Further Rumelia, northeast of Filibe

Densely populated Bulgaria ...

Filibe, in the bottom left corner, is modern-day Plovdiv.  "Filibe" is the Turkish name; prior to the Ottomans taking the city in 1363-4, it was known by the Byzantine name Philippolis, the name it had going back to its founding by Alexander the Great's father, Philip II.  It's an old city, a large city, with a high infrastructure, even though it's virtually unheard of outside Europe.

Further Rumelia, around Kazanluk

Pressed for time, but here's today's map:

The Balkans in general are such a confused collection of mountains, valleys, dense fields and empty hinterlands.  Until I post a complete sheet map of the area, it's bound to make little sense to the reader now.  But I go on posting, to give the sense of the world unfolding in its own way.

Further Rumelia, around Marsa

Moving south from the last post:

The denser areas do take more time.  I'm tasked to search for the various town names, and then there's additional roads to add as well.  On the whole, I think these spaces form a framework around places the characters would actually want to adventure.  I've never fully realised a game world with this density of population, which means I've never in-depth run a place with multiple type-1 hexes clustered together and a town every six miles.  I've given it some thought, but I think that until I actually try to run such a place, with the player's involvement, I won't have a handle on what that'll be like.

This is the 8th post in the province of Further Rumelia.  Some provinces are just bigger, is all.

Further Rumelia, around Beroia

Heart of Bulgaria:

Beroia is a "big" city, nearly 20 thousand people ... which seems a lot for a D&D world, but we visit little burghs like this all the time our world and think nothing of them.  Most of us living in actually big cities (Calgary has more than a million) can hardly imagine living in backward place the size of Beroia.

The Goths won here against the Romans in the 4th century AD.  At the end of the 6th century, "Beroe" was destroyed but rebuilt, under the name of Veroia.  The Byzantines named it Zagore, and in the 10th century when it came under the control of the Bulgarians, it was renamed Borui.  In 1371, it fell under the Ottomans, where it remained until the time of my game world.  Thus I had a number of names to go with, but chose "Beroia," the original Thracian name.  The present city is Stara Zagora.

Cities like this are naturally cosmopolitan, given that each generation has created a new tradition that's followed in some quarter of the city, as leftover Greeks, Italians, Goths, Byzantines and Bulgarians are impressed upon by the latecomer Ottomans.  A DM can make use of this to create a vibrancy in some cities that doesn't exist in other places that haven't changed hands, or culture, in a thousand years.  Each part of the city is a faction, trying to hold onto its past while sustaining it's identity in a steady flow of outsiders and alternate beliefs.  Tapping into this can help the players insert themselves into the world, as they realise that they, too, are outsiders, with a strange, modern viewpoint on everything.

Further Rumelia, west of Suida

Here's the next map going west.

A portion of the upper Maritsa, the big river not named on the map, flows through the rough country between Suida and Kazanluk.  Today the valley is densely populated, but there's also a large reservoir that makes me think much of it's been irrigated by the collected water.  Either way, in my game world, it's a dense forest that separates the east population density from the west.  The infrastructure numbers at the bottom of the screen (742, 692, 484) shows that it's going to be all dense cities on the south side of this forested reach.

Further Rumelia, around Kavakli

Slowly, steadily, we march west across Further Rumelia and eastern Bulgaria:

This is a good, long shot, showing the relationship of the area with the coast.  I did one-and-a-half sections, including the parts with Golyam, Kavakli and Vaysal.  It's a good, healthy adventuring area, with the party needing to make their way to Vaysal on the edge of the hilled forest that surrounds that country town.  From there it's plenty of dry, dense hills, in which could be hidden anything.  Then it's a long walk to a bigger city, carrying their gold along empty roads through more forested places.  Provides a number of interesting possibilities.

Of interest to some, "Kavakli" is the Greek name for Topolovgrad, which is noted for the dolmens that occur in the area.  This could add another element for the creative DM building an adventure here.

Nilnard, around Somolo

A very unself-evident title:

This is a rework of the city of Columbus, Ohio, as it might have been if the Mound Peoples culture had survived and supported by elves, who arrived in America before humans.  In other words, a totally fantasy rendering of the area.

