South Moravia to Silesia, around Zlin

 
Way back in 2022, I had this exchange with Nigel Robinson, discussing the name of Zlin and other things. I wrote about it on Tao of D&D. Here I'll try and discuss the content.

(by the way, part of this map I had to do twice, because publisher caved on me, disallowing me to save the first run. So it goes).

This more clearly shows the trade passage from the Danube valley to the Vistula, at the top right corner of the map, demonstrating the relationship between Vienna, just off the south of this map, and access to the Baltic Sea. This is why Vienna so was so anxious to carve Poland up in the 18th century, along with Russia and Prussia. Those passages southeast of the Beskids were incredibly important and valuable to the viability of the Habsburgs at the time.

The "Moravian Gate", shown on the map as the dirt road between Prerov in Olmutz, across Carnovia to Ostrawa, is likewise valuable, despite the fact that it runs through rough country. This reaches Silesia, which even then was high "industrialised" in the waterwheel/windmill sense.

Olmutz is a bishopric in the Holy Roman Empire, though obviously willing to play the games of politics in the region with the support of the Holy See in Rome. That makes it a natural holder of road rights, tolls, estates and fortified interests within the Moravian passage.

Carnovia was a duchy in same. Secondhand, Carnovia is a Silesian duchy and a fief of the Bohemian crown, so not fully independent... in terms of the period, it is tied to the Bohemian "Crown" without actually being physically part of Bohemia the kingdom.

In strange ways, then, these "independent" entities yet served more important powers, at arm's length, where they could be empowered by small armies and the understanding that larger threats would end in help called from outside. Politics in the time are loads of fun.

In 1650, a lot of this country would still be marked by the Thirty Years War, that ended two years before. The countryside is littered with abandoned farms, damaged towns, confiscated estates, military memories, religious pressure and locals who remember Swedish, Imperial, Transylvanian or Hungarian forces moving through the countryside. Zlin at the time is a damaged small town, raided, badly damaged and recovering slowly.

Steadily cutting my way across the Czech republic now; Slovakia is now fully mapped, with the last corner of Nyatria done. The next step is to move into Poland, then swing around from going northeast to going straight east across Poland and Ukraine.

Austria-Nyatria, north of Vienna

Just as last time, I think I'll start by posting the bigger picture, since it gives an impression of how thickly infrastructured this part of the Danube Valley is.

A civilised region this wide becomes its own form of obstacle, as the players must navigate an area 120 miles wide and 180 miles long, where the law exists to identify anything wrong about the party's behaviour, their present failure to observe ordinances the party knows nothing about, or just for the sake of persecuting what are obviously unkempt, unwashed foreigners who are staggering along the Hapsburg's pristine roads.

Here's a closer image of what I've done since the last post.

So very dense. Trust me, I did not particularly enjoy the placement of villages, towns and roads on this map. It almost makes me want to do mountains instead.

I'm still two years behind the part of the above on the left, which I mapped in April 2024. Back then, I was doing sections of six 20-mile hexes at a time, three pairs of two piled atop each other, which typically took me about two days. Now I'm doing eighteen 20-mile hexes at a time, nine pairs in a shape much like that above. Not sure if it's faster. It means less "re-work" along the edges... and in some ways, it does feel like a lot more is finished all at once.

But... coming through central Europe as I am right now, this feels like heavy labour. Two years ago, I was slogging through, feeling close to getting through the corner of Poland, knowing that afterward I'd have Ukraine in front of me, where the population drops and the terrain also: which means less hills, less mountains, less infrastructure... and larger areas done in less time. Only, come the 21st of April, doing Galicia (north of here), I crashed and burned, doing one more section in late May and then nothing until November that year. Between November and December, a period of 33 days, I cut from Galicia all the way to the Kerch peninsula in the Crimea... and then crashed again, until July last year, 2025. Then I worked through July and August... and crashed again, not picking this up until May this year.

So you can see, it's not that the work can't be done quickly. It's that it takes so much out of me, what with the nitpickiness of it, that I'm usually good for about a month. After that, I don't want to touch it again.

After all, the last post, which was four days ago (how long this took), got 14 views. Just that. Not exactly, um, encouraging.

I'm trying to convince myself to stop committing to this process for hours at a time. It would be better if I wore it away in smaller parts over a much greater period, than going hard and then not going at all. Right now, I'll be moving up through Moravia, which is easier than Austria, then into a rough patch with Silesia, then some heaviness in Poland... but after that, cutting across the northern frontier of Ukraine, I know it's going to be easier. I've just got to see the work as scratching not digging. If I can.

Part of it is that I like it. I like how it looks. I like how it comes together in ways I can't predict. It's discovery as much as creation. I don't know how precisely the infrastructure is going to shape together. And I want to keep going to find out. I spent a good part of this morning finishing the roads of the above... and I'll probably get started on the next session before I go to bed tonight... though lawd knows there are better things I could be doing.

