Vassia, around Mirg

First, today's maps.  I was going to do a section and then half a section east of that, to make the hexes line up, but as I'm straddling the cut-off between the Kiyev and Dneiper sheets, it's easier to do the half-section first and the section after that.  So here's the pre-map half-section on K.30e - Kiyev:

This gets us into Vassia, which I'm going to talk about today, but first it's all maps.  The infrastructure numbers are getting higher, as Vassia surrounds an important Ottoman province on the frontier with Kiyev.

The distribution was unusual, as I got a bunch of type-4's and a type-2, whereas a single type-1 would have consumed five of these hexes into one.  This distribution continued, curiously enough, into the next section, now on the K-32e-Dneiper sheet:

Settlements aplenty here, and good solid infrastructure numbers, though of course nothing extravagant in the 200s.  When I completed the map, though ...

I got seven type-2's and no type-1's at all.  That's very unusual.  No type-3's either.  This makes for a high distribution pattern, with 12 population centres, the most I've had to add since way back in Ternopol Wald, which now seems like a long time ago.

And here I'm going to talk about breaking some of my own rules with regards to representing the Earth with my game world.  Historically, there is no place called "Vassia."  Moreover, while the city names above are placed in the location of actual places, the names have been changed to reflect a distinctly different culture from either Russian or Ukrainian.  The changes are slight: on GoogleEarth, "Hruz" is Hruz'ke.  "Olek" is Oleksiivka.  "Mirg" is Novomyrhorod, or Novomirgorod as the Russians spelled it in 1952.  "Vassia" the territory, occupies what is today Kirovohrad oblast.

The reason for this is because the region's background until the early 18th century was distinctly NOT Slavic.  The area had been ravaged endlessly by tribes pouring in from the east, from the Visigoths and the Huns to the Pechenegs and eventually the Mongols ... who permanently settled in what's southern modern Ukraine as the "Khanate of the Golden Horde."  Eventually, it became "Little Tartary," as the Mongol Tartar hegemony in this part of the world became known when "Great Tartary" had collapsed and lost it's influence here.  The Tartars, to protect themselves, allied themselves with the Ottomans, giving the latter more and more power until, by the middle 17th century, the Ottomans were effectively in control here.  Wikipedia and historians say that Little Tartary, or the Crimean Khanate, lasts until the early 18th century (1783), when the Russians annexed it ... but personally I've chosen to count it as part of the Ottoman Empire, as it's essentially an utterly dominated client state.

As an interesting note, this part of the Ukraine was known as the "Wild Fields," a historical term used by the Poles and Lithuanians, until the 18th century.  From it, the Tatar tribes raided into Kiyev and Poland, and into Russia too, although this raiding largely subsided in the second part of the 1600s.  My world, remember, takes place in 1650.  The push back came from the Russians, who expanded into Poland between 1654 and 1667, and from the Ukrainian Cossacks, who dwelt east of the Dneiper in the Zaporozhian Sich, and who began to claim parts of what I'm calling Vassia after the 1620s.  Thus some of the villages on the map above are "Cossack villages" and some are "Tatar villages."  In-fighting is  taking place, so it would be a difficult part of the world for a low-level party, who might get randomly attacked on a road first by one side, then the other.  They'd have to be clever and strong to defend themselves and win the trust of one of these groups.  It's a Conan adventure.

Still one more detail to pile on top of all this.  In my game world, because I wanted the presence of non-human races to fit into the historical tapestry, the Mongols were not human, but uruk-hai; "ogrillon" from the Fiend Folio, while I prefer the designation "Haruchai" because it's my own and I can do what I want with the race without getting bogged down by Tolkienesque boundries.  Essentially, orcs with 2 hit dice.  In turn, the Cumans and Pechenegs were orcs; and the original Turkish tribes in the 7th to 10th century in central Asia had a great deal of orcish blood.

My argument, however, is that the orcish genome is weak ... with constant interbreeding with humans, the genome evaporates, leaving behind a completely human genome.  This is what happened to the Bulgars, who were originally a series of half-orcish Turkic tribes in the Volga region in the 7th century, who slaughtered their way into Europe (bigger and stronger because they were orcs), bred with the Slavs and ultimately became Slavic themselves, with no recognisable orcish characteristics to speak of.

This is, of course, fantasy nonsense.  But it allows me to create historical precedents for non-human territories in my game world, such as the existence of Cumana, which in no way exists in human history.  This half-orc state, remaining half-orc through traditional inter-breeding with only half-orcs and orcs, dominates eastern Ukraine, acting as a Kiyevan-like state between Moscovy and the Ottomans.  The existence of this state robs Russia of much trading revenue, thus helping keep the Russian state weaker in the 1600s than it actually was; thus the war against Poland won't go as well in the 1660s as it did in the real world ... also because Russia is hemmed in by two states that restrain it from crossing the Urals and gaining access to the resources of Siberia: a dwarven kingdom called Hoth and a surviving remnant of the Mongols, the orc-haruchai alliance, the Jagatai Empire (or Chagutai).  My Russia is nowhere near as powerful as Earth's Russia.

So ... these are just a few changes to keep in mind as we move south towards Crimea.  The population is largely human, but there are definite half-orcish characteristics throughout.