Kedantlan

Tags: canon = the author decided it, proposed = a suggestion awaiting a yes, modelled = output of the climate model, true of the map rather than decided as lore, open = undecided.

Region 23 of the survey. The starter region, and the ground the front-page survey map is drawn over. A Mediterranean-to-continental country of shield lakes and low relief, named in the elvish framework rather than the dwarven one.

[proposed] Kedantlan is the ancient homeland of the elves: a chain of great lakes and winding river valleys running down to a warm inland sea, with a single land border to the rest of the world. If accepted, this settles the open question below about why an elvish-framework name sits here.

The name

[canon] Kedantlan is built in the Xibanal naming framework: a Hebrew triconsonantal root, a Nahuatl-style suffix, and optional Greek or Latin prestige affixes. See _Xibanal (Elvish).
[canon] The root is kdm, carrying antiquity and what came before. The final m turns to n before a consonant, giving kedan. The suffix -tlan marks a land or region.
[canon] The people are the Kedanteca. One person is a Kedantecatl.
[proposed] Kedantlan reads as the older country the empire grew out of. The imperial homeland is already named Xaltlan in the codex, built the same way from the prestige root Xal- plus -tlan.
[open] That Kedantlan carries an elvish-framework name is explained if the elf-homeland reading above is accepted, and otherwise is not. Rook decides.
[proposed] Alternatives considered and set aside: Yantlan, sea-land, for the old seafloor; Agantlan, lake-land, for the great lake chain and the shield lakes around it.
[proposed] Place names already coined in Xibanal for this ground: Givatepec (hill-place), Xartlan (forest land), Etzcan (settlement of trees), Agancan (lake town), Kochavco (star city or observatory), Yarechco (moon city), Kedanco (the ancient city).
[open] These were built from the Xibanal entry alone. They have not been checked against the Wood Elf or Sea Elf rules, because _Ajnetik (Wood Elves) and _Ahvesil (Sea Elves) are both empty files. The check cannot be done until those notes exist.

The land

[modelled] Area about 4.1 million km². Mean height 256 m, highest point 1,104 m. Low, worn country rather than mountainous.
[modelled] Old seafloor: the source gives this as 10% of the region in its summary figures and as about 18% in the rationale for the discarded name Yantlan. The two disagree and neither has been confirmed.
[proposed] A chain of great lakes fills the north. The river valleys run down to a warm inland sea, and the region has a single land border to the rest of the world.
[modelled] 489 thousand km² of lake surface across 309 lakes. Shield-lake country.
[modelled] Largest river flow about 11,137 m³/s.
[modelled] Ground cover on the survey map reads as wet forest, grass and steppe, dry ground and cool forest, with deep water paling toward the shore.

Climate

[modelled] Mean rainfall about 803 mm a year. Mean temperature about 12.8 °C.
[modelled] Climate classes by area: Csa Mediterranean hot summer 47%, Dsa continental dry-summer hot 22%, Dfb continental humid warm 11%, Dsb continental dry-summer warm 10%, Csb Mediterranean warm summer 8%, Cwa dry-winter subtropical 2%.
[modelled] The model gives wet winters, dry summers and mild winters.
[canon] For play, treat the winter as hard and the summer as green.
[proposed] Use the model's temperature curve for the shape of the seasons only, not their severity. Its real-Earth twin is the Quebec and Hudson Bay shield country, which behaves the opposite way: rain all year peaking in summer, winters well below freezing. The two disagree, and play follows the line above rather than either curve.

Peoples

[canon] Probably no Koda halls in the Kedantlan area, though related hill dwarf settlements are possible. See Dwarves and Duergar.
[proposed] The Mountainholms, the range holding the five Kords, sit about 2,300 km from Naharapan.
[open] Are the Kedantlan hill dwarves linked far-flung septs, or severed ones? Carried over from the dwarven open questions, where it is unresolved.

Mapping

[modelled] The region is drawn on the tilted-Earth frame: real Earth relief rotated into the world's frame, then run through wind belts, ocean gyres, heat transport, rainfall and rain shadows.
[modelled] The Kedantlan survey page states its frame as 18 N to 66 N, 12 W to 26 E.
[proposed] The world is about one third Earth size. The survey page defaults to that scale, with travel at 24 miles a day on foot, 40 riding, and 72 for a longship on open water.
[modelled] Worked sample point, for checking frame alignment: 36.1 N, 10.6 E in frame corresponds to 49.7 N, 74.7 W on real Earth, at 369 m elevation, climate Dsa, 533 mm/yr rainfall, 11.8 °C mean.
[open] Whether the front-page header's frame still matches the reworked map. The header is registered to a top-left corner of 10 W, 52 N at 120 pixels per degree over 4440 by 3840 pixels, which works out to 10 W to 27 E and 20 N to 52 N. The survey page gives 12 W to 26 E and 18 N to 66 N. The two are different crops, which is survivable; what is not yet known is whether the underlying tilt changed, which would make the header's tiles and its Naharapan marker wrong rather than merely cropped.

Open questions

[open] Kedantlan's borders, neighbours and polities. Nothing in the source fixes them; only the regional envelope is modelled.
[open] Whether the region's name predates or postdates Xaltlan in world history, which decides whether "the older country" is a geographic fact or an imperial story about itself.

Source provenance

Source: the Kedantlan and Areshnaat climate layers pages of the Areshnaat atlas app, read 2026-10-11 from the published artifacts; also exported as kedantlan.pdf and areshnaat-map-rework.pdf, which lose some sections to the print layout. Figures marked modelled are outputs of that climate model, not authored lore. The model is calibrated so global rainfall matches Earth, but it runs rainforests 3 to 5 times too dry and deserts too wet, so regional rainfall is indicative only.