a temple of the moon occupying the bottom centre. Each label sits directly on the ground it names, with no key and no legend anywhere.

The colour readings behave the way they always do with these sheets: saturation high, contrast among the lowest of the fifty canvases here, which is what a well kept piece of old paper does: a single strong warm ground with everything else sitting quietly on top of it. The greens are muted, the blues are pale, and nothing on the map is allowed to be brighter than the parchment.

Read the labels again and notice what is not on the sheet. There is a temple and there is an enclave of druids, and there is no palace, no keep, no throne room and no castle anywhere in the plan, because this nation is not run by a monarch: authority sits with a high priestess and with the head of a druidic order, and the two largest institutions on the map are the two that actually govern. Compare it with the human city plan in this collection, which is organised around a keep, and the difference in the lettering is the difference in the constitution. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the human capital charted on the same kind of sheet, around its keep and the priestess whose temple anchors the bottom of this one, in the robes of her office.