Arianna Bianchi (ehr-ee-ahn-uh bee-ahn-kee)

Known as one of the most prolific cartographers in the world, Arianna Bianchi was originally an adventuring mercenary who quickly discovered her true passion was exploration and discovering areas of the world. Over a career spanning more than 40 years, Arianna traveled to most corners of Luuxinor and has produced dozens of regional or national maps based on her travels and commissions. In fact, the most commonly used current map of Luuxinor is an amalgamation of Arianna's work with a few other cartographers' creations to fill in the very few gaps between her works. The decision to draw the map with the South toward the top was Arianna's signature style, and most cartographers currently operating have adopted this as the standard.
Originally born in Alloro in 1422 to a moderately noble family, Arianna was always fascinated with learning about the world. History, nature, and geography were her favorite areas, as she has written and told countless people and audiences over the years. As a young adult, Arianna became bored with the cushy city living and wanted to go out and explore the world. Her parents financed a trip across the countryside to Sybilina, hoping that trip would sate her curiosity. Instead, Arianna fell in with an adventuring mercenary company in Sybilina quickly and eschewed her parents' escorts and planned activities. The group started to take a few jobs in the countryside areas of Regia, and Arianna started to doodle the geography and landscape, beginning a lifelong love of cartography - despite her having no formal education or training in the area.
As her adventuring group traveled further afield on jobs and quests, Arianna realized her true love was in traveling and seeing things, not in fighting monsters. Her skills with a bow were middling at best, and she was really not a very helpful member of her party. After realizing her passion for cartography, Arianna convinced her troupe to escort her back to her home city, going through the wilderness instead of taking the well-traveled roads. Along the way, Arianna sketched landscapes and made notes of the geography as much as she could. Once back in Alloro, she enrolled in the Magistoria Academy to study cartography officially. Her instructors were impressed by the skill and detail of her untrained sketch maps, and she quickly found herself under the mentorship of the Lead Cartographer of the academy. With such great mentorship, Arianna was able to complete formal training in just two years, ready to head out and put her newly acquired skills to use.
When Arianna started her journey, there were no comprehensive world maps, and even the regional or national maps were somewhat rudimentary. Most had been around for several decades without being updated, and the further reaches of the world were almost entirely uncharted. Due to her connections to the upper echelons of Magistoria scholars, the academy agreed to fund a multi-year journey for Arianna to travel around to various parts of the world with an adventuring mercenary group to accompany her. They hoped the group would be able to traverse the northern plains, cross the al-Sahra Desert to the west, and then continue to the western coast. The stated goal of this first expedition was to map essentially everything north of the mountains, then any other areas the group was able to access through their travels. Despite some complications along the way, Arianna and her group did make it west past the desert and around the northwest corner of the mountain range, eventually making it as far south as Ustcôte. From there, they chartered a ship to take them back to Alloro so they could turn in their work.
Because the mountains were the reference for this initial trek, when Arianna was compiling her notes and sketches, she chose to sketch the mountains as the background layer of her maps, this putting the northern direction toward the bottom of her drawings. She recognized the unconventionality of this practice, but she also believed that presenting her first map in this view made all of her locations and markings more legible. When she finally submitted her first map to the academy in 1453, the review board praised her innovation and creativity, as well as the thoroughness with which she completed her task. Her map had many precise notes about distances between landmarks or the specific size of geographical zones - namely the al-Sahra Desert, which was previously only scarcely mapped and the boundaries of which were not fully understood.
Having enjoyed a rousing success on her first expedition, Arianna was quickly sent on another - this time to travel south on the Great Trade Road and map as much as she could south of the mountains. This trek took almost five years and saw Arianna and her company travel to the very far southeast and southwest corners of the continent, even venturing across Eismer Bay to reach Kryepostniy and map its environs. After returning from this expedition, the only areas left for Arianna to explore were the eastern side of the continent around Easthold and the central western continent around Magnavalus Lake. These areas were checked off Arianna's list within the decade, and she could officially say she'd seen every corner of the continent of Luuxinor.
Over the next three decades, Arianna undertook specific, focused missions to refine her maps and notes on very defined areas she was not able to capture in depth on her first voyages. By this point, she had become a famous name around academic circles, and the Doge of Alloro even gave her a title of nobility. Despite her illustrious career, Arianna has never made it to the northern islands, and with her seemingly in retirement now that goal seems unlikely to be met. In 1477, at age 55, Arianna compiled her lifetime of notes and maps into one grand work to create the ubiquitous continental map of Luuxinor, using the very accurate maps of some of her proteges to fill in the islands and other areas she was never able to map. This work was quickly replicated by magical scribes and distributed to every corner of the continent, with each academy or nation making its own additional markings to show territorial divisions, land claims, etc. as applicable.
Today, Arianna still lives in Alloro and is an honored professor at the Magistoria Academy where she once was a student. She has been known to frequently visit the Doge's palace for tea and social events, and she is often consulted by various traders and mercenaries to give advice on travel routes or possible dangers of upcoming expeditions. She has even been known to sponsor adventuring expeditions from time to time, with the focus of delivering new maps to far-flung places or going to specific locations to take more precise notes on the geography and scales. Despite her success in life and relative fame she has found, her parents disowned her during her first expedition, believing cartography to be a dead-end career where she would make no money and probably die in the wilderness far from civilization. After her parents' deaths, Arianna reconnected with her siblings, though the relationship still remains icy by all accounts, and the siblings do not enjoy the same high social status as their mapmaking sister. Travelers to the city can occasionally catch this renowned adventurer telling tales of her journeys at her favorite tavern (the one she founded and still owns) The Brass Compass.

Official court portrait

Art by me, using HeroForge

Honorary & Occupational Titles

The Great Cartographer

Date of Birth

10th of Samradh Ardt, 1422

Birthplace

Alloro

Gender

Female

Arianna's Famous Map of Luuxinor