A few considerations have to be given thought with the above.  While appearing like a European setting, the map above doesn't give details on what a stone road might look like, or how the houses might appear, or what a city layout might be.  The various villages and towns might very differently organised, with distinct living conditions and social designs.  The map alone is just a step towards building the world here.

I have a vision of houses that are scattered over large areas, between continuous vegetable gardens growing mostly tubers rather than grain crops; the high roads, those in darker red, could be discontinuous black-and-brownstone blocks, each made to perfectly fit with the next, like the example of walls found in Inca cultures.  They might have a gutter and a low stone wall that runs on one side, to collect water for crops dug alongside the road.  The whole social culture might be organised along communal lines, without the dependence on money for trade.  It's really up to us to decide what sort of lives these people lead.

So just because the map looks like it might come from a place in Europe with unfamiliar names, this could be utterly unlike the world we know.  

Further Rumelia, around Maritsa

Today's contribution:

Here we're encroaching upon the Maritsa River valley, which is intensively cultivated and has a dense population.  Infrastructure will be high as we go west, until encountering mountains again.

Tomorrow, I'll be posting the "Mojo of Nilnard" in the Great Oyo Greenwood, the names I finally settled upon for the Ohio request made earlier in the week.  I'm ready to tackle that now.  We'll return to Bulgaria on Thursday.

Further Rumelia, west of Sizebolu

One section today, still in Further Rumelia:

It must feel a little confusing, as I'm going at this somewhat inconsistently.  I need to smooth out the west-side edge of the map as I progress.  This section fills in the gap I created in yesterday's map.

Rumelia, like much of the map, is under the control of the Ottomans in the game world.  Rumelia in Ottoman Turkish means "Land of the Romans," which was in reference to Constantinople, not Rome.  It's the same basic construction that was used for the 13th century Sultanate of Rum, that occupied central Anatolia, was also taken from the Byzantines.

Rumelia is a rolling country with wide, fertile plains; it became the home of the Bulgars after 681, once they'd defeated and driven out the Avars.  Being Turkic, the Bulgarians are human, unlike other tribes from central Asia in my world, whom are orcish in race.  They adopted Eastern Orthodoxy from the Byzantines and maintained their faith through the Ottoman occupation, unlike other parts of the Balkans that became Islamic.  However, the Bulgarian Orthodox church is isolated from the main branch of Orthodoxy, which is located in Moskva.

Further Rumelia, around Sizebolu

This completes the Bulgarian coast upon the Black Sea.

This completes the coast of Bulgaria upon the Black Sea.  The clever observer may notice there's something missing from the map above, and there is.  The small town of Burgas was destroyed in the 14th century; a new settlement was built in the 17th, and renamed Burgas, but it doesn't appear here because I've ruled it doesn't exist.  Today this part of the world is somewhat densely populated, as Burgas is one of the most important ports on the Black Sea ... but in my game world, this is a backward area, hardly worthy of notice.  But the wilds of Rumelia depicted above serves as a defense for Constantinople, with is south and east of here.  These are low mountains that have been avoided by armies for thousands of years, dependent upon the small ports that dot the coast.  I haven't figured out what their name is yet; I'll need to address that.

From here I'll be going progressively west.  It's my intention to fill in the gap shown by the green line, in the image below:

I started doing three sections at a time just southwest of Belgrade, in Serbia.  I intend to extend the line out to Sarajevo, then go three more sections westward to even up the line, just as I did in the east.  That should take me well into the Adriatic, and cover a fair bit of the Dalmatian coast (lots of islands), before cutting northwest into Bosnia and then Croatia.

This would seem absurd ambition, if I hadn't just done something like it.  A few months and we'll brush the edge of Slovenia and Austria.  I look forward to it.

Further Rumelia, around Aetos

Don't have much time to make sense of today's map, upon the Black Sea and part of Bulgaria.

