Northern Hills, west of Miskolc

I forgot to mention yesterday the unlikely forest that appeared adjacent to Miskolc.  I love that occasional a fairly high infrastructure, such as the 164 showing here, can still produce a wilderness adjacent to a city of more than 10,000.  'Course, it's really more of a hinterland than a "wilderness" ... there are too many people surrounding it not to have worn off the wild spaces with trails and paths.  I'm sure a goodly section has been carved off as a hunting reserve, not for the common folk to enter.  A simple random roll like this provides all sorts of strange possibilities.

Our subject today is the area west of Miskolc, where we reach the northern edge of the Ottoman Empire.  This is as far as the Ottomans got in there hegemony over Europe.  The remaining Austro-Hungarians, occupying modern Slovakia and Lower Austria, held the boundary for more than 150 years.  Here's an image of the area before mapping:

Turns out, my inclusion of the "Cserhat Hills" shown on the map is dead wrong ... a mistake I made more than a decade ago.  Those hills are further to the southwest.  It's nice to be able to correct the misinformation.  Note the "1" infrastructure on the left.  That's going to be a wilderness hex.  The wide dark line above Salgotarjan is the boundary to Hungary (and modern Slovakia).  This is also the first time with this blog that we get into real hill country ... the hills that gave this Ottoman Territory it's name in the 17th century.  Once laying out the hills, I took this screen shot without the background to show their density:

Those are the correct names for these mountains and hills, according to Google Earth (which has improved its topographic designations steadily in the last few years, making this easier).  The big mountain in the Matras and the two big ones in the Bukks are just above 3,000 ft.  The plains along the south edge of the map are some 350 ft.  Thus, these look fairly impressive, though they're not as high as the Tatras farther to the north.  We'll get to those eventually.

As a map is drawn, little adjustments get made, to make it easier to fit in the names, roads and streams between the hills and data.  When I drew the hill north of Egri, it was with the assumption that there'd be something for that road to go to, when the time came.  But it's easy enough to adjust, as the next section is added.  See if you can spot little differences in the way the map above was changed into the map below:

That bit of wilderness around the Karancs produces a slight impediment to easy movement into Slovakia, just beyond.  The whole area, just south of Christian Europe, suggests numerous possible adventures to my mind.

The two purple hexes, one surrounding a type-7 and the other a type-5, are code for "mining" settlements, as opposed to traditional agriculture.  The density of hills are just too high in both cases ... and we can note the difference in coins and hammers.  Just noticing as I look at it, that the "5" number is a little low and needs adjustment.  I'm constantly editing these things.

As I've said in the past, please ask if there's anything you'd like more information about.  This is as far west as we go ... with the next post we'll jump north 20 miles and 40 miles east.