Budapest, Nyatria & the West Border

So many new villages and towns; so many bridges.  So many rivers.  It's easy to tell when the land flattens out, as the rivers begin to braid and small swampy areas appear all round.  The density of the area explains how this region was able to hold back the Ottomans, who were overextended from their political centre.  The map above is our last farewell to the empire for awhile at least, before we meet back with it again in Anatolia.

I'm glad that the population density drops rapidly as I move northeast from here.

The region itself is a mix of numerous ethnicities and cultures, jammed together in the last century as refugees from the widescale European war against the Turk.  Included are Hungarians, Slovaks, Germans, Jews, Moravians, Roma, Croatians, Serbians and many others.  The division between Protestant and Catholic sentiments, combined with the potential for plunder, AND the potential for playing off one people against another, made this region a free-for-all during the 30 Years War ... so "ravaged" would be a very light word to use for the whole area shown.

Onto the western edge of Upper Hungary with the next map.

Bakony, Budapest & Nyatria

Some of these can be brutal to lay out; the roads took just too long with this one, as the path of the Danube through the middle of the densely packed area, coupled with my trying to maintain my road-layout premise, really proved a challenge.  The hex containing Komarom and the next hex to the right had 800+ and 700+ infrastructure.  Since a hex gets a "high road" for every 100 pts., both have more of these roads than the hex has sides ... which means they get an "extra" road on either side of the Danube.  Yet one of these had to be used to connect Guta with two different settlements off-map, so the road between Tata and Tardos ended up being a low road.

I don't suppose anyone knows what I'm talking about.

There's still a part of me that wants to connect Sturovo to Svodin (honest, these places are on the map), but then, the primary form of trade through the middle here is on the Danube itself.  The best way to connect with Svodin, as well as all the shown area of Nyatria including Guta, is to ship it down river to Moca, Iza or Zlatna.  So I left the extra road west from Sturovo out.

As I said with the last post, Budapest (the Ottoman Empire) controls the south bank of the Danube, Nyatria (and the Kingdom of Hungary) the north bank.  The actual price of goods is set by Danube traffic, which is why there's no official "trade route" shown, as would be indicated by a road with a black line down the middle.  You can see the route between Pozsony and Koszyce at the top left, running through Hul, Mana and Kalna to Leva at the top.  Obviously, the road west from Esztergom would be used continuously for trade, but on my trade map of the "known world," none of the roads here are "trade routes" specifically.

The city of Budapest controls the trade on the south side of the Danube.  Just off the map to the west is "Yanik Kale," modern Gyor, which is the last far west fortification of the Ottomans.  That'll be mapped with my next effort.  The next section is even more populated, with even more cities and more roads, so I'm not looking forward to it.

Oh, there's an error I didn't notice.  The high road from Nagysap needs to be connected with the cart path from Csakvar, which I laid out yesterday.  That'll be fixed the next time this area is posted.

Bakony, Budapest & Northern Hills

At last, Buda & Pest.

Both were wrecked considerably in attacks from the Ottomans, but also during the 30 Years War, taking place just before the time of my world's game play.  Both cities are under the control of the Ottomans and will remain so for many decades yet, before recovered by the Hapsburgs (or perhaps some player party).

The Danube valley here forms an important trading passage, called the "Danube Bend."  In points, the river flows through a narrow gorge flanked by hills, provided a natural passage connecting the Great Hungarian Plain with the Transdanubian region of Vienna.  All along the banks of these type-1 hexes are fortifications and castles, protecting the west from the east while maintaining control over the considerable river traffic.

The Ottoman's control the south bank of the river west of Esztergom, while the Hapsburg-Hungarian kingdom controls the north.  The three provinces of Budapest, Bakony and Northern Hills are all part of the Ottoman Empire, which I'll be leaving behind soon enough.

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.

