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ILCJR
Acolyte

USA
3 Posts

Posted - 02 May 2017 :  23:46:21  Show Profile Send ILCJR a Private Message  Reply with Quote  Delete Topic
Greetings All.
I am working on a project for a novel based in Cormyr. I have researched for two weeks for any readable maps with the names of the streets in Suzail. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I do not mind having to pay for the map, within reason.

L.C. Campbell Jr

Edited by - ILCJR on 03 May 2017 17:45:28

George Krashos
Master of Realmslore

Australia
6641 Posts

Posted - 03 May 2017 :  01:47:40  Show Profile Send George Krashos a Private Message  Reply with Quote
I'm pretty sure other than a few scattered references in the lore, there is no map which gives Suzail's street names. Only Waterdeep has received that treatment.

-- George Krashos

"Because only we, contrary to the barbarians, never count the enemy in battle." -- Aeschylus
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KanzenAU
Senior Scribe

Australia
763 Posts

Posted - 03 May 2017 :  01:52:38  Show Profile Send KanzenAU a Private Message  Reply with Quote
What George said.

There's a very pretty map in Dungeon 198, but unfortunately no street names. The only road name I can think of is the Promenade, which is the sweeping semi-circular one. If you wanted to be ridiculously thorough, you could probably extract some names from Ed's books set in Cormyr.

Regional maps for Waterdeep, Triboar, Ardeep Forest, and Cormyr on DM's Guild, plus a campaign sized map for the North
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Artemas Entreri
Great Reader

USA
3131 Posts

Posted - 03 May 2017 :  14:30:49  Show Profile Send Artemas Entreri a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Street names are pretty easy to make-up. Go for it!

Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way. -Steve Martin

Amazon "KindleUnlimited" Free Trial: http://amzn.to/2AJ4yD2

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ILCJR
Acolyte

USA
3 Posts

Posted - 03 May 2017 :  17:52:18  Show Profile Send ILCJR a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Thank you all for the advice. Kanzen, I will look into that.

L.C. Campbell Jr
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Elren_Wolfsbane
Learned Scribe

USA
111 Posts

Posted - 04 May 2017 :  14:04:46  Show Profile Send Elren_Wolfsbane a Private Message  Reply with Quote
I think the 3e map has street names on it. My current csmpaign is in that area and the nain tkwn they're in at the moment IS Suzail. I'd love to give any lore, etc you wanna know

Aa' lasser en`coialle n`natula brown.

(May the leaves of your life tree never turn brown)

-Elren Wolfsbane
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George Krashos
Master of Realmslore

Australia
6641 Posts

Posted - 06 May 2017 :  03:53:54  Show Profile Send George Krashos a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Okay, this is all from Ed and The Hooded One (one of his players) and contains a lot of general Suzail information, not just street names. Enjoy:

I must direct you to the map of Suzail found in the 2nd Edition Realms boxed set (specifically, on page 54 of “A Grand Tour of the Realms”). On many, many occasions I’ve sent “street keys” to TSR for various cities of the Realms, but because they make maps so cluttered, they usually get dumped (or largely omitted).

Find the warehouse of the oil and perfume dealer Ilmur Jhassalan (feature 73) and Blackgorgons, the tower of the wizard Baskor (feature 74). To the east of both buildings, defining the easternmost boundary of the ‘blocks’ they stand in, is a street whose northern ‘end’ is a Y-junction, and whose southern end is a T-junction. That street is Swordstars Lane.
The Society for Stalwart Adventurers stands on the west side of Swordstars Lane, three buildings south of the Y-junction. In other words, it’s the L-shaped building five building-fronts ‘up’ from Jhassalan’s warehouse.

The westfront-Swordstars buildings in between, by the way, are (going north from the warehouse):

-- Vardrim’s (an always-full rooming-house for carters and crate-makers and warehouse workers, owned by the elderly, energetic, and irascible Bardra ‘Battleaxe’ Vardrim, who lives on its ground floor). Bardra has two sons in the Purple Dragons, who dine with her weekly, and ‘take care’ of rowdy tenants or visitors. Vardrim’s has a rickety back stair [fire escape] where many roomers grow edible plants, which several local low-coin girls use for concealment of sorts while entertaining clients (roomers who let them use “their” stretch of stairs get serviced for free).

-- Jharko’s Coffers and Crates (a rat-infested firetrap of a decaying former warehouse now owned by the shrewd, miserly Ustal Jharko, who’s filled the place with secondhand strongchests, coffers, travel-boxes, crates, coffins, barrels, handkegs, and every other sort of sturdy container. He repairs them and sells them all for a copper under “new” prices (and buys such things, no questions asked, for about a quarter of new pricings). If one needs containers in a hurry, Jharko can provide. Most of his containers have hasps, but Jharko has few locks to sell. He charges VERY dearly for hinges and hasps, for those who just want to buy such hardware.

Between Jharko’s and the next building north (Montalar’s) is the main cart-alley into the center of the block. Traffic to and from the warehouses is heavy enough to keep it clear of the usual refuse.

