It's been a while since I read that one. There were some Terisiarian references to dragon engines and Yotian soldiers, but also references to Benalish religions (Church of Angelfire and Serranism). I'd have to comb through it carefully before forming an opinion.
Plenty of spicy new (and old!) Dominarian material coming up soon!
Yeah, those are basically the mixed messages I was talking about. Granted, the dragon engine in the story is a remnant of the Phyrexian Invasion, not a Brothers' War era model, and those showed up pretty much all over Dominaria, not just Terisiare. But there are also coins minted from watersilver, which we've only ever seen in Jeff Grubb's
Ice Age trilogy, and the
Planeshift novel (p. 52) implies that white dragons usually live in Argive, but it's not like we haven't seen them in other places as well (like Eagyn in 'Dragon Lord' moving to Otaria after the Invasion)... IIRC, the soldiers in the story also don't fit Benalia despite having that Serra/Angelfire sword, I think there might have been a detail or two precluding that (I think it was some reference to them having a king or something along those lines). That's not even going into all the random unnamed kingdoms and geographical hints that are mentioned in passing... It's almost like that story was
made to be confusing and ambiguous.
The bottom line is, I haven't looked into the implied geography in the story in detail either, at least not in the way I did with the other anthology stories (I only bought and read the book last year, I just didn't care about D&D enough to pick up the whole anthology before that). Maybe I should look into all the other stories that I haven't been able to place properly again, too, sometime soon. At least some of them had named locations in them that could be put on a map, but there isn't a lot to work with either. I'm pretty confident in my reasoning for the stories that I assigned a suggested location to (or at least a continent), but the ones that I haven't been able to place at all were:
- 'Smoke and Mirrors' in:
Tapestries- 'Airborne All the Way!' in:
Tapestries- 'Chef's Surprise' in:
Distant Planes (because I want to know where Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar lived!)
[- 'God Sins' in:
Distant Planes (although putting that one on Dominaria at all might be more trouble than it's worth, considering the planeswalker protagonist and his meddling)]
[- 'Dual Loyalties' in:
Distant Planes (although I'd argue that one doesn't fit Dominaria
at all due to the setting's strange metaphysics, plus the fact that it's kinda implied to only have one moon etc., I'm just mentioning it for the reference to the University of Akkat that also crops up in 'Foulmere'. Then again, I gave same possible in-universe explanations for that referene as well]
- 'The Isle of the Lost' in:
The Myths of Magic- 'The Fog' in:
The Dragons of Magic- 'Goblin King' in:
The Secrets of Magic (that one is particularly vexing for all the named loations it contains)
- 'Like Spider's Silk' in:
The Secrets of Magic (this one even more so)
- 'Unnatural Predator' in:
Dragons: Worlds AfireI hope there's going to be another series of podcasts where you answer people's geography questions, because
boy do I have those in spades!
Oh, and there's an interesting reference in the flavour text of
Drake-Skull Cameo that caught my attention the other day: Would you agree that "Ephran" is probably an adjective meaning "from Ephren", as in, the region in Corondor? That would be a really cool easter egg if true.
There's also
Seashell Cameo and its mention of a place called Kinymu which is "a hundred leagues from the sea". The MtG Salvation wiki tells me that this is a city-state in Jamuraa which is/was part of the Kipamu League... I don't remember that name from the top of my head, but that isn't saying much, especially considering how infuriatingly dull the
Prophecy novel is... Speaking of which, can I request you guys make a card for Haddad (the "protagonist" of
Prophecy) with a kind of
Null Rod like design? You know, because he
does nothing