The dry sea

The Messinian

The game is set in the Messinian, the last age of the Miocene, during what geologists call the Messinian salinity crisis. The Atlantic gateways had closed and the Mediterranean, cut off from the ocean, evaporated. What was left was a salt desert kilometres below sea level, with brine lakes pooled in the deepest basins. The sea came back later, all at once. That is not part of this story.

The map

The campaign map is built from real elevation data, reconstructed to how the land stood then. The rules behind it are simple ones, each a well-documented fact of the period:

• The Atlantic stands higher. With less ice on the planet the ocean sits about 20 metres above today's level. The Low Countries and the Thames estuary are under water.
• Gibraltar is closed. A ridge joins Spain to Morocco. The Atlantic can't get in.
• The Mediterranean is dry. Every basin that was sea floor is now salt flat, crust and brine shore, with lakes of brine in the Balearic, Tyrrhenian, Ionian and Levantine deeps.
• Britain walks to France. A chalk ridge stands where the Strait of Dover will be.
• Corsica and Sardinia are one landmass, standing on their shelf above the salt. The exiles' camp is there, on the Joined Isles.
• The Black Sea is a lake. The brackish Lago Mare, kept apart from the dry Aegean by a low ridge.
• Rivers cut canyons. As the sea fell, the Rhône, the Po, the Ebro and the Nile cut gorges down toward it.
• There is no Baltic. Where it will be, there is low river country.

Wooded north, open south

North of the Pyrenees and the Alps the land is forest and parkland. Iberia, Italy, the Balkans and Anatolia are scrub and dry steppe, the Pontic steppe runs east, and a hot desert rim lies along North Africa. Only the high Alps and the highest Pyrenees carry snow.

The map is cut into 50 regions. Each has its own name, a hint at the country it will become, a kind of land and a line of description. There are 12 kinds of land, and each one is a different kind of battlefield. See regions for all of them, and plants and animals of the period for what grows there.