Amazing Map Simulator

So I am, when the mood strikes (like a lightning bolt of heavenly tribulation), something of an Amazing Cultivation Simulator addict. It's such a terrifying game. The genre is really hard to find with even half-decent English translation, so to have this slumbering behemoth quietly sat there on Steam with a thorough translation, good mod scene and more depth than the Marianas Trench is just a little absurd.

It's the depth that's terrifying, just when you think you have your head around how to progress your cultivators and run your sect and you've got the whole diplomacy thing done and branch sects make sense to you... And then the game will throw you a whole new system! Super-spesh plants with a new, dedicated system to manage their growth and the benefits and drawbacks of having them and how to interact with them, or another system specifically for sentient objects and how to turn them (laboriously) into the perfect little cultivators, the list goes on. Every stone you turn has a labyrinthine system underneath, waiting to suck you in and give you a whole new level of control over your little sect victims members.

Part of my love of the game does come from my enjoyment of the genre though. Xianxia, as its commonly called, isn't too dissimilar from a lot of western progression-based fantasy works but the trappings and tropes common within the genre tend to be very different. Less elves, more beautiful 'fairy' immortal cultivators and so on. It's a nice change to now be able to read more of these works with official or at least decent quality translation or just written in a very new style by upcoming western authors. Forge of Destiny is something of a favourite of mine, though it does get a little politics-heavy later on.

And, well, I bought the Humble Bundle a long time ago for Campaign Cartographer 3+, and I felt like maybe building my own little Xianxia-themed world. I may not be able to then play it in ACS, but I can think about how it'd work at least!

(If you think some of the names are familiar and remind you of a mediocre anime or the never-officially-translated light novel series it was based off, no you don't. Hush.)

This map would just be a region, or department, of a larger nation. Grendan is not a national capital, it's a regional one, and maybe one day I'll get around to making a map at the national level, showing this region amongst its peers.