Essentially, it's approximately the middle of Bulgaria's coast on the Black.  I'm going to run down the Black Sea coast for 60 miles, which gets just past the Turkish border, whereupon I'll start inland in a westerly direction.  I'll put up a general map explaining this tomorrow.

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.

Provence, around Marseilles

 Also requested by a $10 Patreon supporter:

Marseille is an unusual location upon the Mediterranean Sea in the south of France.  In the first regard, it has a spectacular deep-water port, enabling the largest of ocean-going ships to park where they're well-protected from storms.  This port was known to the Greeks 2700 years ago, and has been in constant operation since then.

The low plateau surrounding the city is densely populated, but it consists of macchia, a rocky, dry, porous scrubland, impractical for ploughing but excellent for growing olives, dates, grapes and various shrub-based nuts.  These are grown and traded south and north for cereals grains from Italy, Spain and the Loire valley of France — especially the latter.  Because of its port, Marseille also imports from all over the world, so that the city is a tremendous transshipment point for unloading goods from Asia, Africa and the New World into the European market.

Unusually, however, Marseille doesn't do so from ship to wagon, as there are no easy routes inland from the city.  Instead, goods are transferred from huge merchant ships into smaller vessels that take the Rhone deep into the heart of France — making Lyons, Burgundy and Geneva rich.  It was this route, the last extension of the Silk Road from China, that created the Fairs that changed the economy of Europe in the Middle Ages.  While this route withered for Italy with the discovery of the New World, Marseille was strengthened by the ships that came from the west through the Straits of Gibraltar.  It remains today one of the busiest ports in the world.

For players visiting, the key word is bustle.  As a DM, I'd stress that there was no safe place to stand, no quiet place to go.  Instead, the constant movement of loaded animals and vehicles would force the party to move and move and move out of the way or get run down.  As newcomers, they wouldn't understand what was going on, but they'd be able to see there was a LOT going on.  Literally the world's produce and handicrafts pouring through its streets, outwards into the world and inwards from it.  By D&D standards, Marseille is a gigantic place, with 226,000 people — three times the size of yesterday's Munich.

Back to Bithynia tomorrow.

Upper Bavaria, around Munich

As requested by a $10 Patreon supporter:

Requests tend to be for heavily populated areas; Munich sits on a wide, beautiful floodplain with rich black soil, laid down by the Isar River.  It also happens to be located in a convenient set of trade routes from east, west, north and south ... particularly the route from Italy through Innsbruck, about 46 miles from the bottom edge of the map.  The combination of these things made Munich a phenomenally important place in Europe, sustaining Bavaria as a powerful independent duchy until eventually conquered by Napoleon.

As a stand-alone map, it isn't that impressive ... but the value of these maps is how good they look as piece after piece is added on, giving each part of the map a little more context and flavour. 

Bithynia, around Inebolu

Continuing westward along the Anatolian coast, skirting the Bithynia shore ...

The mountains are rugged and wild ... even to where they affect the layout of the villages upon them.  This GoogleEarth aerial shot of Akcabel, with the vertical at 1:1, shows a scattering of houses along the ridge, 2,000 feet above the sea, just six miles away.

Clearly, an economy reliant upon treenut orchards, olives and grapes, which are traded for more traditional staple foods imported from abroad.  And so it has been since the time of the Hittites, most likely.

The isolation is extreme; the mountains behind form an obstacle that can be crossed on foot without excessive trouble, but is certainly past the practicality of a road.  Inebolu and surroundings might as well be an island in the Black Sea, as regards communication and trade.

The next post is a location request from a reader, most probably a place in France.  Waiting to learn the final choice that's made.

Bithynia, around Sinop

Filling the "hole" that I described as the Black Sea with my last post, I found that yes, I am skirting the northern edge of Bithynia, on the coast of modern day Turkey.  The region is massive compared to European standards, with a 500-mile coast that collects together a series of isolated population centres between wild, forested mountains.  These cut Bithynia off from the mainland of Turkey except where gaps in the mountains occur ... and in terms of trade, there's only one practical road for use, that south of Amisos.  As such, south of the coast, there's a whole lot of sparse, nasty, high-peaked wilderness.  Most parts of the province cannot communicate with one another by road, and thus rely upon the sea.

