toadcross
1 · What I want to see here
Two roads cross on the high ground, and in winter that is all there is to say about the place. They have been kept open: you can see the earth, and a rim of thawed grass down each side of it where the wheels throw the slush, and everything else is under snow. A toad of old stone squats in the middle of the crossing; nobody knows who put it there and every cart steers round it. A pale stone post stands at the south-east corner, tall enough to find the crossing by when the roads are not this clear. Two snow houses stand in the north-east corner with their doors on the east road - the herders' winter station - and there is a stack of barrels and a covered heap beside them. South-west of the crossing are the stumps of the trees that went to keep the station warm. The firs that are left are white to the ground.
2 · How to show it
- Winter: the ground is snow from edge to edge and the only buildings are made of it. No roof in the pack carries snow, so a house here would be the one thing on the map that had not noticed the weather.
- Kept open: the roads are earth, not trodden snow. The contrast with Coldgap is the point - that road was lost, this one is used.
- A crossroads: four arms of equal width meeting at right angles, and a crossing a little wider than the arms so there is a middle to stand the toad in.
- Nobody lives here, somebody waits here: two shelters, stores, and a quarter of the trees cut for fuel.
3 · What it needs
- snow as the ground
- bare earth for the roads, with its grass rim
- the stone toad
- a post to find the place by
- snow houses, two kinds
- firs under snow, large and small
- stumps, fresh and old
- barrels
- a covered heap
- snow-capped boulders
- Not in the pack: A signpost. A crossroads has a post with four arms. Four more sheets were read for one on 2026-10-09 and the nearest thing is a capped stone post off the desert sheet, which now stands at the corner: it marks the place and still says nothing about where any of the four roads goes.
- Not in the pack: Ice. There is a frozen-water terrain on the water sheet and an ice-over-snow one on the floor sheet; neither is catalogued, so there is no pond for the station to have broken a hole in.
- Not in the pack: Snow on anything that is not a tree or a boulder: the barrels, the heap and the toad are as dry as in July.
- Not in the pack: Wheel ruts, smoke from the snow houses, animals.
4 · The arrangement
A cross, and four quarters that are each a different thing. The roads divide the map; the toad marks the centre. North-east is the station, hard against the east road. South-west is the cut-over ground. North-west and south-east are untouched firs. Each quarter is one idea, so the map can be read a corner at a time.
5 · What that means in (x, y)
40 x 30 squares. The north-south road is cols 18-20 and shifts one column west below the crossing; the east-west road is rows 13-15 on the west arm and a row wider, 13-16, on the east arm, where the station fronts it. Neither is ruled. The crossing is cols 15-23, rows 11-17, a plain rectangle: every outside corner of earth is drawn as a square that is mostly grass, which on grass is invisible and on snow is a green block, so the first version, with its corners stepped to round them, had eight green blocks and this has four. The toad is at cols 19-20, row 14. The post is at col 24, row 17: the first square of snow off the south-east corner of the crossing, under the east road, so it is two squares tall against the earth behind it. The snow houses are three squares each and stand with their door row on row 12, directly on the top edge of the east road (rows 13-16 there), at cols 26-28 and 31-33. Stumps are in cols 2-14, rows 18-27. A fir is one square deep and three tall, so the big ones are kept three rows from any road they stand south of, or they would lean over it.
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.
........................................ ....ff........ww.......ff...ff.......... ..........FFFF...................FFFF... .FFFF.................................ww ...............ff.......FFFF............ ......BBBB.............................. .............................BBBB...BBBB ........ww......rr...................... BBBB.........BBBB.....ff........ww...... .....FFFF...........................cc.. ..........ff..............III..JJJ..cc.. ..ww......................III.bJJJ..b... ..........................III..JJJ.b.... ........................................ ...................AA................... ........................................ ........................................ ...........rr...........M............... ff......++...**.......................ww ...++.....................ff...ff....... ......**.............ww............BBBB. ............++..........FFFF............ ...**................................... .....++...............rr.....BBBB.....ff ..............**........................ ..........++......................FFFF.. ..++..................BBBB.............. ........**.................ff........... .....ww.......ff................ww..rr.. ........................................
What is in it
| 12 | tree_snow_small | tree snow winter conifer |
| 9 | tree_snow_white | tree snow winter conifer |
| 8 | tree_snow_big | tree snow large winter |
| 7 | trees_snow | tree snow pair large winter |
| 6 | stump_cut | prop stump felled |
| 5 | stump | prop stump |
| 4 | rock_snow | crag stone snow winter |
| 3 | barrel | prop goods barrel |
| 1 | goods_covered | prop goods covered |
| 1 | igloo | structure intact snowhouse winter doorway |
| 1 | igloo_brick | structure intact snowhouse winter doorway |
| 1 | toad_statue | prop statue toad odd |
| 1 | waymark | prop marker stone post |