coldgap
1 · What I want to see here
Coldgap is the place where the road north stops being a road. Two shoulders of rock close in from east and west until there is room for one cart between them and no more. Coming up from the valley they are cliffs: grey faces three times the height of the shelter door, stepping in toward each other like the two sides of a stair, with the snow lying thick on top and bare outcrops standing out of it. The snow has drifted into what room there is between them. Somebody has trodden a single track through it, and down on the floor of the pass that track is the only ground that is not deep white. Just below the narrowest point a shelter of cut snow blocks stands in the lee of the western cliff, with the track bending in to its door. South of the gap the valley opens out and the firs come back, heavy with snow, and a stone post stands by the track for whoever comes up in a whiteout. North of the gap there is only more rock.
2 · How to show it
- A pass is a narrowing: the open ground between the two masses of rock goes from twenty-two squares wide at the foot of the cliffs to four in the middle. The map is taller than it is wide so that the squeeze has length to happen in.
- Height: the pack draws a cliff face only on an edge that looks south, so the narrowing is built as a stair. Below the throat each shoulder steps back two or three squares every three rows, and every step shows a face three squares tall. Five faces a side, climbing toward the middle.
- Snowed in: no earth and no grass anywhere. The only path is trodden snow, which differs from the drift by a rim and a shade, not by a colour.
- Somebody still comes through: one track, and a shelter with the track going to its door.
- Above the tree line: firs in the valley at the bottom, none past the gap.
3 · What it needs
- rock with a top and a face, enough to build two shoulders out of
- grey outcrops to stand on top of it, so the shoulders are not just white
- deep snow as the ground everywhere
- trodden snow for the track
- a snow shelter
- firs under snow, for the valley end only
- snow-capped boulders along the track
- a stump or two by the shelter
- a drift or two
- a marker post at the valley end
- Not in the pack: A cliff that faces any way but south. The relief sheet is described now (2026-10-09) and the shoulders are plateaus with faces, but a face is only drawn under a south edge. Above the throat the shoulders step OUTWARD going north, every edge there looks north or sideways, and so the top half of the map is two pale fields with a line round them. The height is all below the throat.
- Not in the pack: A top that is not the colour of the track. Snow on the rock is the same pale shade as trodden snow, so up on the shoulders the track is not the only thing that is not deep white; only on the floor of the pass is it. A rim tells them apart, not a colour.
- Not in the pack: Snow lying ON the outcrops. They are bare stone in every season. Only the small boulders and the one stack have a snowed version.
- Not in the pack: A drifted-over road: fence tops, a cairn. There is a marker post now and it is a desert one, the colour of sand.
- Not in the pack: Footprints, people, smoke.
4 · The arrangement
A funnel, twice. The rock shoulders are widest apart at the south, squeeze to a throat a little above the middle and ease apart again to the north. The track runs up the middle of whatever gap there is. The one building sits just south of the throat on the west side, where the rock would shelter it. Trees only in the open valley at the bottom.
5 · What that means in (x, y)
30 x 40 squares, 480 x 640 pixels: portrait, because the subject is a gap you go up through. Each shoulder is one plateau written in tiers three rows deep, and the free gap between the two is twelve squares at rows 0-2, then ten, eight, seven and six, four (cols 13-16) at rows 15-17. Below that the floor of the pass stays four wide for three more rows and then opens: eight, twelve, eighteen, twenty-two at rows 30-32, and the whole width from row 33. Going north to the throat a tier may grow by a single column, because an edge that looks north is only a rim. Going south from it every tier gives back two or three, because the squares it gives back become rock face - three rows of it, directly under the edge - and a face one square wide has no tile. So the faces are at rows 18-20, 21-23, 24-26, 27-29 and 30-32, each further out than the one above. Eight outcrops stand on the west top and nine on the east, feet kept off the edges. The track is two squares wide - the narrowest the renderer can rim - at cols 14-15 through the throat, drifting a column either way above and below it. The shelter is at cols 10-12, rows 24-26, with a tongue of trodden snow along row 27 from its door to the track.
7 · What it looks like
Read this against the paragraph at the top. That comparison is the only check that catches a map which is perfectly valid and is of nowhere.
6 · What was actually written
The same two grids as flat colour — earth, grass, and a block for every footprint. Anything in the render that is not here, the translation invented.
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What is in it
| 8 | crag_tall | crag stone grey |
| 7 | rock_snow | crag stone snow winter |
| 5 | rocks_grey | crag stone grey pile |
| 5 | tree_snow_small | tree snow winter conifer |
| 4 | crag_wide | crag stone grey |
| 4 | trees_snow | tree snow pair large winter |
| 4 | tree_snow_white | tree snow winter conifer |
| 4 | tree_snow_big | tree snow large winter |
| 2 | stones_snow | crag stone snow winter small |
| 2 | boulder_snowcap | crag stone snow winter small |
| 1 | stack_snow | crag stack stone snow winter |
| 1 | igloo_brick | structure intact snowhouse winter doorway |
| 1 | stump | prop stump |
| 1 | waymark | prop marker stone post |