Italy Began; Apulia, around Bari

I am working on the magazine. I'm producing about a page and a half a day, so I should be more than ready for the October issue preview to be ready on September 1st. In the meantime, I'm stoked to work on this, so I am.

Let's start with this corner of Apulia:

Not as heavily infrastructured as I feared, and of course there were far fewer rivers and topographic features, so it went rather quickly. Also, a large part of this is water. I see I forgot to add a road to the town of Le Torri, so I'll repair that before posting this again.

The density of the settlements, the black circle towns, arises because of their importance, even from the source in 1952. It was still more common at that time to take a train rather than a plain to Barletta, Bari or Brindisi (off map), to take a boat to Athens, Cairo or the Holy Land. Moreover, historically, all these places represented the most important trading route in the world, as the Adriatic proved to be dangerous to lighter ships (Venice solved that with technology), so it was best to park along Apulia, unload, and rush back to Egypt for more grain, or Constantinople or Antioch for more luxuries. That chaotic terrain, plus the madness of local tribes, made the Balkans less friendly to trade between 400 BC and 1500 AD. So this coast got rich as the most successful middle-men in world history.

I went on this morning and mapped further west. Below, the sheet map shows the background for context, so the reader can see where we are.

This is the M.12e - Rome sheet, with the Kingdom of Naples and smallish states on the right and the Papal States on the left. I'll be following the slanted line with this pass, concentrating the Adriatic and the rest of the Dalmatian coast for now.  I'll post the sheet map of Dalmatia's relationship to the Apulia map above with my next post here.  I guess that's about all. The independent state shown, with the heavy border line around it, is the Bishopric of Benevento, which even the Spaniards were unwilling to tax.

Albania-Macedonia, east of Dirac

 And... this is the last truly chaotic map I have to do of the Balkans. I'm so glad. There's still parts of Croatia and Slovenia to do to finish with the Balkans altogether, but this, this above... this horror show is finished. Yay.

I don't think the choice to do these larger sections is necessarily faster... I think it's more that when I get my teeth into a particular process, I'm less likely to put it down. One thing I find with a series of small jobs, when each in the string are finished, it's easier for me to throw off the next one for an hour, a day or even ten months. Whereas, something big like this... I'm not completely relaxed until it's done.

Anyway, I spent about 3.5 hours tidying this up today. and I think probably about 5 on it yesterday... which sounds like a lot. But when I think about the eight hour shifts I've worked in my life that have ended without anything real to show from it — and I know all of you know exactly what I mean — this really feels like time well spent.

So, this wraps up the Rumelia sheet for now, which the reader can compare with this from Aug 8, six days ago:

And it tidies up the Illyria sheet:

On Google Earth, we can see what's been finished overall in this corner of the globe:

Keeping in mind that everything in the upper right corner behind the red boxes has been mapped. It can be seen that I've worked a line north up to Sarajevo, then jumped way west through Croatia, which has steadily widened with each trip around the map that I've done. So I'm going to even that up now, pushing way into south Italy, then north, evening up that scraggling line. It's an opportunity to map a very different country (though Italy is going to be very densely infrastructured, all type-1 hexes) and a lot of coast. All of Italy is smaller than Romania and Serbia put together, but it's very long so finishing it will cover a lot of open sea, with Sicily and Sardinia being the last areas finished.

So, it's across the water with my next map, with the densest part of Apulia on the block.

Further Rumelia and Hither Thrace, north of Gumulcine

This is a bridge map between two map sheets, which exist because the size of these maps disallows any possibility of working endlessly on one map.  I'll show the two sheets that it's a bridge across below.  This recent tactic of creating large areas of map in one go is great, but when that area covers more than one sheet, it's definitely problematic, so from here on, the size of "large area" I'll be making at a time will have to change, both in dimension and in some cases, marginally in shape.

The above represents the last of the large province of Further Rumelia, the eastern half of southern Bulgaria.  Bulgaria is essentially two large flatlands split by a mountain range that passes through the middle, called the Balkan Mountains; north of this is the southern plain of the Danube, and south of it is "Rumelia." For those interested, Rumelia is an excellent name to build a fictional kingdom around, and was used extensively in the 1930s whenever a film wanted to have a visiting emisary appear from one of those "Eastern European places no one really understood," back when Hollywood was still fascinated with royalty. As the population became educated, this sort of thing stopped being used, though Blake Edwards continued to experiment with it into the 1960s.

