Ragusa and Venice, on the Adriatic

Back in January 2024, I passed this way and produced the region around the Skader lake in Albania. I've been working around the corner this represented back then, which is now mapped to the south and the west, thusly:

This includes the coast line up to Ragusa, which was a competitor with Venice for a time, but not a successful one. That is to say it was an independent maritime republic, paying tribute to the Ottoman Empire, which protects the state from Venice (who is no friend of the Ottomans), while at the same time Ragusa was careful to cultivate close relations with the Papal States and Catholics (also, no friends of the Venetians).  This, and Ragusa's nearer access to the Mediterranean made it a nimble competitor to Venice, with a fleet of about 150 ships.  Ragusa lasted until Napoleon got rid of them.

Cattaro, on the other hand, just to the east, modern day Kotor, now a part of Montenegro, was organised as a Venetian Viceroy, acting in Venice's behalf, right there next to Ragusa where they could keep watch. Just 90 km apart, round about 55 miles, both were fortified, both were technically Catholic, both had the Ottoman Turks in the hinterland (though, admittedly, it wasn't a very populated hinterland), both were paying tribute to the Turks and both operated on neutral trade, with Cattaro paying out to the coffers of Venice.  It's a bit closer to the Mediterranean, but it's also deep up a channel where it could be defended.

Both are filled with spies, excellent harbours, merchant guilds hiring escorts, smugglers sneaking cargo past Venice or past Ragusa.  Both have vicious plutocracies ready to sabotage the other, while lots of money is available for paying out any capable person willing to join; there's trade, there's piracy, there's escape inland (if you can avoid the Turks) and out to sea (if you don't fall prey to the Spanish across the Adriatic). Fun fun fun.

Italy Began; Apulia, around Bari

I am working on the magazine. I'm producing about a page and a half a day, so I should be more than ready for the October issue preview to be ready on September 1st. In the meantime, I'm stoked to work on this, so I am.

Let's start with this corner of Apulia:

Not as heavily infrastructured as I feared, and of course there were far fewer rivers and topographic features, so it went rather quickly. Also, a large part of this is water. I see I forgot to add a road to the town of Le Torri, so I'll repair that before posting this again.

The density of the settlements, the black circle towns, arises because of their importance, even from the source in 1952. It was still more common at that time to take a train rather than a plain to Barletta, Bari or Brindisi (off map), to take a boat to Athens, Cairo or the Holy Land. Moreover, historically, all these places represented the most important trading route in the world, as the Adriatic proved to be dangerous to lighter ships (Venice solved that with technology), so it was best to park along Apulia, unload, and rush back to Egypt for more grain, or Constantinople or Antioch for more luxuries. That chaotic terrain, plus the madness of local tribes, made the Balkans less friendly to trade between 400 BC and 1500 AD. So this coast got rich as the most successful middle-men in world history.

I went on this morning and mapped further west. Below, the sheet map shows the background for context, so the reader can see where we are.

This is the M.12e - Rome sheet, with the Kingdom of Naples and smallish states on the right and the Papal States on the left. I'll be following the slanted line with this pass, concentrating the Adriatic and the rest of the Dalmatian coast for now.  I'll post the sheet map of Dalmatia's relationship to the Apulia map above with my next post here.  I guess that's about all. The independent state shown, with the heavy border line around it, is the Bishopric of Benevento, which even the Spaniards were unwilling to tax.

Albania-Macedonia, east of Dirac

 And... this is the last truly chaotic map I have to do of the Balkans. I'm so glad. There's still parts of Croatia and Slovenia to do to finish with the Balkans altogether, but this, this above... this horror show is finished. Yay.

I don't think the choice to do these larger sections is necessarily faster... I think it's more that when I get my teeth into a particular process, I'm less likely to put it down. One thing I find with a series of small jobs, when each in the string are finished, it's easier for me to throw off the next one for an hour, a day or even ten months. Whereas, something big like this... I'm not completely relaxed until it's done.

Anyway, I spent about 3.5 hours tidying this up today. and I think probably about 5 on it yesterday... which sounds like a lot. But when I think about the eight hour shifts I've worked in my life that have ended without anything real to show from it — and I know all of you know exactly what I mean — this really feels like time well spent.

So, this wraps up the Rumelia sheet for now, which the reader can compare with this from Aug 8, six days ago:

And it tidies up the Illyria sheet:

On Google Earth, we can see what's been finished overall in this corner of the globe:

Keeping in mind that everything in the upper right corner behind the red boxes has been mapped. It can be seen that I've worked a line north up to Sarajevo, then jumped way west through Croatia, which has steadily widened with each trip around the map that I've done. So I'm going to even that up now, pushing way into south Italy, then north, evening up that scraggling line. It's an opportunity to map a very different country (though Italy is going to be very densely infrastructured, all type-1 hexes) and a lot of coast. All of Italy is smaller than Romania and Serbia put together, but it's very long so finishing it will cover a lot of open sea, with Sicily and Sardinia being the last areas finished.

