Shattered Kingdoms

The side with the light aura NPCs, does it seem wrong Map wise?

From the entrance, you go east twice, north, northeast, northwest, west twice, southwest once.

That's three easts, three norths, five wests, and one south and you're back at the entrance.

Iane'elanka reminds me of Escher.

My exploration of areas in the game have lead me to conclude that builders think irregular paths are the bee's knees.

A variety of reasons influence the builders layout of a city. Remember, a room - especially one that acts like a road - is not necessarily designed to fit within a single square on an excel spread sheet.

1. They should be using graph paper to design their areas before building.
2. If the rooms don't line up when I'm reviewing a new area, I'll TYPO it, since I use zmud to map any area I review
3. For areas already in the game, it's usually too late -- fixing the problem can mean rearranging the whole place and confuses everyone who has been there before.

A lot of older areas are like this - I would give ch'zzyrm and the rest of the "old" deep realms as a prime example, same with the necropolis. But its not always just old areas. Sometimes new additions to older areas cause this problem too. Another example would be the changes to Nernia's inn.

Its the same thing at the outpost. If you look close enough there is one room with
obvious exits N(closed) NE(closed) E S
then in the room to the east you see
ovious exits N(closed) S(closed) E W

but the N room in the second room is not the same as the NE room in the first one.