I'm just starting on "Hither Thrace," at the bottom of the above, called "Hither" because it's closer to the centre of power in Austria.  Thus, Further Rumelia is further from Vienna, while Hither Rumelia, including the large city of Sofia, is closer to Vienna.  Both Hither Thrace and Lower Macedonia (so called because its that part of ancient Macedonia that's on the Aegean, with the large important port city of Thessalonika) are very heavily populated, below unpopulated mountains (the Rhodope), but that's all for the next map.

Here's the Varna sheet, M.27e (the number being the nearest whole parallel running through the upper left corner):

And here's the one to the west of this, the Rumelia sheet, M.23e:

I'll be filling a goodly large section of that blank space at the bottom with my next map.

Nyatria & Galicia, around Zsolna

The end of Nyatria and I think all of Slovakia now.  For awhile now, I've been progressing east to west with each group of three posts, but now I've climbed up the previously constructed map to where I'm even with it.  Here, I'll demonstrate; here's the upper left corner of the whole map as it's been rendered so far:

The reader can see that it's even now.  I've fixed the error I made with this post and extended the intended line up to include Busko at the top of the map sheet, "Nyatria-18e", which is named after the general area and that the upper right corner is 18 degrees E of Greenwich (an anachronism, but let's be realistic).

As I've explained before, the distance around the world EW is greater than the distance NS, so I've been mapping outwards six 20-mile hexes from the edge; atop the done map, however, I'll just do three 20-mile hexes.  I'll go north from the map finished here, to do the group of six hexes (3 high, 2 wide), then proceed east along the edge of the map shown.  Thus it'll be dense population to Lwow, then it'll drop off towards near Kiyev.  I haven't looked yet to see if I'll be doing Kiyev on this pass.  I kind of like not knowing.

I suppose for most this all seems sort of repetitive.  Certainly the mix of hexes extending along the finger that the Hungarian Kingdom makes east to west, plainly visible on the double-map here seems like a long scattering of similarly patterned hexes.  Let me say that I know that it's just infeasible that this much information could ever really be made use of for a D&D world; it's tremendously out of reason to run every one of these towns in a lifetime of gaming.

Therefore, we can guess that much of my motivation here isn't D&D.  I am pretty nerdy, after all.  I find myself mapping Poland and I think, "wow, not that long ago I was mapping Bulgaria.  This is so kewl to be this far north and actually mapping Krakow!  Goofy, but it's like travelling across Europe at walking speed, which feeds my inner quest for knowledge at any cost.  Some things I do "for D&D" are purely selfish.  I admit it.

I'll skip a description of this area above.  It's much the same as the last two I wrote for Upper Hungary.  The sight of the completed map, overlaid upon the uncompleted areas, I think, is enough.

At some point, I'm going to have to solve the problem of laying two adjacent maps one over the other.  The "Arpathian Mountains," for example, indicates that pretty clearly.  I've figured out how to do it, but damn, it's a lot of work.

Nyatria Map Sheet

For fun, here's the next map sheet north of the Croatian sheet, which I've just moved on from.  I've duplicated that material appearing on the Croatian sheet along the bottom, and printed this with the 20-mile map in the background, so the reader can see the infrastructure numbers that have been generated for those hexes.  Some regions on this may haven't been so calculated, and that'll have to come before my moving off this sheet.

The thin orange line that slants up and then to the right is the outward boundary of while I'll be mapping before putting this sheet to bed.  As can be seen, I'll be doing that heavily populated aisle along the Danube valley, then up through the main of western Slovakia and across the Tatra Mts., which are mid-map around Zakopane.  Then it's clearly into southern Poland and Galicia, just grabbing Krakow before I start off in an easterly direction.  Silesia, and Zlin, gets missed this time around.  One of my readers who is interested in Zlin is probably disappointed.

Squeezed against the Edge

 

I should have just tacked this on to the end of the last post, which I put up about two hours ago, but I didn't think of it.  The image above shows the rest of the map sheet I'm working on.  Note there are just six hexes between the mapped area and the edge; this translates to being two 20-mile hexes wide.

I've been posting sections that are 9 hexes high and 6 sections wide, which translates to three by two 20-mile hexes.  What I'll have to do with the above is make an area 6 by 6 hexes, and then copy the top two hexes of that onto the next map sheet in order to keep going.  This is easier than doing a 9 by 6 area ... so well do the three 6 by 6 sections first, then continue as I have done before.

This can't possibly matter to anyone but me and a few serious map nerds, but heck, it explains why I'm doing what I'm doing with the next three posts.

Finishing a sheet is always an annoyance, what with the duplication of the edges that has to be done so the maps can be lined up.  I've done so much of this, however, that it's not a big deal.  It just slows me a little.  However, towards the end it feels like I'm being squeezed against the edge of the map.  I obviously prefer to have a big empty map to fill up, then getting towards the end of one.