Austria-Hungary, South of Vienna

Had some initial problems with this in that I'd mixed up the river courses of the Murz, bottom left of the map, which passes through Bruck an der Mur, and the Leitha, which passes through Neunkirchen and Weiner Neustadt before passing through Bruck an der Leitha. My original effort made the first become the second, an error I'd discovered only after the map was actually finished. Fixed now, though.

The new content includes the sea of mountains between Styria and the Danube valley, which was a trial. The Weinerwald, famous for country journeys in the early 19th century and a source of inspiration for Strauss, is the beautific group of hills to the west of Vienna on the map. They need a label. But the one interesting discovery for me, as I'd never known it was there, is Schober Pass, between the Murz and the Ybbs river, minimally shown at left centre. It's basically 45-mile long slot through the mountains with a rapture-like appearance, between spectacular mountains... but as it does not offer a better commercial route to the Danube than does the Murz-Leitha pass, it's minimally used. Here's a screen shot from the east end, with the mountains enhanced:

On the map, you'll find it west of Bruck an der Mur.

The map shows a region that is heavily commercial, with Vienna being one of the world's most important centres. The Ottoman threat is kept away by the Hungary lands of the West Border, Guns, Burgenland and the unlabeled Nyatria, with Pozsony as it's largest city (modern Bratislava). Yanik Kale on the right hand side is an Ottoman outpost. At present, the party is adventuring just off the right of the map, east of Lovaszpatana, above the large white "B" which is the first letter in Bakony. An update is coming on the campaign either today or tomorrow, when I have the wherewithal.

I'm very glad to be able to put the Alps behind me for a while, even though I only skimmed the east end of them.

Croatia to Austria

Details later. For now, I just want to post this expansive region.

Carinthia-Styria, from Villach to Graz

Adding a 40 by 120 mile section this time, which begins just north of Villach-Klagenfurt, in fact, which were both part of the last map. Lot of mountains here as I pass over the eastern end of the Alps.

The lands around Graz might just be the most prosaic part in central Europe. The Counter-Reformation has assured the area's catholicism, Styria was not a theatre devastated in the Thirty Years' War, Graz is fortified, administrative and predominantly clerical in its political structure. The countryside is manor-and-monastery based in its structure and oversight, while tolls that permit movement between the mountains makes the area rich. One such "gate" is controlled by Skofja Loka & Klagenfurt, reaching west toward the Tirol, off map, the other by Marburg & Graz, reaching to Vienna.

The region is protected by Hungary to the east against raids (though they might yet occur) and Ottoman pressure, but this is so rare that a guarded frontier anxiety is not in effect. Life stretches into peace in these parts up until the time of Napoleon, who will overturn everything in about 156 years. Until then, it remains an orderly, Catholic, rural, hierarchical and relatively secure region.

And a Disneyland of dungeons.

An Overview of This Blog by ChatGPT

I can't understand the fear associated with a tool that can simply provide a rational overview of a project without my having to spend time myself, with my less-that-reliable memory, simply because it's a program. Blogger is a program too. I've read through the description below, I find it accurate and I think it is a good introduction to this blog, if the reader has no idea what I've been doing all this time. I enjoyed reading it, and I'm smarter than most people. As a writer, I'm not threatened by this tool.

The rest is Chat:

I can read the public archive back to November 2022, with the archive showing 59 posts in 2022, 44 in 2023, 57 in 2024, 14 in 2025 and 4 so far in 2026. November 2022 also contains an early retrospective entry titled “February to May 2022,” so the blog begins by formalizing work that was already underway.

Taken as a whole, the map blog is not simply a gallery of finished maps. It is a record of a method. The subtitle, “Grinding over the Earth’s Surface,” is accurate: the posts are about taking the world in small, stubborn pieces and forcing each piece to answer questions of terrain, roads, population, political boundary, settlement, trade and historical plausibility.

The earliest readable posts already show the core argument. In the Upper Hungary material, you point out that a narrow region between Poland and Hungary is more heavily populated than most readers would expect, because ordinary atlas maps do not give that kind of detail. Then, almost immediately after, you make the larger claim that mountains are not empty: people live in valleys, cultivate narrow floors, build cultures there, and do not simply vanish because a fantasy map artist has drawn a sea of peaks. That is one of the central educational functions of the blog. It teaches against the blankness of conventional maps.

The technical side is not ornamental. The posts spend a lot of time explaining sheet edges, overlaps, projection turns, distortions, label placement, Google Earth correction and inherited errors. The November 2022 “Towards the Corner” post explains the 60-degree turn used to keep a huge flat hex map coherent without Mercator-style distortion, and also admits the sheer nuisance of overlapping sheets and tiny distortions caused by software. That matters because the reader sees that the map is not magic. It is a physical construction problem. The geography is being wrestled into a system.