So, it's across the water with my next map, with the densest part of Apulia on the block.

Macedonia, upper and lower, around Strumica

My last map post of 2023 was of Cumae, at the top of this map, after which I took ten months off mapmaking before continuing on with the Balkans. I was just so tired of mountains, I couldn't face another, so I took a rest.  The upper left of this map was made in January, 2024... so I've gone from being 28 months behind my last pass, to just 18. That's fascinating to no one but me, I'm sure.  But it does mean I could pass this way again before the beginning of 2027.

With modern Bulgaria getting fully mapped with the last post, which I failed to say, I've started on 20th century Yugoslavia.  Macedonia will be done soon, after which I'll cut through the middle of Albania, not finishing that country, to cut my way up through Montenegro and Croatia, until all of that is completely finished. That'll be the end of the Balkan states, unless Greece is counted, which it usually isn't.  I consider that an accomplishment.

Not too much to say about the above. It's small because it's filling in the corner of the Rumelia sheet map.  The next map will be another section of 18 by 9 hexes.  I'm digging into the heart of the October issue of the Lantern just now, so it really is a question of what I feel like working on.  My deadline for the October edition is the 1st of September.  Just a reminder here, though I'll push it on the main blog tomorrow, that those wanting the September edition at the normal price of $7 should increase their patreon support by that amount by the 21st, otherwise they'll have to buy it on itch.io or lulu.  Those links are to the August edition; September isn't out yet.

Hither Thrace and Hither Rumelia, around Drama

I worked on the area along the top of this in February of 2023, though it really doesn't feel like it was that long ago. This new manner of sketching out larger areas is certainly more efficient, though the hills and mountains of this particular section was... trying.  The roads, though there were a lot of them, did tend to follow the valleys and therefore weren't as complex as some areas I've mapped.  It's certainly interesting to be in Greece, which the southern half of this map covers.  Thessalonika is just off the bottom of the map, not to be added (with the coast) until the next pass through this area.  I hate to think that might not be until February 2028.

Which brings up a point, as always: will it ever be finished. The answer to that is no... and I do wish that more people could understand the fact of doing something for the pleasure of it, regardless of it's practicality, completeness or even it's value, really. I worked on D&D for myself and my players, with no expectation that anyone in the world would ever see it, for some 25 years... and never once thought, "Oh gee, what's the point of this, it'll never be a product and no one else other than I will ever see it." Simply wasn't a part of my consciousness.

There are things I make, obviously, that I'd like to be seen, but really, that can't apply to everything in my life. I'm proud of many things that I keep private, that will never be seen here, or anywhere, that I spend time on, that are every bit as precious to me as these maps or any other thing I've written for the internet. It is a simple pleasure to design, study, copy and sketch out these maps. Sharing them here is really an afterthought.

At present, I'm a little excited to think that after about one and a half more passes at this country like the above, and I'll be able to start drawing out the east Adriatic coastline. I can feel my blood rush a little at the thought of it. How wonderful.

Further Rumelia and Hither Thrace, north of Gumulcine

This is a bridge map between two map sheets, which exist because the size of these maps disallows any possibility of working endlessly on one map.  I'll show the two sheets that it's a bridge across below.  This recent tactic of creating large areas of map in one go is great, but when that area covers more than one sheet, it's definitely problematic, so from here on, the size of "large area" I'll be making at a time will have to change, both in dimension and in some cases, marginally in shape.

The above represents the last of the large province of Further Rumelia, the eastern half of southern Bulgaria.  Bulgaria is essentially two large flatlands split by a mountain range that passes through the middle, called the Balkan Mountains; north of this is the southern plain of the Danube, and south of it is "Rumelia." For those interested, Rumelia is an excellent name to build a fictional kingdom around, and was used extensively in the 1930s whenever a film wanted to have a visiting emisary appear from one of those "Eastern European places no one really understood," back when Hollywood was still fascinated with royalty. As the population became educated, this sort of thing stopped being used, though Blake Edwards continued to experiment with it into the 1960s.

I'm just starting on "Hither Thrace," at the bottom of the above, called "Hither" because it's closer to the centre of power in Austria.  Thus, Further Rumelia is further from Vienna, while Hither Rumelia, including the large city of Sofia, is closer to Vienna.  Both Hither Thrace and Lower Macedonia (so called because its that part of ancient Macedonia that's on the Aegean, with the large important port city of Thessalonika) are very heavily populated, below unpopulated mountains (the Rhodope), but that's all for the next map.

Here's the Varna sheet, M.27e (the number being the nearest whole parallel running through the upper left corner):

And here's the one to the west of this, the Rumelia sheet, M.23e:

I'll be filling a goodly large section of that blank space at the bottom with my next map.