Further Rumelia, around Stanimaha

Bit late today.  More of the Maritsa valley.

The infrastructure density is getting me down a bit, but making progress.  The above map in southern Bulgaria completes the sheet map M.27e - Varna for the present.  Here's a shot of the whole map:

I'll match this up with the next map to the west, when I complete that one.  This covers virtually all of eastern Bulgaria.

Bithynia, around Cide

Returning to Bithynia, there's only this small corner left, before leaving modern Turkey behind:

Everything else is south and east.  When I come back around this way, I'll be doing a great deal of Turkey ... but then Turkey is a very large country, bigger than France, so that I'll be adding to it for years to come.

Before starting on Bulgaria, I thought I'd provide a general map of the coast around the Black Sea, to demonstrate how really huge it is with this scale:

Not all of this coast is mapped, obviously.  The big swing around Constantinople on the lower left swings too far south, so it won't be done on this pass.  This is also a part of the map where the direction of hexes turns 60 degrees, which is really obvious for anyone familiar with a world map.  With tomorrow's post, if someone doesn't intervene with a request, I'll fill in the coast on the middle left, which is Bulgaria, and start moving inland from there.

The reader can see that, although I'm only doing a small part each day, it's just taken two months to map an enormous part of Europe, from Hungary through the southern tip of Poland, across the Ukraine and down into the rim of Turkey.  In another two months we'll have reached the Adriatic Sea and, I hope, be on the verge of returning to Hungary.

Dneiper Sheet

The first of two posts today.

Here's the Dneiper sheet, that I forgot to post yesterday:

Not that exciting, as most of the page is empty.  I'll add the Kiyev sheet and trim the undone portion off the one above and see if that gives a better sense of space:

There, that supplies scope.  I like the comparison between the splash of orange on the left, which is Moldova around the big city of Chisinau, and that of Vassia on the right.  In between, a few little burgs and villages, with only one decrepit route between them.  Even that has places no better than a cart track.  A bit of a surprise for a party that decides to make the journey with big wagons and not enough replacement axles.  It may only be 140 miles, but it wouldn't be pleasant.  And with strange names and no map, plus villages who couldn't tell them how to get to Voghrad (as they'd have no idea), I wonder how many dead ends they'd reach.

K.30e - Kiyev Sheet

First of two posts today.  To begin, here's an image of the Kiyev sheet, to date.  Won't be finishing that upper right hand corner for awhile.

Labelling still needs work, at least from the standpoint of large pictures.  Got to darken up the geographical descriptions and the political labels also.  But, not pressing.  Play around with it going forward.

Here's an image of the Czernowitz and Kiyev sheets together:

Gets harder and harder to see the whole picture without having to give up a level of detail.  Mostly it's just lines and hexes, unless we know just what we're looking at.

On the subject of forward mapmaking ... yesterday I talked about the ragged edge of what's been mapped so far.  Here's an updated image from GoogleEarth for the sections that have been completed:

So, not nearly half of the Ukraine done.  It's a big country.  But the reader can see what I mean by the eastern edge.  My intention is to the continue with a southeast progression until coming even with the yellow rectangle on the map, though that means doing more that three sections in a line before moving south.  Then, with that evened up, I'll come southwest until I hit Bulgaria and Thrace in Turkey.  There's a small chance I'll map some of Bithynia, the bulge showing in Turkey south of the label for the Black Sea.  I'm actually looking forward to mountains.

Czernowitz Sheet Map

I'm done with the Czernowitz sheet now, so it's time to post it.  Here it is in its full size:

The top nine hexes from edge to edge were done in the last two weeks.  Everything else I did before last August.

But for some real perspective, here's a pic of the journey we've taken since Hungary:

Has the whole upper course of the Dneister from left to right.  Lovely.

Is it improper of me to post these large sweeps of map?  Does it seem like I'm indecently patting myself on the back?  I'm really just trying to show that with steady, diligent work, remarkable progress can be made.

Ternopol Wald, south and around Ternopol

 Yesterday, I posted this area of Ternopol Wald, without completing it:

In order to get past the cut line between two map sheets, I've done all six hexes including Chertkov north.  To start with, here's the first two hexes, with a rough map of the remaining area to be done:

Down at the bottom, we have some new things.  Between Koropets and Peredmistya is an empty type-8 hex with a different pattern than the "forested" colour I've been using.  I've struggled and struggled to find a good representation for this kind of hex.  I think I've finally found one.  Many of the earlier maps have to be adjusted, which I'll do as I move along.

This is an empty steppeland, not arable due to lack of water and poor soil ... something that came up with Shelby on the main blog.  The scattered hills suggest a dry highland, where the water table is so far beneath the surface as to be impractical.  Coincidentally, there's a good reason why this should happen.