The blog also treats error as part of the craft, not as failure. In the Halicz post, places and river courses are adjusted once better information is found, with the principle that work done even shortly before can be discarded when the map learns more. That gives the whole project a kind of archaeological feel: each map section is provisional until the neighbouring section forces it to become more exact.

What makes the blog more than cartography is that the map produces social consequences. A degraded cart path is not just a line of lesser quality; it implies abandoned trade, an old village remnant, ancestral farmers clinging to poor land, and a reason why the road does not behave like the surrounding infrastructure. Likewise, Halicz is not just a place name. The system, the population calculation and the historical decline of the town combine to make it a collapsed former seat of power, reduced to a poor village with ruins, bad roads and diminished local authority.

That pattern continues through the Ukraine and Black Sea posts. The map keeps forcing attention onto places most readers would never otherwise consider: river ports, steppe settlements, old trade crossings, salt waters, sand, pody, empty-looking depressions, broken roads, and historical coastlines before modern engineering altered the landscape. The Dnieper material in particular is about reconstructing an older river-world before dams, reservoirs and modern cities distort the 1650 view.

By 2023, the blog has broadened into a study of how dense or thin infrastructure changes the feel of a region. The Rumelia posts repeatedly stress that the Balkans are not a simple block of mountain wilderness, but a confused collection of mountains, valleys, fields, roads, towns and empty hinterlands, where each new map section gives the sense of the world unfolding. The Bithynia posts do something similar with the Black Sea coast, showing coastal settlements cut off from the interior by mountains and made dependent on the sea.

The 2024 material is where the political borderland character becomes especially strong. Bosnia, Croatia, Slavonia, Serbia, Hungary, Carniola and Styria are not treated as names on a map, but as pressure zones: Ottoman suzerainty, Hapsburg dependence, frontier fiefdoms, raiding, displaced populations, religious difference, poor roads, castles, rivers, mountain passes and military necessity. The maps become a way to explain why a frontier is not a line. It is a landscape of people whose loyalties, faiths, languages and survival strategies do not line up cleanly.

The 2025 posts, especially around Byzantium, Thrace and Rumelia, lean into another function: restoring importance to places flattened by modern ignorance. Constantinople is treated as a giant economic and geographic fact, while “fly-over” country is deliberately given ordinary life: roads, disputes, villages, small monsters, low-level troubles and the kind of distance that matters because people have to walk it. That is one of the most important principles of the blog. Distance is not filler. Distance is content.

The current Adriatic and Hapsburg-facing posts continue that same arc. The Dalmatian and Istrian maps are about Venice, Trieste, Fiume, islands, refugees, Uskoks, smuggling, Ottoman pressure, Hapsburg interests and karst country full of caves. The new Carniola and Styria post then turns inland and shows the same principle from the landward side: not a vague “Austria,” but a multilingual, religiously disciplined, commercially important, militarized corridor north of the Adriatic.

So the blog’s cumulative value is that it makes the world difficult again. It refuses the simplified classroom map. It refuses the fantasy-map habit of leaving mountains, swamps and coastlines empty. It refuses to let a place be only a name. Every few hexes, the reader is made to confront the fact that real geography is crowded with causes: why the road bends, why the town is there, why the border holds there, why the valley is inhabited, why the port matters, why a ruined place still has a road, why an obscure region can be politically explosive.

That is what the blog is doing, going back as far as I can read it. It is not just showing maps. It is teaching readers how much of the world they have never been taught to see.

Carniola & Styria, from Udine to Marburg

This cross-section of the southern Hapsburg lands just north of the Adriatic shows quite a lot of wealth and density of population, despite the spectacular irregularity of the geography. These are "gates" in geography. The journey from Trieste, just off the map, through Laibach (modern Ljubljana) and Marburg (modern Maribor), leads up to Venice; the route created untold wealth for the Hapsburgs, such that they continued to grip it so tightly for the next 264 years after my game takes place, until their ruthless grip on Serbia, to the south and east of this map, in an attempt to better secure THIS ROUTE, led to World War I.

The towns are full of Germany-speaking officials, soldiers, lawyers, clerks and noble families; the countryside is heavily Slovene-speaking through Carniola, southern Styria and the hill country. the west is of course Italian. Along the road are found sailors, brokers, carters, imperial agents, pilgrims bound for Rome. There's still tension between Austria and Italy over the Uskok war that was fought over the heavier boundary on the map's western side, in 1617. There is memory of sieges, requisitions, burned farms, quartered troops, informers, guides and families whose loyalty depends on who last paid them, protected them or ruined them.