I had to create three map sheets to account for the parts I'll be mapping, though these'll remain largely unworked until I pass this area again.  I only touch the very edge of the today's sheet map and then I'm onto the next one.  Here's the section that appears:

It's strange that an area with 3,000 years of history still has vast areas of wilderness, but this is Turkey.  Looking through GoogleMaps, there's a distinct absence of villages and other occupation all along the hinterland just south of the sea.  Sinop is a beautiful looking city that spreads along the peninsula that reaches out from the mainland:

And naturally, it includes the necessary ruins that make it an excellent adventure starting point:

Alas, I won't be working on the hinterland of this place for a while.  Instead, I'll be skipping along the north coast of Turkey, following my exacting longitudal line until I reach Bulgaria, where I can once again put the coast behind me and work on pure mainland.

South Crimea

I've been so sick, and so frustrated at being sick (I just lay in bed and think about how badly I'd like to be working), that getting better, as I have been since yesterday, gave me motivation to push through that frustration.  As such, I finished the Crimea ... or as much of it as I intend to do this turn around the map.

So very, very glad to have this done.  The mountains are ... weird.  I recommend a look at them with GoogleEarth, as you'll find them interesting.  I couldn't find an easy source saying so, but I'm guessing the last ice age lopped the top off these mountains ... which is why I created a different mountain symbol specifically for their type and shape.

This also puts two sheet maps in the rear view window: L.34e - Crimea and L.37e - Sea of Azov.   Here are those two sheet maps in their entirety:

Much later, I'll come back around to complete the Sea of Azov and the small area of sea in the bottom corner of Crimea.  It may seem strange not to just fill in that part of the Black Sea, but I'll need it to line up later on with the map sheet to the south.  It's devilishly hard to connect sea edges together without some marker, and knowing what I've done on GoogleEarth works as well as anything else.

The next step is to acquaint ourselves with a map sheet that hasn't appeared on this wiki, M.27e - Varna, and undoubtably to make an additional map sheet to the east of that to flesh out the Black Sea.  Here's a GoogleEarth image to show the approximate hole created by the Black that needs to be filled in:

Should be able to move very swiftly through this.  Don't know yet if I'll actually cut across the corner of Turkey (Bithynia) ... if I do, it should be a short job of making that toe hold.

Crimea, northeast of Acmescit

Posting a rather bleak area of the Crimea, just north of the Crimean mountains.

This employs something we haven't seen before ... a river ending in an arrow, rather than debouching in a body of water.  These rivers run all year round, nearly.  However, with the lack of rainfall, and especially with an unavailable groundwater table to sustain the river's flow, a small amount of irrigation is enough to cause the river to dry up.  The arrow head indicates a non-specific location.  Some years the river may get further, others not so far.

In places where a river like this is highly intermittent, meaning it only runs when it rains, then the river is represented by a dashed line.  I don't expect we'll see a river like this in these maps for a long, long time, but it's worth explaining its presence anyway.

Aqmescit, incidentally, is modern Simferopol.  I'll write more about it later.

Crimea, around Gezlev

I'm still feeling plenty down from this cold.  This is all I can manage for today:

Crimea, southeast of Cankoy

One-and-a-half sections today, without fanfare:

Moving steadily southeast.  More than half-way through Crimea (what we'll do of it), so we'll be in Bulgaria before the end of January.

London

It happens that I have the plague ... seems like a typical cold.  I've had all four shots, so no worry.  Don't know how well I'll feel over the next few days, so if there's no post and no work done, this is why.

Here's London, as Maxwell requested:

London has special problems, and not just that it touches six different counties, nor that it's highly overdeveloped.  London is so well known to so many people that any tiny error has a high annoyance factor.  Every bend in the river, every additional stream, every place name is instantly recognisable.  Thus extreme effort is required to get things right ... we can't just use the excuse that it's "fantasy."  We have to try.

Still, there are limits.  The scale and space won't capture every neighbourhood.  That's not practical.  As ever, a "sense" is the best we can do.  Any actual adventure planned for an area like this requires a very different perspective.