The very curled course of the Dniester river is the result of the "Dniester Canyon," with much of it 500 ft. below the plateau above.  This is the river cutting down from the Podolian Upland and into the valley of Bukovina, where the large modern city of Chernivtsi is located.  I've been careful not to create any routes across the river between Nishniv at the top and the trade route on the east, which does not bridge the river in any case.

I know I haven't published the map in relation to those on the west and south.  This is done below.  For the moment, here's a rough map of the remaining four hexes to be done, or two sections:

Virtually all of this area is steppe.  This begs the question, if I'm using progressively darker green colours for less developed hexes, shouldn't these change to something more brown as we move into the steppe?  Hm.  I've considered it ... and done some experimentation also.  But the truth is, the discontinuity is instantly so confusing that it fails to provide the quick-look index of the existing colour scheme.  As such, it's better to remember these areas are open prairie rather than try to represent that.  The hex type colours, therefore, are not representative of "trees," though it'll look like that over much of the map.  Only the wilderness hexes, that are type-8 and not designated on the map, will reflect the natural vegetation.  I don't find this the least confusing.  It's certainly less confusing than any alternative I can think of.

Okay, here's all the region I've done today, including all three sections, or six 20-mile hexes, without background:

Remember, this is two map sheets overlapping, because these three sections straddled two sheets.  Sorry about the flotsam that could have been deleted.  I missed it until after this composite image was put together, and I didn't want to do it again.

I don't know why, but the village dot for Peredmistya, west of Chertkov, has disappeared; that needs fixing.  Additionally, the type-4 village Nastasiv, should have that road going to the larger nearby Ternopol, not Zaboika.  Small bits and pieces.

This is the last of the Ruthenia sheet for awhile.  Here's a rendering of the whole sheet, just as I did for Nyatria last week:

Compare this with what this map looked like when I started this post on November 9th, three weeks ago:

See?  Stuff gets done.

Ruthenia, south of Turka

The above is a long shot of all Ruthenia, with the small section at the top still undone.  This is the far east extension of the remaining Hungarian Kingdom in the mid-17th century, with the Ottoman Empire to the south and Poland to the north.  The Lithuanian element of Poland was united, finally, with Poland in 1569, with the Union of Lublin.

We have a few more populated areas to create, especially as we enter the Polish county of Lwow (modern Lviv), of which the four settlements of Turka, Borislav, Bych and Stryj are a part, as shown on the completed map below:

The very small road shown creeping out of the left hex and into Poland should have gone into the right-hand hex, with an infrastructure of 241 ... however, the terrain is so dense with mountains, the lack of a pass drove the road westward towards Turka instead.  There's certain to be a Turka-based road that comes south and meets it.  Still, because my system allows the hex only one connection (see the table on this link), the route stops at the river, making a half-mile gap.

Keep in mind that the light greenish-brown route is a "cart path" ... used so infrequently that the ruts are not maintained with stone, with vegetation encroaching on the route.  Too, a route like this is probably hundreds of years old.  Once, it might have been a dirt road, but it's degraded over time, due to the collapse of trade between south and north.  This suggests that the hex itself may include an abandoned village, now occupied by a small remnant of farmers who cling to the lands of their ancestors.  We can see from this how the incongruity of the road causes us to come up with a good reason why it's apparently unsuited to the environment.  This is better than linking up the road at the bottom, which only contributes to a dull consistency that suggests nothing to see here.

Anyway, we have this small sea of mountains, 20 by 40 miles.  Now, rather than do one post today, I want to jump 30 miles north and west, as shown by the long arrow on this post.

This is Upper Hungary, around Bartfa (modern Bardejov):

The section is an area of low hills, rising to above 2000 feet in the northeast corner.  The reader should remember that I grow intimate with each of these sections through GoogleEarth.  Here's a slanted shot of the hills I'm speaking of:

This is quite different from the mountains in Ruthenia, above.  The vertical ratio is 3:1, as this helps elucidate the terrain's nature.  We can see that there's more than enough room for all the people on the map below to live. 

This is the last of the Kingdom of Hungary for a long while, and the last of Slovakia also.  This section is entirely on the Ruthenia sheet, but some of it is duplicated on Nyatria, so I have one last chore to do today.

Starting back on the 9th of November, I created the Nyatrian sheet because the map had spilled that far west.  Now I've done the last that I'm going to do on it until coming back around in a clockwise circle by way of the Black Sea.  Here's how it looks on its own:

From here, it gets left behind.  Later, I'll link it up with pages on the east and south, and post that map as it's own post.  Onto the Ukraine.