-- Montalar’s Happy House, a popular local eatery. This dawn-to-dusk place shutters its windows every night and turns out diners “to seek drunken entertainment elsewhere,” as Bhaerusk Montalar puts it. Up until then, however, Bhaerusk, his four daughters, his wife, and her two sisters keep bustling, serving forth hot cider (except in warm summer, when it’s served cold), weak ale, weak but sweet berry wine (beloved by many thirsty workers in the area), and ‘happy helms.’ Helms are circular pastries about the size of a small man’s palm, pinched flat around the edges but filled with a fry-mix of ground meat, diced vegetables, and strongly-spiced brown sauce. They’re portable food, and can be bought hot and fresh for dining on the spot (the vast majority are sold this way, many of them sold right out a front window to hungry buyers standing in the street) or cold (cooked, allowed to cool, and put in a stoppered second-hand clay fry-oil jug or salvaged bottle, to keep) for eating at home, later. Helms are sold two for a copper, and most find them tasty and filling -- though many whisper that the strong sauce makes one buy thrice as much drink, and could conceal the taste of, say, none-too-clean chopped rat.

The family Montalar lives on the floor above their eatery, and discreetly rents out apartments on the floor above. There’s also a cellar below, and folk murmur that jovial Bhaerusk Montalar rents out space in it for all manner of mysterious items, no questions asked. The cellar and the eatery both have rear entrances usually screened from view by heaps of discarded crates and a hanging curtain of runner-vines (edible beans) grown every year by the Montalars (their laundry lines adorn the gently-sloping roof of the building).

-- Talarkgates, the once-grand but slightly decaying home of a retired wool- and ale-merchant who still engages in moneylending and property investments in Suzail. Umbran Daerith is elderly but in robust good health. He’s rarely seen out of doors before dusk (when his coach calls for him, to take him to this or that nobles’ feast) unless attending business at Court or in one of the clubs along the central Promenade where wealthy merchants talk trade and make deals. Daerith is hard-headed but mellowing as age creeps up on him, and is increasingly seen in the company of beautiful young ladies he hires by the tenday (it’s thought they spend less time in his bedchambers than such ‘ornaments’ usually do, but most of their time simply being his friendly chattering escorts). Daerith has many ties to Sembian trading-partners, and it’s widely whispered in Suzail that some of his beautiful lasses are really War Wizards, keeping an eye on him.

The house is surrounded by a high, spear-topped wrought-iron fence, enclosing a narrow, overgrown-by-untended shrubs walkway all around it. Its name came from its builder and former owner, the long-dead merchant-fleet owner Indrith Talark.

Anyone can go to the Royal Court, ask directions of many guards (who can and will gruffly point you at the right building, wing, and floor), scurrying pages (who can give useful, accurate, and very brief locational replies), and clerks (most of whom are unhelpful, some sneeringly so), and eventually find their way to the Office of the Clerk of Maps.

The Clerk, an aging and bespectacled man by the name of Ulthaerus, was always far too busy to see us, accept appointments for any person or rank of person we could think up, or even (as far as a sneaking-about Torm was able to determine) show up in his inner office for work. However, he has six or seven Senior Underclerks (mostly tall, humourless, petty-power-loving [ahem] pricks [ahem] with fussy habits and names like Dueklaer, Ombrael, Instur, and Phelmet), and a dozen Junior Underclerks, who scuttle about and do all the real work. I only have two names of these nervous, helpful young men: Asgler and Paerimm. (These are all surnames, by the way; the only first names we ever learned for any of them was “Clerk.” )

The office also has two Secretaries (the only females, of course, and the only ones who have everything you need to know memorized): the middle-aged, matronly, iron-patient Amilla and Jathys (first names, of course, and it’s pronounced “JATH-ee-sss”). The Office is authorized to sell you street maps of every named settlement of Cormyr except military installations (in other words, you can’t get High Horn, but you can get all the other places along the major roads; DMs who don’t want their players to get particular maps, or who don’t want to go to the trouble of generating maps for places like Espar, can just have the Senior Underclerks explain that those maps are ‘out of stock’ at the moment), plus a VERY simple overall road map of the kingdom. No other maps are available, and persistent attempts to obtain such things will invite War Wizard scrutiny (yes, being tailed by spies).

Detailed property maps (deed by deed) aren’t kept at the Office of the Clerk of Maps, but at the much-harder-to-find Offices of the Land, whose Lord Registrars (self-titled clerks, not nobles) so jealously guard them that even courtiers and Court clerks from other departments can’t get to see them. War Wizards and Obarskyrs are the exceptions, but even they won’t really get helped by the Registrars (the “help” will be hindrance, full of misdirection and literal obedience rather than providing all that is desired or implied).

Neither Royal Court office provides keyed maps of cities (there are no feature or street names on any official maps for public purchase, just compass roses and place names), and neither allows visitors to “just look at” maps, even for fees (or attempted bribes). I can’t recall the prices charged for maps (because, ahem, Torm stole the ones we wanted, although the rest of us didn’t learn this until later), but I SEEM to remember something (probably the overall road map) being 75 gp.