Note, also, with London, Paris, Naples, Moskva, Shanghai or any other medieval city you care to name, the "Big City" isn't just one city, it's dozens.  Fantasy RPG products try to pretend that this massive city map with streetnames surrounded by a wall exists in some void, where there isn't another place within hundreds of miles.  The thing is, a truly big city is a logistic nightmare; to feed those in the most urban areas, giant transshipment cities develop whose purpose is to collect from the environs surrounding the big city, so as to create an army of wagons that drag flour, fabrics, timber, wrought metal, bricks and much more from the outer edges into the main city.  As London grows, it creates cities that grow to feed it, which creates cities further out who gather materials to help the feeder cities, and so the tendrils stretch outwards.  You just can't have a big isolated city.  It would starve and run out of materials for a few days, no matter how large it's docks were.  Without a feeder system to make sure those docks are full of ships, barges and cargo, the dockworkers would find themselves with nothing to unload. The same goes for the gargantuan task of organising goods from the country to get them to the right streets in the big city.

Ameriscoggin, around Brunswick

Took more hours than I'd care to discuss:

Islands and lakes smaller than 2 miles in diameter are not included; those between 2 mi. and 2.67 mi. are included on an arbitrary basis, depending on whether or not I felt the map needed it.  A zoomed-in map could include much more detail.

I wonder how long it takes locals to grasp the complexity of the islands, as obviously there are hundreds not included above that are yet a quarter mile in diameter.  In any case, the coast looks less complex above than it did tracing the lines from GoogleEarth.

Pejepscot was an incredibly lucky find.  Making the map for Sterling, I'm against a wall in finding native names for places, because for one thing I have zero personal relationship with the area and for another, the internet is notoriously devoid of natives carefully recording their own history for other natives.  I'm rather stunned that I can't just locate an extensive wiki for every native tribe everywhere in the world ... but of all the things that people think are important, this doesn't seem high on the roster.  A wiki would be incredible for this kind of work.  Every native family and place of origin could be carefully tabulated and managed by hundreds of focused, careful Abenaki natives ... but instead what we have are some scrubby generalised texts that list Abenaki bands or random Abenaki words with no context whatsoever.  It's staggeringly unhelpful.  And yet there's more information about Abenakis than there is about Odawa, that I searched for earlier this week.

Real headshaking stuff.  So everytime I have to "come up" with an Abenaki name for a place, it's pick a random word and use it.  Yesterday, Sterling corrected my use of "Damiriscotta" for the place just east of Brunswick.  Well, I'll admit it.  That was a totally random word found in on Abenaki webpage that I used because it was at least Abenaki in origin.  Most of the time, this is the best I can do here.  So if someone would like to correct some name I'm picking for these parts of the world, please do.

London tomorrow.

Lower Androscoggin Valley

This proved more intriging than I'd originally expected:

As with the Michigan example, this is a bare-bones 20-mile map of the area requested by Sterling.  It's a collection of European incursions established on the edges of Abenaki native lands, so that in calculating the infrastructure it's a mash of both cultures hex-by-hex.

Each "patent" here is a grant made by the monarch of England to an individual or company, in exchange for a service rendered each year.  In this case, most likely a set amount of timber to be cut and provided into the hands of the sovereign.  The patent grants the specific right to trade with the Abenaki or Penobscot natives.  I haven't gone deep enough into the subject to determine exactly what was granted or what specifically the trade desired ... that's going to need my going into old books on the net, because wikipedia is notably scant in its information.  The patents all failed as it happened, though not at once.  And they did help establish a foothold on the shoreline, which is more important than their intention.

'Course, in Earth's actual history, this was done with the natives as the loser.  The Abenaki here, whose settlements can be understood by their unfamiliar non-English names, have been given benefits by elves in America that the real natives did not have.  These benefits are based on things that existed in North America, that might have been exploited if the natives had known to do so.

First, the wheel.  This gives the natives a better pottery and the potential for taking advantage of moving rivers.  And since the elves came to North America first, and brought horses with them, they've been here since long before the Europeans came in the 15th century.  Thus there are carts, and with carts, roads.

