Maps

[mellicious]

(Warning: Guild Wars post)

My highest-level character, Rima, has been playing lately with columbina's highest-level character, Kaeleen - instead of with Io, who Rima played with from the beginning, and who is actually Col's fourth character - because Rima finally caught up with Kaeleen on missions, and Kaeleen is way behind on them from where she really ought to be. We got a couple of them knocked out - The Wilds, which is where Kaeleen stalled on doing them on her own - and then Bloodstone Fen. (Rima is actually still ahead of everybody - both Io and Kaeleen and all the rest of our characters - on missions, because one night when I was bored I did Bloodstone Fen with a pick-up group and got the mission and the bonus, both. Rima and Kaeleen have not so far succeeded in getting the BF bonus, which is sort of a sore subject. Apparently it's very hard to do without a big group of real people, not just henchmen.)

We have also just been exploring, because there's a title you can get - "Tyrian Explorer" (Tyria is the fictional continent that GuildWars is set on) - when you explore 60% of the map, and both Rima and Kaeleen are over 50%. This involves going back and finding all the back areas that we didn't explore the first time, as well as exploring new areas. I had found out, while exploring on my own one day in Kryta, that there's a shortcut that takes you down to the southern part of Kryta, which as far as I knew was something you only got to much later. So this got me looking at the map.

OK, for the two or three of you who bother to read this but don't play GuildWars, here's a visualization aid:

(I had fun doing that in Powerpoint. And hey, it's a learning experience!)

Basically, you go in a big loop, with some detours. But I had been so occupied with doing the main part of the loop that I hadn't looked at the detours. Thus the question marks. I did know that where you go after Sanctum Cay, in Southern Kryta, is someplace called the Crystal Desert. But where the Crystal Desert was a I had no idea. (Which means that I hadn't looked at the map at the bottom of this page lately, because while it might not be too clear if you just look at it out of the blue, either, it does have the relative positions of the missions - and their order - pretty darn clearly.) (And if you're really masochistic, here is the big - very big - map of Tyria.)

So all of that means that the first question mark, the Crystal Desert, is off over to the east somewhere - south of Ascalon, more or less, and the second one, the Ring of Fire, is more or less south of Maguuma. (And it doesn't show the final trip back to Ascalon on the mission map, but I have been told by many (semi-)reliable sources that it exists. That probably just means that it's not a mission.)

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