I look in wonder at your skills with Thedas' map. I have a problem I wish I had an answer to: How does Redcliffe village work? We get different maps for it in DAO and in DAI (supposed eastern part) and they don't seem to fit together. I can also not make heads or tails of Redcliff's supposed location on the world map (like with position of rivers/lake) in relation to the mini map in, say DAI. Nothing seems to add up. Could you help me make sense of this? Maybe maps need some turning or sth.?
*blush* Thank you so much for your kind words! It is a labor of love…that occasionally causes me to want to tear my hair out. ;) Redcliffe is one of those places that makes not only my scalp to itch, but my eye twitch. (So at least we are in good company.)
Nothing about the geographical lore of Redcliffe makes any sense. For example, the codex entry used both in Origins and Inquisition is full of nonsensical statements. For example:
“King Calenhad Theirin once famously declared, “The fate of Redcliffe is the fate of all Ferelden.” Certainly, the castle is the first and last defense for the sole land route into Ferelden, and the country has never fallen to any force that did not first capture Redcliffe.”
Um…what? Redcliffe is on the sole land route into Ferelden? Redcliffe is even near the sole land route into Ferelden. It may be closer to Orzammar and Gherlen’s Pass than West Hill or Highever, but you could definitely reach Denerim without having to travel close to Redcliffe.
Now, you could definitely argue that it would be really, really bad idea to leave Redcliffe untouched if you planned to occupy Ferelden. By the time an invader reached Denerim, Redcliffe could muster an army and use the southern arm of the Imperial Highway to aid Denerim or attack from behind. So if this was the only incongruous information, I could deal with it, but then there are these nuggets:
“The castle, which despite being three times captured is popularly described as “unassailable,” also guards one of the largest and most prosperous towns in Ferelden. Redcliffe village is well situated near the mountain pass to Orzammar and the Orlesian border, and so serves as a center of foreign trade. For these reasons, Redcliffe is accounted an arling despite the smallness of the domain.”
Again, huh? Don’t you mean the reverse? Redcliffe is a village of about 200 people, but the arling itself is quite large. Honnleath is part of the Arling of Redcliffe, and presumably parts of the Hinterlands are also included under its protection. So it isn’t exactly small.
And whatever the scale of the map you use to calculate how far it is from Redcliffe to Orzammar, it is strange to say that Redcliffe is “near” the pass that leads to Orzammar and Orlais beyond. It is at least 150-200 miles to travel between Orzammar and Redcliffe. There are several other Ferelden towns and arlings (Kinloch Hold, Wutherford, West Hill Bannorn, Waking Sea Bannorn) that should be better situated to profit from international trade than Redcliffe. But it gets better:
“The inhabitants of Redcliffe village are primarily fishermen or merchants who ship dwarven goods through the pass from Orlais to Denerim. When the entire village smells of smoked fish on certain late autumn mornings, the merchants in their finery do their utmost to pretend otherwise.”
–From In Pursuit of Knowledge: The Travels of A Chantry Scholar, by Brother Genitivi.
Sigh. Why would you take dwarven goods all the way south to Redcliffe if you plan to ship them to Denerim? That tacks on hundreds of miles to your journey! Just take the North Road!
None of that makes any sense…unless you look at where Redcliffe was in The Stolen Throne.
If Redcliffe were located where it was placed on this map, then the codex entry about it would make complete sense. It would be a much smaller land area, but the position of the town would make it a far more likely trade center and “first and last line of defense” for Ferelden.
There are even signs that this location almost made it into later maps.
In spite of the fact that moving Redcliffe messes with the lore about the village, it appears on the southern shore of Lake Calenhad on every other map that Bioware has published.
So why did the developers move it? Most likely it was game mechanics, or rather, button mechanics. If Redcliffe had remained where it started out, it would have made the button placement on the Origins map rather awkward. It is so close to Haven that players might have confused the two.
(There is a similar problem with where the Temple of Sacred Ashes should be. It should be very close to the edge of the game play map in the mountains to the west of the town, but in game it appears an equivalent of 35-65 miles south of Haven so it won’t be so close to the edge and it won’t obscure any writing.)
And most casual game players wouldn’t think there was anything strange about Redcliffe being so far from Orlais and Orzammar. In fact I was really glad it was so close to Lothering the first time I played Origins. Only when you are really examining the geography of Ferelden does its placement become questionable. Am I 100% sure this is the reason? Not at all, but the map sure is more balanced with Redcliffe at the bottom of the lake and easier to read, all of which is desirable in game play.
And then there’s the problem of DAI’s map. Sigh. So….I replayed a large part of the Hinterlands and did a bunch of math for this post. And I now have a bit of a problem with my own map.
I am pretty good with spacial relationships and so I used a lot of landmarks and large scale measurements to place various locations on the map I shared. That works well when adding towns, temples, landmarks, etc from the various published maps, but it doesn’t work so well for the highly detailed area maps in Inquisition.
I confess that I should have done a bit more math when I started to add Inquisition zones to my map. If I had I would realized that this small neon green dot you see above is the equivalent of about 5 square miles, depending on which map scale you use. I went with the smaller 1” = 50 miles scale. That dot is 1/16” x 1/16”. That means there is more than enough space for the whole Hinterlands map, which is about 2-3 square miles, to fit into that tiny green square. Wow.