Second, metal forging.  The natives therefore have swords, axes, spears and so on with metal parts.  Thus they're able to take a firm stand in war, and the use of metals enables a lot more in the way of tools and farm implements.  This allows better planting of crops ... though existing staples are beans and squash rather than cereals, which were never established in the New World prior to the Europeans.

This creates a whole new dynamic, turning history on it's head.  The Europeans cannot simply bully their way into America; there are several well-established groups who could fight them to a standstill, and several scattered Elven kingdoms within the large deciduous forests east of the Missouri.  For those who may wonder how to predict what the natives have compared to the Europeans, it's best to assume they have everything.  After all, what they didn't have prior to 1600 has been since traded by Europeans who began to arrive.  There are likely some individual natives planting grain crops, since those too were brought across the Atlantic.

One thing: it paints the Europeans clearly as the invaders, who in this history must give respect to the native tribes or find themselves quickly wiped out.  On the map above, the Europeans number about 2,000 persons.  There are more than 16,000 Abenaki, as skilled and able, with comparable magic, as the non-gun-toting Europeans here.  There are no guns in my game world.

Tahquamenaw, around Munising

Here you go, Discord:

Next month, let me know if you want me to map west, south or east; I'll throw in Grand Island for free, whatever it winds up being named.  Onto Maine.

Tahquamenaw Country (Michigan)

Continuing with Discord's ask, I've built a 20-mile hex map without the bells and whistles, from which I can manufacture the 6-mile map.  I've adjusted the time date for the region to start in 900 AD rather than 1050, as the latter is just too late and the populations (in my opinion) are too low.  Here's the 20m map:

Excitin', ain't it?

This region should have a scant population.  It's northerly, densely populated with swamplands and important only for it's connection between Lake Superior (Kitchi-gummi) and Huron (Karegnondi).  Baawitigong is the early Odawa name for the settlement that existed at present-day Sault-Ste. Marie.  The Odawa themselves were famous as "traders," suggesting they hold a position of peaceful interaction with its neighbours, who are more interested in obtaining goods from far away, brought by willing travellers, than in taking over obscure places like the country of Tahquamenaw above.

I took the name from the famous falls and river located in the area.  No knowing what the real name was for it, or even if it had a name.  It's convenient for me to give it a name, however, and this was the best I could obtain.

In any case, I'm in a position now that I can create a 6 mile map around Munising.  I'll take it and the hex immediately to the east and build the map as soon as I'm able.  Then I'll apply the same technique I used for the above to build a map for another reader, Sterling, who has asked for a section of Maine's coastline.

Addressing Discord's Ask on Mapping Michigan

Change up.  I'll continue mapping Crimea, but Discord as a patreon supporter of $10 has requested a start in northern Michigan.  Before I can make 6-mile hexes, I must have 20-mile hexes and I must have infrastructure.  I can't do the latter without knowing what settlements there are, so this is where I start.  Settlements come from my 1952 colliers encylopedia.  Here's an image the Rand McNally map provided:

We're interested in Marquette, Alger, Delta and Schoolcraft counties.  But we don't want all these little dots.  The other maps that I've worked with in the past, those that make up Europe for instance, are in 1:4,000,000 scale.  If I had a map of Romania, say, in a more detailed scale, obviously there'd be a lot more settlements I'd have to contend with.  This map of Michigan is 1:2,347,000, or 37 miles to the inch.

Thus, when choosing settlements, we only want those with a larger text size.  See this close-up of Marquette county:

The reader can see several sizes of dot and text.  Marquette, Negaunee and Ishpeming all have nice big dots; Marquette's "hole" in the middle indicates its a county seat.  South of Marquette, Gwinn has a smaller dot and is written bold, as is Munising to the right hand side (also a county seat).  The other places are in normal font with a tiny dot.  If you look to the upper left, you'll find two places, Baraga and L'Anse, right next to each other.  Those are written in a font slightly smaller than Marquette, but bigger than Gwinn.