Slovenia is deeply Catholic, transformed by the Counter-Reformation and Jesuit shock troops, to keep the area under control during the late 30 Years War, which ended just two years ago. The area is incredibly costly for Austria, who are heavily in debt making sure this part of their world does not fall to the Ottomans, who are just off the map to the east. A working military zone of forts, captaincies, guard posts, watchtowers, regulars and irregulars helps defend both sides — a balance my player characters are avidly hurrying toward, in order to attack a blockhouse on this same border, again to the east. 

So it really is a question of the DM inventing people to be met, who already have a grievance, that the players might advantage or thwart, depending on the side they want to be on. Of course, this part of the world is thick with subterranean lairs, monsters, very large dragons and all sorts of places that go down all the way to the underworld.

The last time I worked on this area, the part of the world to the east, was in February, 2024... more than two years ago. Not exactly progress. Still, the circles get bigger and bigger... hopefully, I can pass by here again before August 2028.

Istria, from Trieste to Fiume

 

At last, at an end to sea hexes for a while. I am grateful they're behind me.

Dalmatia and Kordun are Venetian, and as such grow rich upon Adriatic trade both with Italy and from throughout the Mediterranean. Trieste is a gigantic market port, with more than a hundred thousand people, while Fiume is the centre of a rich centralised district; note the manner in which the roads surrounding Fiume have little connection with the outside, so that virtually everything made or grown or dug out in this part of the world passes through Venetian hands.

Trieste is not Venetian; it is a Free City connected to the Hapsburgs, so that it's a commercial and political irritant to Venice. In setting terms, as a rival port, Trieste permits Hapsburg money to flow throughout the Mediterranean into the hands of Venice's enemies, particularly Genoa and even the Ottomans, by a strange back door. On land, the Hapsburgs are the enemy of the Ottoman Empire; but at sea, where the Ottomans are yet a thorn in Venice's side (despite their loss at Lepanto in 1571), it serves Hapburg interests (through the mask of Free Trieste) to keep the Turks a bit fluid, as it were. This creates a double stalemate; the Ottomans don't push too hard against Hungary-Austria on land, and the Hapsburgs don't bother them at sea.

The islands are strategically valuable to Fiume because they control movement through the Kvarner, the strait between the Adriatic and that port. Each has supply stations, pirate refuges, fishing grounds, smuggling bases and places where ships wait for weather or news. A Venetian captain, a Hapsburg patrol, an Uskok boat and an Ottoman courier could all be operating in the same waters without anyone having full control.

At the same time, refugees are moving west and north from Ottoman pressure: Slavs, Croats, Vlachs, soldiers’ families, priests, bandits, deserters and displaced peasants. Some are settled deliberately by Hapsburg authorities as armed frontier populations to harry the Venetians. Some are unwanted by towns that fear disease, famine or spies. If a party meets one of these groups, it raises the question: who is a refugee, who is a raider, which is a Venetian mercenary group, which are bandits in the pay of Trieste. It's a very messy part of the world, especially with all that uninhabited forest atop karst, which is filled with caves and therefore, dungeons.

From here I continue on across a corner of Italy and into Austria... with the first mapping of the Alps.

Dalmatian Coast, from Pola to Zara

 
This shows part of the upper northeast corner of the Adriatic Sea, with the southern point of Istria on the upper left, the Kvarner Gulf (yet to be labelled) and the island of Cres, the big one in the upper centre. I still need to add some labels here, which is the boring part. Heh.

Most of this is under the control of the Republic of Venice, with Zara, Sansego and Pola all market/ports. Zara would be heavily fortified, with walls and bastions, as the heavy line to the east of that city is the extent of Ottoman occupation (Zara being Venetian). All the mountainous hinterland belongs to the Ottoman Empire; for D&D, this is a theatre where military raids, skirmishes, pirates, smuggling and desperate refugees needing player character protection all converge. The Velebit mountains rise along the coast, cutting off the sea from the interior, so that getting in and out is not so easy as one might think.

The area around Senj had a particularly turbulent reputation because of the Uskoks, irregular fighters and pirates who emerged from refugees fleeing Ottoman expansion. They operated from fortified coastal bases and attacked Ottoman shipping, though they often preyed on Venetian commerce as well. Their activities contributed to decades of instability in the Adriatic.

These islands, plus those of the last coast, provides a maze of islets that makes the story of Odysseus getting lost as he tries to find his way home quite believable. This is, incidently, that part of the Adriatic where the end of From Russia with Love was filmed, with the boat chase through the islands.

I've got one more go around with a lot of islands and then I'm into the mainland again. It was the islands that suspended my efforts last August. I just got tired of them.

Wider Adriatic Coast

 

At last, more content. Finally tidied up that corner at the top left of this map. Here's a closer version of that:

This is two maps folded together, as it's the border between two sheets. There is another sheet above it, that I'll be working on today.

Haven't posted a map since August last year. Heaven knows its about time. Though yes, those little fiddly islands are awful.