*** warning: this post contains mild spoilers ***
I haven't played the Banner Saga myself, all information here comes from screenshots and videos Stoic has posted on their site. I noticed a variety of location names being referenced in the Let's Play PAX demo videos. Since Stoic was kind enough to post a partial world map on their facebook page, I was interested in charting the various cities of the Banner Saga. Maybe some day after the games are finished Stoic will release a proper Atlas of the lands of the Banner Saga.
In the meantime I've annotated the map that Stoic posted on their facebook page:
We've heard about 2 groups traveling in the Banner Saga single player game.
The first is a group containing by Rook and Alette, who seems to be a group of humans and Varl escaping from the Dredge. This is the group we saw in the Let's Play videos. I've marked the locations mentioned in the video in red on the map.
1. The village of Skogr, where their story starts
2. Greyhorn is the fort that Rook mentioned must have been overrun by the Dredge in the first video. Note the northern edge of the map has a series of locations with similar names: Skyhorn, Stonehorn, and Ridgehorn. Maybe they were fortresses built to protect against the dredge?
3. Sigrholm is the Southern city that Rook suggests they flee to in the fourth video. I couldn't find Boergard (the other city he mentioned) on the map; it's probably farther south.
4. Frosvellr is the walled city that the chieftain decides to flee to.
The second group is a group of Varl, collection tax revenue. We're introduced to them in the Factions intro video. They also feature prominently in the new screenshots included on the main stoic webpage. I've marked the locations mentioned in the screenshots in green on the map. (the images displayed below don't include the captions, but if you view the images from the main Stoic page you'll see the captions - many of which contains the location names)
1. The city of Strand, referred to in the Factions intro video as the biggest of the human trade cities. We're all familiar with this picture of Strand, it's identical to the one in Factions.
Here's another picture with Strand and Denglr Bay in the background. (On the map Denglr Bay is directly to the north of the city of Strand)
2. The Varl travel quite a ways, because this shot depicts them travelling through the lands of Grofheim.
3. Schlid is probably a town/city. The Varl talk about it having fallen to the Dredge in this shot.
4. Verdfell is probably also a town/city as well. The Varl travel there because we can see them fighting Dredge in this shot.
5. Finally the Varl visit the Tower of Ridgehorn, which seems like an ominous place, depicted in the background of this shot.
From the scenes depicted it seems like the Varl are travelling north/south along the western edge of the map.
As for Rook and Alette, I think they will be travelling west across the map. This is supported by the following quote from the Banner Saga kickstarter update #34:
"In a game about travel, we wanted the world to feel large. We started by looking at real-world Scandinavia and calculating how long it would take a person to walk from the far side of Norway to the other side of Sweden. We then took that land mass and roughly doubled it in terms of how much time it takes the player to walk from one place to another. Unlike a lot of games which are about big, world-changing events but play out in a matter of days, we wanted a real amount of time to pass. Walking from one side of the continent to the other will take several months (in chapter 1 you do not span the entire length of the world, but by the end of the trilogy you'll have traveled quite far)."
You can view the full update here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...a/posts/494433
To give you a sense of scale, walking west across the length of map seems to be about the same distance as walking west across Norway and Sweden.
That's all for now, but if anyone else can find information about various locations in the Banner Saga, I'd be curious to hear about it. (Unfortunately I didn't save a copy of the "What is Told" short story from the old Stoic website, so I don't remember if it references any locations.) Just trying to pass the time until the game is released with a little geographical speculation.
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But, I still believe that the Dredge are not entirely "bad"; perhaps its some response of the Earth to man/varl-kind, a task-force to deal with something (?)... I guess this remains to be seen in the future volumes of the Saga, as the first volume they are surely portrayed as baddies.
Originally Posted by quartex