Where do we draw the line?  Because of the severe urbanisation of America, even in the 1940s, we get places like the Keweenaw peninsula that are so thick with names they're on top of one another.  That won't work for a D&D game world.  Realistically, we might want to scratch nearly all these names out, taking only those with a font as large as Marquette.  Unfortunately, this leaves a county like Alger without a single place.  We could do that, what with American counties all being so small ... but there's a motivation to accord "importance" as an element of which settlements we choose of this map.  My proposal is to take those of Marquette's size, but if there's a county without any such places, then we can accept the county seat of that county, regardless of text size.

Thus, if we start with Alger county, we have one settlement: Munising.  Let's put the other counties away.

To calculate Munising's population, we need to know it's 1952 population and we need to know when it was founded.  The real date is 1868, when the post office was built.  Obviously, we can throw that date out ... it's the date Europeans founded it.  In our fantasy role-playing world, it was founded by a native tribe ... in this case, the Odawa tribe, as I describe in this comment.  My reading tells me the Ojibwe tribes began migrating slowly sometime around 500 AD, and were settled around the Great Lakes surely by the year 1400.   As they were moving westward from the Atlantic, we might assume the further westward we go, the newer the settlement.

1400 is 250 years before 1650, the game world date; we could say, then, that the average Ojibwe began settling in this precise area twice as long ago as that, say in 1150.  Of course it's a number pulled from nowhere, but any number would be.  We don't know the truth.

We can then say the Odawa settlements are a hundred years earlier (1050), while Ojibwe settlements in Wisconsin-Minnesota are a hundred years later (1250).  This is just a baseline, for us to apply the procedure described for settlements on the wiki.  Except that instead of rolling 6d6, I'm going to use excel to generate a random number for the founding date of Munising.  Founding date?  1376.

Okay.  The 1952 population of Munising is a mere 4,339.  Using the standard calculation for settlement population, we subtract the founding date from 1650, divide that product into 4000 and multiply it against 4,339.  This gives Munising a population of 297.  A nice, small native settlement on Lake Superior.

In 1952, Alger county had a population of 10,007.  Comparing this with the adjustment made to Munising, the population of Alger county in our game world is 685.  Hah.

'Course, it can't be named Munising, can it?  Well, we can look up "Odawa name for Munising" and find this page:

"Munising is a Native American name meaning 'Place of the Great Island.' In 1820 the Chippewa village was located at the mouth of the Anna River, but they later moved camp to Sand Point. Munising was actually officially founded in 1850, but the first civilization was built in Au Train."

 

Gives us options.  We can rename it "Place of the Great Island," if we want that particular feel.  We can literally move the village to where Au Train stood.  Personally, because I have to do thousands of these [not kidding], I prefer to be bloody minded about it.  As I've said, I'm not interested in creating an "accurate" version of the Earth in any sense.  Nothing said above is remotely accurate; even the 1400 figure is just a guess by experts.  For me, it's good enough that Munising is a native name.  Works for me.  And it can sit where it is.

Discord asked for "Bay Furnace Ruins," which happens to be 3.16 miles from Munising.  This is a good place to start.

Let's make an Odawa "province."  American counties are too small.  If we draw a boundary line between Schoolcraft and Delta counties, and between Alger and Marquette, then we have five counties forming the tip of the peninsula: Alger, Schoolcraft, Mackinac, Luce and Chippewa.  The total area for these five is 27,311 sq.km, or 10,668 sq.m.  This is about the same size as the Sanjak of Vassia that we mapped in the Ukraine last month.

We can mix the populations together and create a single figure for all five, based on their settlements.  That's my next task.  I'll report when that's done.

Crimea, southwest of Cankoy

One and a half sections today.

Part of the Crimea's plain, the "Pontic Steppe."  This same plain extends eastward well past the Caspian sea, as far as west-central Kazakhstan ... thousands upon thousands of miles.  At the time of my world, much of the settlement of these lands further east was entirely nomadic.  That ultimately is reflected in the lands of the Don Cossacks and the surrounding lands around Astrakhan, way, way east of where I'm mapping now.   And still there would be groups of persons living gypsy-like in the lands depicted here, so that in addition to the infrastructure population shown, there's a "ghost" population in the background possessing no infrastructure at all.