(BTW, I went out to the interwebs to see if others people had come up with a similar area number, and found an estimate that all of the areas in the game put together (minus DLC) is about 45 square miles. They probably went with the larger 1” = 70 miles. That would make Thedas about the size of Western Europe, I think.)
So the reason it is difficult to figure out the DAI landmarks on the Thedas map is that the map is far too small for such minute detail. I’m going to have to ponder what to do now that I know the true scale we are dealing with and update my map accordingly.
Thanks for the ask! It made me do math, and we’ll get a better map at the end as a result. :)
-MM
Woah… thx for racking your brain over this! To be honest, I was mostly confused with Redcliffe’s DAI-map you see as you enter the area. I wondered which of these god damn routes you would have to take to a) reach Redcliffe Castle, which you can only see towering in the background in DAI and which is not accessible. And b) how this relates to the town layout presented in DAO, where you can access the castle via a side way or a tunnel below the windmill. (I also wondered whether that particular windmill might be present in the DAI und I take it, it is that broken one that was destroyed in a blight).
Only thing I’m wondering in the Hinterlands area map is which road you would need to take to reach Haven from there. I’m opting for the western road/map-exit, in hope this might work. But maybe this is all of no consequence if the map’s scale is not matching up with Thedas’ overall layout…
@_@° Why you so confusing, game…
Yeah, I think we have all done a 360 in Redcliffe and wondered, “What in the Void happened to this town?” Sorry my last post didn’t quite meet your needs. I do love looking at these maps so let me take another shot at this.
There is an attempt to make DAI Redcliffe reminiscent of the village we saw in DAO but there are several things that make it difficult to match up all the landmarks, including what I think are some deliberate placement mistakes in DAI. Some of those mistakes I can headcanon away. Others are more twitch worthy.
(That is some nice face lift you got there, Redcliffe! Your once plain hills are now taller and full of nonsensical waterfalls!)
I went back to my screenshots of Redcliffe from Origins then lined up some comparison shots in Inquisition. Hopefully, these pictures will make the new and old geography make more sense.
This is going to include a lot of pictures, so let’s take this under a cut’
Thank you very much for taking such a very detailed look at Redcliffe Village and its landmarks. It is truly hard to work through it in comparison to the old shots of it in DAO. As for my question how to enter Redcliffe, I keep wondering on that one.
The reason is simple: I’m wondering what the quickest route from Redcliffe Village to Haven would be, because I keep speculating what route Dorian might have taken when he warned the inquisition of the mages marching on Haven. He simply said that he “raced” there, but I keep wondering how he would have made his way. I have a few ideas of course, but all of it leads to me thinking he might have taken the West Road to reach Haven from Redcliffe Village, simply because, no matter where exactly Redcliffe is placed on the world map, the western exist appears to be closest to get to Haven from it.
There is an Imperial Highway snaking around Lake Calenhead and one route leading north-/eastwards in the direction of Haven, too (if Haven is placed northwards in the direction of Gherlen’s Pass). There is only one western exit to the world map in the Hinterlands, hence why I’m guessing Dorian might have taken that way to get out of Redcliffe, through the Hinterlands and to Haven (same for the mage army I suspect).
Ah. Okay, so Dorian and mages’ route to Haven. I have some thoughts, and pictures, that may help with that.
When you zoom out with the flycam, you can get a sense of where the roads would go even when the road isn’t actually there. For example:
Here is the Eastroad. It seems to only skirt the cliffs for a short distance and then levels out and would follow the topography of the land to the Northeast. This would take it around the edge of Lake Calenhad, which probably has other small hamlets and fishing villages along its banks.
Here is the path for the Westroad:
Although this appears to go the right direction, the area to the west of Redcliffe is so mountainous that there is really only one way to go. Up and around to the northwest. Again, there are probably other small villages or farms along this path, but it appears to be a very mountainous route.
From these images and the map I normally use, which has some topographical information, I can make an educated guess where these roads go. Here is the result:
Although the Westroad appears at first glance to be the best and fastest way to get to Haven, there seem to be a lot of mountains in the way, both in Inquisition and on paper. This would slow travel along this path because most roads in Ferelden appear to be little more than dirt trails.
Once you are closer to a town or a crossroads, they turn into a rough cobblestone, but the outer areas turn quickly to dirt.
So what does this tell us about the quickest path to Haven? I would suggest that the fastest way to get there would be through Dwarfson’s Pass.
Sure you backtrack to the southeast for a bit, but once a person is on the Imperial Highway, travel would be considerable faster even in places where the Highway is fallen into disrepair.
Then it would just be a matter of taking the newly cleared and improved trail to Haven.
So I am going to amend my earlier post. The Warden most likely traveled through Dwarfson’s Pass to get to Redcliffe. Dorian and the mages at Redcliffe most likely took the same route. Harding and the Inquisition’s forces, however, still probably used the Eastroad in order to come into the area without alerting the battling mages and templars. Once the fighting was over, it would make the most sense to travel through Dwarfson’s Pass because it is the quickest way to the Imperial Highway.
That’s my best guess based on the geography, anyway.
-MM