I do know that the maps had a reputation for being VERY accurate, each city being checked annually and a spell being used to ‘project’ the image of a correct master map onto parchment for precise copying by the clerks (so every map was hand-drawn, but was also darn near identical to the source map and all other copies of the same vintage).

There are at least three shops in Suzail that have extensive collections of old (secondhand) maps from everywhere in the Heartlands, and one of them, Mustipher’s, is a second-floor shop about midway along the southern side of the Promenade, above a cloak and sash shop. I recall that both Florin and Torm were of the opinion that Belvarus Mustipher (a fat, hand-rubbing, always-leering little man) employed some youngsters skilled at drawing to make simplified (but probably accurate, unless they got really bored, I suppose) copies of some of the maps, and display one copy at a time for sale. Mustipher’s prices were 350 gp and up (he wanted a thousand gp for a Waterdeep street map and a detailed overland trade-route map, if memory serves me correctly; we didn’t bite). The other two shops were down near the docks at the west end of the city, and east of the center of the city, somewhere a street or so south of the Promenade; I don’t recall their names or locations because Torm and Rathan did the scouting and just told us.

Which is a very long way of getting around to what you wanted, Karth: the actual cartographers living in Suzail.
All I can say is there were only two publicly making a living at cartography, and only one of these would travel (within central Cormyr only, not east of Arabel or Marsember, or west of High Horn) to make measurements and observations so as to draw a ‘new’ map to order.
The non-traveling cartographer was Orustivus Malonder, a very wealthy retired adventurer of striking stature, looks, and voice (the “grand dramatic actor” type; think Luciano Pavarotti in build and beard, only gone gray), who lived somewhere in the wealthy area of the city north and west of the Palace and sold maps only through agents (urbane young adventuring types, all handsome young men, whom Torm suspected of reporting all unusual inquiries to the War Wizards) who could be contacted in several of the better taverns and dining houses along the Promenade. Malonder sold some rudimentary street maps of various Heartland cities (Ed just gave us copies of the originals he’d drawn for the FR Adventures hardcover, whenever we bought a map from Malonder), with SOME street names and features provided. He could also provide the same maps sold by the Office of the Clerk of Maps, but with a lot more features and streets “filled in.”

The traveling (and best) cartographer was Lorimel Rustellur, who lives in Thornposts, a grand house two doors west of Taneth’s (Taneth’s festhall is keyed feature #54 on the Suzail map published in A GRAND TOUR OF THE REALMS in the 2nd Edition Realms boxed set, and Thornposts is the second L-shaped building ‘along the row’ northwest from Taneth’s (due north of the westernmost of the two clumps of trees enclosed by this block of buildings).

Rustellur had done floorplan maps of many noble mansions and keeps, all over Cormyr, as well as “estates maps,” which are illustrated ‘from the air’ views of the arrangements of buildings, gardens, bridges, and ‘water features’ on a landscaped estate (of a noble or very wealthy landowner). He never sold any of these for less than a thousand gp each (the idea being that only jealous fellow nobles hoping to ‘build something grander’ would bother to pay such sums, and so such maps would be kept out of the hands of thieves and “common persons”). Rustellur wouldn’t sell any maps of Crown lodges, mansions, castles, or civic buildings, but could provide just about everything else (a DM wants players to have, from any sourcebook) if one could afford his always-steep fees; I doubt he drew custom maps for less than 2000 gp plus travel expenses, or sold any map for less than 800 gp.

There are, of course, plenty of retired (and not-so-retired) traveling merchants and Purple Dragons resident in Suzail who can draw crude, not-to-scale “how to get to Tavern X/the house of Y/Dungeon Z” maps, often for as little as 25 gp.

My notes have yielded up a prominent painter of Suzail, circa 1357 DR: Elros Lazandur, an aging, crotchety, short and stooped man who does portraits and hunt scenes depicting nobility - - but refuses to do nudes or anything "modern." His work is well respected, expensive, and rarely comes on the market because noble buyers don't want to part with it. His house (including a front room shop/studio) is on Doloph Street ("DOE-loff"), which is one of the streets south of the Promenade and paralleling the Promenade, in the western half of the city.

-- George Krashos


"Because only we, contrary to the barbarians, never count the enemy in battle." -- Aeschylus
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ILCJR
Acolyte

USA
3 Posts

Posted - 19 May 2017 :  03:24:37  Show Profile Send ILCJR a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Elren, all the maps that I found with street names were not legible, no matter what I did.

George. I have many 2nd edition books left, unfortunately that is not one of them. and the only one that I had an street names on it is The Promenade, of course. What you have done in your post is actually the the best help so far, I have several 2E maps of Suzail, so I can follow the instructions from your post to look up those things from the 2E Forgotten realms Atlas that I have.

L.C. Campbell Jr
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