These peoples sometimes engage in something called "sporadic cultivation," in which groups settle for a season or two where sufficient water has accumulated in order to raise crops from late spring to early fall.  Usually the land won't sustain a second crop or there isn't sufficient water the following year, as the steppe is intermittently dry, depending on where rain happens to fall.  The effect, at any rate, is for these nomads to become tremendously protective of their small plots, as they've chosen to get most of their food in a give year from this cultivation, instead of from hunting.  Following such years, tribes move outwards after the harvest in search of herds, leaving behind evidence of their brief appearance.

Something new for the players to stumble across when they set out across the plains.

More coast tomorrow.

Crimea, around Shekhlar

Just one section today, with little fanfare.  Took down Christmas today, and that's always a tiring procedure.  And I've have other work to get to, which is also compensating for Christmas.  There's no time off without penalty.

This is the far western end of Crimea ... dry, flat, but still an interesting coastline.

Hm.  Small error.  Zoriane needs a road.  Should be a dirt one.

Isthmus between Kherson & Crimea

To present the rest of the Rotten Sea, I've matched up the two sheets together.  Here's a close-up of today's added map:

Steadily, the mess gets itself sorted out and put behind.  The few "ports" on the sea produce salt and other obscure minerals, and fish, while providing docks for dories and pramms.  This creates a "community" of sorts, with news passed along between outlets, while the whole exists as a distinct backwater from the rest of the European world.  Historically, nothing happens here; nothing changes; the various warlords roll north and south of the sea, while furtive royal janissaries and officials grumble about their assignment to such a hell-hole.

Here's a wider shot of the whole coast I've been doing lately:

... and I am glad to have it behind me.  Roaming through the Ukraine, I began to wish for something as interesting as making coastlines, but now I've had my fill.  There are more coasts to make, of course; most of the Crimean Peninsula is on the agenda, like a big island at this point, but none of that has the sort of intricacy displayed above.  I won't see anything like this again until the Adriatic, which I believe will get met a few months from now at this rate.

Crimea, along the Karkit Gulf

 Been almost two months now of making maps; with the new year, I feel it's time to drop the rough version of the map.  The reader should have the idea now.  The above represents two new sections, the furthest west just barely touching the mainland.  This part south of the Karkin Gulf is also part of the Pontic steppe that we've been maping, but the soil is considerably drier.  This is going to be reflected in a general reduction with infrastructure.

There's a single blank hex in the upper right that got overlooked.  I'll have the fixed before the next map.

Crimea, around Or-Kapi

The next bit requires further expansion of coastlines to the south, though the Rotten Sea is already nearly complete:

The Crimean lands here are almost entirely Turkic in background, with a century and a half of "clensing" the scant population.  Some parts of the Crimea are heavily settled, but much of it's undeveloped and sparse.

Filling in the section above:

Helps bring out the colour of the sea, defining it a bit better.  Still, the eye has trouble grasping images like this.  Even simplified, as the above is, the sea looks complex and confusing.  Obviously, it doesn't help that it's split in half by the two sheets its spread across.  When it's all complete, I'll post another composite picture of the whole.

The next section further east falls on the adjoining map sheet:

The inland sea of the Syvash extends southwards along the East Crimean coast, so it'll be with us for awhile.  I did the two sections here, because the right side was easy enough due to falling across the Black Sea.  This also represents the furthest east I'll be going, as this finally evens up the ragged former work I did last year.  From here, I turn the corner and proceed southwestward until encountering Bulgaria.  Most of that is simple to map Black Sea, but there's still most of the Crimean Peninsula to fill in.

Oops, miscoloured the hex with Kosa in it.  Have to fix that.  Errors, yeah?  I tell you, I sure missed the location of the coast the first time I made this area in 20-mile maps.  But I'm getting used to finding out how incompetent I've been.  Fix mistakes, however, don't dwell on them.

This finally completes the Sanjak of Kherson.  It's all Crimea from here south, until the Black Sea.