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.

Bosnia-Serbia, Visegrad, Uzice

 

Normally, I create the posted map from six 20-mile hexes, but this is from eight — filling a gap created by my going all the way around my mapped area in a great circle, passing through Hungary, Ukraine, the Black Sea, the edge of Anatolia and finally Hungary and Serbia.  The above brings me back full circle and completes Serbia completely.

The above was especially difficult as it spans over three separate map sheets.  I did a better job matching these together, so the reader would have to look hard to find a seam.

The river is the Drina, which flows north into the Sava and eventually the Danube.  It isn't an accurate representation.  Doing the map incrementally, and the rivers themselves being extremely difficult to follow and read with GoogleEarth, as everything is a canyon.  Somewhere I lost the correct line of one of these rivers and to make it work, I had to "invent" a river connection.  Not going to say where.  It looks pretty good, and it is a fantasy map.

Part of the blame lies in that I began creating the underlying maps in 2004, before the invention of a lot of map-friendly content on the internet.  As such, I decided not to focus on exact geographical rendering ... which is, unfortunately for me, now possible.  Sometimes I regret not starting over at some earlier time — but hell, I was mapping India by 2011, which meant that most of the area I have mapped in 20-mile hexes was done in the first seven years of my effort.  It felt too late to adjust even then.  So as someone committed, I have to stress things like it being a "fantasy" and not being an "exact" depiction.

It's funny because unless we're from the actual place being depicted, chances are we just don't care.  Here's a video for reference there.

'Course, I know every error I've made, because I really care about details and the real world.  And the errors haunt me.  I've made my bed and it's too short for my feet.  The only thing I can do is hang them over and get the soundest sleep I can.

Ruthenia-Hortobagy, south of Ungvar

It's fairly easy to do a little of this map each day, as I enjoy the process.  At this scale, I get such insight into the topographic and cultural elements that arise with each new small section of the world.  It makes me realise that a shortcoming of many people's mapmaking is that they just don't know the facets of the world as much as they ought to.  I've been studying geography all my life and I find myself astounded every day as I put these maps together.

Today's rough map.

The zero in the upper left is an error.  That should read 75.  It appears correctly with the next image ... though, by the time I'd discovered the mistake, I'd already made the map.  People who think I'm unable to admit to making mistakes should read this blog.  I make 30 mistakes a day before lunch.  It's not the mistakes that matter.  It's the refusal to fix them.

This is the northeastern boundary of modern Hungary, against the heavily populated area of Ruthenia, which includes Munkacs and Ungvar on the map.  Ruthenia has been endlessly disputed by a dozen kingdoms over the last thousand years, which has led to much of the country being devastated century after century.  Still, the land is fertile.  During the Ottoman period, Ruthenia made up the extreme eastern flank of the Hungarian bulwark that defended the rest of Europe.  Note the border forts occurring on the map:

There are six of them, from Heten to Berehy.  These are overlooking lands controlled by the Transylvanians, not the Ottomans, but as Transylvania pays tribute to the Ottomans, an Janissary force can cross the frontier to Ruthenia whenever it wants.  This, too, is a possible adventure, with the players choosing to either join local defenders or taking the opportunity to abandon the area before it's attacked by a force of 12,000.

Full disclosure: some of the rivers on this map do not correspond with the actual Earth.  It's because when I made the 20-mile map many ages ago, I made decisions then that were inaccurate, and I've decided to maintain my original somewhat.  Here and there I've made corrections to bring it more in line with the real world, but not entirely.  I've considered taking the extra time to redesign the whole area, and occasionally I may do that in the future, but with this area I've decided to leave it as it is without worrying too much.

Nagykata

See, this kind of thing will drive us crazy.  With the last post, I thought I'd forgotten to put a town in the hex adjacent to Nagykata.  So I eventually added Szentmartonkata.  But ...

Nagykata is indicated in a type-6 hex, which should not have a village or town at all.  So, the correct solution is to move Nagykata over the crossroads to the south, get rid of Szentmartonkata and leave the type-6 hex empty.

Why do I care?  It's a matter of maintaining a standard, even when I can handwave that standard whenever I want.  Sooner or later, the pattern dissipates and the end result is that we might just as well have never imposed a method in the first place.  We have to believe that those things we impose on themselves are broken if we don't obey the standard.  This is how things of beauty slowly evolve on their own ... by not meddling.

It's just a minute or two to fix it.  It's taken me longer to write about it.  But this, too, is an element of mapmaking.  To keep things organised and useful, the quality has to be maintained.

Here it is, fixed.

P.S.,

Added as an example for the comments:

Here's an example for Shelby.  The dark green is the original 20-mile hex.  Randomly, Glingeni appeared in the hex north of the Prut River.  But the cobbled road (orange) was designated to go south, to the hex-side on the south side of the river.  This designation is according to which adjacent hex has the most infrastructure.

Thus, the cobbled road goes to the river, stops, then picks up on the other side.  Despite the apparent "connection," there no actual infrastructure for getting traveller's across.  Individuals might be able to cross during the dry season, they might risk swimming across (the Prut is 220 ft. across by this point, so it looks much larger on the map than it is in reality).  Or they might conceivably flag down someone on the river to pause and give them a lift.  They might even move on down the shore until they find a boat, use it to cross, then head back on the other side to pick up the road again. 

The road was built for an army, who would arrive at the crossing and expect to find boats ready for them.  It wasn't made for trade.