Hortobagy, west of Debrecen

Initially, I'll be adding content about process, though much of this has been covered in those links attached to the blog's first two pages, here and here.  Essentially, the process is to expand existing hexes drawn on a scale of 20 miles per inch.  In this image below, it shows my desktop as I lay out the details for the finished map:

There's a lot of junk here.  The gray map in the background has the 20-mile hexes.  The large white numbers are the "infrastructure" for each big hex.  These numbers are used to generate the small white numbers found on the smaller hexes.  I'll go into the exact way that's done on another day.  The happy faces tell me which kind of route goes to the adjacent hex.  Follow that link and you'll find the process outlined on my game wiki.  Superimposed between the hexes is a cut-out from Google Earth, corresponding to the exact area being mapped.  Primarily, I use GE to give me names for towns, as every small hex that's between 1 and 4 includes a town/village.

However, I ignore GE's information regarding how big a town is, counting on the infrastructure to give that to me.  My world takes place in 1650, centuries ago.  There could easily be a big town on my map that doesn't exist on GE ... perhaps it was destroyed at some point, no?  I also use the Google Earth section to tell me where there are hills or rivers, which I add in fairly ad hoc.  I'm not trying to get an exact replica of the Earth, I'm just using the Earth as a template to help me fill in details I might not think of.

Here's the map after I've laid out the last villages and the roads:

There.  The reader can clearly see the big 20-mile hexes in the background, while it's hard to see the smaller hexes in between.  I could get rid of the big white number 76, because it's no longer on the edge of the map, and I can dump the 44 on the bottom too.  I need to know what the infrastructure is of adjacent hexes, as this determines the direction of the route.  Note that in the lower left by the town of Karcag (it's a type-2 hex), there's no route south.  That's because the 22-infrastructure, matched with Karcag's mere 46, just wasn't important enough for a throughfare.  There would be a footpath for travellers there, but no road.

Okay, let's look at the finished version:

I've gotten rid of the background, so the map looks cleaner.  With my next post, I'll proceed directly west, to make the next two hexes on the same horizontal line.  I've coloured the map to give a sense of the habitation.  Orange/tan hexes are mostly field, green hexes are mostly forest (this being northeastern modern day Hungary), with the darkest hexes (type-7) being the least inhabited.  Incidentally, everything to the east of the large dark yellow borderline shown is controlled by Transylvania, a client-kingdom of the Ottoman Empire.  Everything on the west of that line, not mapped, is Ottoman-occupied Hungary.

For anyone looking for me to detail some part of the process more closely, please leave a comment explaining what.