West Border, around Szombathely

 

This brings us into a new part of 17th century Hungary, the "West Border" or sometimes the "Western Borderland."  This was the best passage through Hungary to Vienna, and was thus a battleground for about two centuries.  Szombathely is a pretty big city of more than 17,000, and is essentially a big overbuilt fortress.  Austria is just across the border on the left; "Styria" and the town of Jennersdorf are in modern Austria.

Something else to think of was that the region, plagued by raids and burned crops, suffered from an endemic famine, though trade, agriculture and artisanship continued to persist as well as it was able.  Disease, too, was a constant threat.  If there's anything that will make players quickly depart a region or go around, it's telling them that disease in the area is rampant.

The reader may notice the area atop the map labeled "Guns."  In German, this is more properly "Güns," the German name for modern Köszeg.  As far as I can determine the name has nothing whatsoever to do with the modern term "guns" ... it seems to be a linguistic coincidence.  I admit, it sounds odd in a D&D context.  I won't be mapping that region until I swing all around my presently made map and pass here again.

This nearly finishes the map sheet; I have to do the next one over to fill the empty white hexes at the top.  When I plug those in, I'll publish the whole map sheet to my Patreon.

Bakony, around Veszprem

And this finishes Lake Balaton.  The landscape all around is farmland with commercial centres designed to collect food and alternately process it or take it on to somewhere that does.  I think I failed to say before that the region is under the control of the Ottomans, so the general direction of food transport is south and east, not north towards Budapest or Vienna ... and yes, those cities dearly miss the good old days of the 15th century when this land was theirs.  It hasn't been since 1526, however.

Consider, that means 5 or 6 generations between the lost Battle of Mohacs and the time of my game world.  There isn't a person left alive who remembers when this was Hungarian territory ... though people do tend to maintain a great deal of nostalgia for past times, even when those happened a long, long time ago.  To put it into perspective, imagine that the United States had been under the control of the Mexicans since the year 1900 ... 124 years.  That's the space of time between Mohacs and my game world.  Would the residents of the Atlantic Seaboard, the Midwest and the Pacific Coast today, having been Mexican citizens all these years, still pine for the old America of late 19th century imperialism, second-rate presidents and a disastrous post civil-war reconstruction (which must have failed if the Mexicans invaded successfully) ...?

I think probably yes.  Though they'd have no idea what exactly they were missing.

Bakony, around Belgrad

A wider frame for this post, though I've just added the small area in the middle.  This includes adding another quarter of Lake Balaton, so that lake is taking shape.  Another smaller lake east of Belgrad, Lake Velence (in English, "Lake Venice") is listed as the third largest lake in Hungary; I assume they're counting Neusiedler See, which Hungary just barely shares with Austria, and though quite big isn't as large as Balaton.

Budapest is inside that little notch that's blank on the upper right, on the Danube that's shown here.  That river has been getting progressively smaller as I map upstream ... there'll be a little more of that river in the near future.

Belgrad is the modern Szekesfehervar, which I think means "Szekes in Feher county."  Feel free to correct me, what do I know?  A little research revealed that a protected natural area nearby is called in English — if it can be believed — the "Watermelon-infested Nature Reserve," but even the Hungarian wikipedia doesn't explain why.  Just kicking this out there to prove the world's a strange place.

The above is three sheets laid over one another.  The cut-off lines exist because the lower left sheet hasn't been duplicated on the upper sheet yet.  I'm going to leave that until I finish all I'm going to do with the Croatia sheet.

I'll finish Lake Balaton with the next post.

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.

Lower Styria, Croatia & Carniola, around Pettau

 

There, haven't mapped anything in a few days.

Except for the last corner of Croatia, the rest of this is still part of the Hapsburg (or Habsburg) Kingdom.  Carniola and Lower Styria are both a part of modern Slovenia.  Marburg is just there as a placeholder; the modern name is Maribor.  The other side of the border at the top left is the beginning of Austria.

However, this is as far west as I'll be mapping for a long, long time.  Now it's northeast to Poland and then east.