Kerch Strait

Both peninsulas completed, now, the south shore sketched out.  Looks mighty fine, I think... the terrain around Taman was simply fascinating.  The coasts aren't strictly accurate, but then, this isn't the real world, is it?

Sea of Azov

Took me until today to realise I had posted this map on my Tao of D&D, and not here.  Obviously, I'm distracted.

Anyway, in the interest of keeping this blog up to date, here it is repeated.

Itossia-Zaporozhia, around Itoskhan

Ah, coastline.  There's the north shore of the Sea of Azov, not entirely but for about 80 miles.  This also completes the enclave of Itossia and most of Zaporozhia... and were I heading out east from here, the land would become increasingly less developed or occupied.

Alas, I'm moving southeast, but only for another line of three hexes.  That's as far east as I'll go as I roll in a circle, starting off southwest from there.  There's a bit more steppeland, then the wilder parts of Anatolia will be a mixture of high mountains, forests and macchia.

Itossia-Kherson-Zaporozhia

There.  This benign landscape skips over three map plates, which means duplication and re-duplication, to make all three match up.  The image is put together from all three; I believe they fit well.

Having finally gotten this out of the way, I'm free to develop much of the north and south coastlines of the Sea of Azov, which comes next.  Infrastructure drops precipitously through this, except for the immediate parts surrounding Cherzeti (modern Kerch).  I'm not far from Anatolia now, which I'm looking forward to (at least, until I get exhausted with mapping it.

Incidentally, Itossia is, I believe, my first non-human region.  It is an enclave of a larger enclave called Cumana, occupied by half-orcs whose origin begins with Pechenegs and Cumans who arrived here in the early millennium.  It is the point where my game world begins to deviate from the real, as these tribes are "orc" in my history, breeding with the human ancestors of the Zaporozhians and succeeding it repelling the Russian humans to the north.  Thus, Russia itself was more severely crushed under the Mongols (larger orcs, similar to Tolkien's uruk-hai, but called "haruchai") in my game.  Most of our Russia in the 17th century was never conquered by Russia, because those lands weren't empty... they're occupied by thousands upon thousands of non-human tribes, who control lands both before and beyond the Urals.  Russia is therefore but a small Grand Duchy, that of Moscovy, as it was prior to Ivan the Terrible.

Anyway, that seemed relevant here.