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It's a fairly important fact that the present of the game is driven by novels (and short stories). Several authors produced many books but not enough: the background material the rulebooks gave to the players is short compared to the topic it should cover and has more holes than a mouse chewed Emmentaler and I believe it's not just the fault of the length limitations of the rulebooks but the authors' of the novels because they wished to reveal more and more mysteries about Ynev and it's history gradually but never completed enough to cover everything. Most novels have chronologies, biographies, dictionaries (while they haven't created languages they come up with a fair amount of words to help to set the mood) sometimes even maps but the main resources about regions, countries, religions, cultures, folks, customs, everyday life, etc. are the stories themselves. Just never enough stories and I have to admit lots of them are subpar quality. Many questions remained unanswered for a long time. When a KM creates an adventure, a module (as DnD players would put it) or a tale (as we call it) he will face the same questions over and over again. For example Ynev itself is a huge place with all the varieties our planet can offer in climate, flora and fauna and when I point at the map that our tale will be played here or there it will come up: what's it like there? What should I tell my players what kind of environment they face? It cannot be everywhere the same fucking oak forests and barley fields, with four seasons, deers and wolves. It's impossible but it's almost no reference about this. And while certain Jew posters could blink on a map and tell what type of weather should be at which area and know everything about geography we cannot expect from the KMs to be the same. And while I believe the KMs try to do their homework for the gaming sessions it is unfair to force them into decisions they have to make about the setting of the world. So in the first years of 2000 a new group started to work on Ynev with the aim of making it more rational. The group was called Szürkecsuklyások (The Ones with Grey Hood, it's the name of one of the two greatest thieves guild on Ynev) and sadly they (or more like their leaders and the publishing company they worked for) got into a legal conflict with the original team (I think there were some cooperation with some people from this team tho). They put great effort into the game but legally they were in the wrong (at least that's what I can find on the internet, I myself knew nothing about this for a long time) and most of their results were kinda in vain, their work cannot be considered official, canonized material. But I believe those players who use their material and try to make it compatible with the newer releases are doing right. Years ago I managed to save most if not everything from their site with the help of the Wayback Machine. The posted pics in this and the next posts are their maps.