Thrace, around Adrianople

This accomplishes most of Thrace... and demonstrates a critical shortcoming of this kind of mapmaking. Much of the world, even at a level of 6.67 miles per hex, is very much like any other. Often we get this mix of type 5, 6 and 7 hexes with the occasional village, scored by a few hills and big towns. The result is "fly-over" country, which the players would probably never care about, which only sit as a unimportant, non-dangerous obstacle between them and their goals.

Part of The Lantern's charm is to take an area like this and give it life... not through the invention of staggering goals and hidden great dungeons, but through those elements that first or second level characters might appreciate: a hidden crowd of goblins, a rampaging wolf, some minor dispute in a village or hamlet that the players stumble upon. The very real, the very ordinary, the unquestionably difficult aspects of a world that in our real life personal experience are never easily managed, even when they don't require swords and risk of life.

But of course, it's not "heriosm," or "superheroism" for that matter, given the recent penchant for "gaming" where death is essentially impossible.  Which I am stupid enough to think diminishes the value of the setting altogether. I mean, why worry about the distance between two places, when essentially the DM can fly you where you want to go, at a finger-snap, ignoring all this dull... everything?

Byzantium, around Constantinople

A technically difficult part of the map, intensively infrastructured, lots of towns and the largest city I've included on any 6-mile map to day, Constantinople. I've started adding "market" points to the numbers on these maps, though this is catch-up work I'll do occasionally. Interest in these has dwindled, so I'm doing them for myself and a few others, not many, so it doesn't really matter. The map above follows the 41st latitude at it's bottom, which is why it's cut off.

I suppose that's all to say. Constantinople was, for about 500 years, the richest city in the world and arguably the center of all trade and travel everywhere.  Even in 1650 it retained much of its romance, but it's financial importance had been bypassed by the mouth of the Rhone, which became the crossroads of Europe and the New World, as well as the destination point for good arriving by sea from Japan, the East Indies and China.  Poor Contantinople... soon to be renamed, ultimately just a sad leftover from its former self.

West Bithynia, around Eregli

 A continuation of the last map to the east, sketching more of the Black Sea coast along modern Turkey, the west coast of the long province of Bithynia. The surrounding region of Constantinople is represented on the far left, against the sea, just before the 30th meridian... where, unfortunately, the map is about to bend to maintain the illusion of the hex-map portrayed circle that is it the northern hemisphere.

This section shows the inland roads form the hinterland, which is often cliff-faces and tangled forest, denying any easy travel along the coast. Even the section between Eregli (centre) and Karasu (left), where there is a road, is so unpopulated, with poor infrastructure, that much of the road is no better than a foot path or a rutted cart track. Easier to take a boat along the coast than to travel it... as that road is mainly for use by peasant shepherds and no better.  Good adventuring country, though.

Posting these larger map areas does require more preparation... though I admit, working on the The Lantern has consumed much of my free time of late. Which will be a steady thing, though I love making these maps when I can find the time.  I can almost see a point where the Black Sea is completely ringed around.

Central Bithynia, around Kastamohu

Following on work done on Jan 17, 2023 (Inebolu) and Jan 20 (Cide), we offer a large area in central northern Anatolia.

Mapping areas like this provides a powerful context for how large Anatolia, and thus modern Turkey, is compared to Europe — and more to the point, how empty parts of it are. 150 miles from east to west and 70 from north to south, this is an adventurer's dream, with large unoccupied forests and open scrub plains ("Mediterranean" vegetation) that, although a part of history for 3,500 years by the count of my game world, remain untapped and uncivilised. Nearly all of it consists of hills or rocky fields, impractical for agriculture, severely plundered with regards to raw material resources and, so far, not cleared as it would be once the industrial revolution gets going. Thus we look at lands that were under the control of the Hittites, Phyrgians, Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans, to name the major players, but yet forever the "outer provinces" that would be bureaucrats hoped not to be assigned to.

The next section, further west, may or may not reach the Bosporus; I believe it's going to be close. Two more sections like this should get me out of Turkey and into northern Greece, possibly skirting the northern coast of the Aegean. I'm a little anxious to try the Greek Islands in this scale (though when I get there I'll probably hate it), but I don't think that's going to happen on this pass.  Next time around I suppose, which by this pace, will be two and a half years from now.

I almost forgot, I wanted to include an image of that wild bend of the Kizilirmak River, the really big one on the map. Isn't this something:

East Bithynia, Gerze and Amisos

In Jan '23, I produced a map of Bithynia around Sinop. Here is the region to the southeast of that former map, done yesterday and today, because I'm looking for ways to relax between writing just now.

This was a test, to see if I could work at eighteen 20-mile hexes at the same time. Originally, I was doing them two hexes at a time, and last year I'd moved up to six at a time. With images made earlier this year to attach to the authentic wiki, I was feeling more confident about managing more sweeping areas, to see if it would prove more efficient. It's a little of doing the same sort of detail more repetitively, but this does represent three times as much work as I would have done formerly of about the same area.  Which is desirable.

The above represents what are essentially two routes into the upper lands of Anatolia.  Gerze provides access across the Kastamonu uplands, down into the high plateau west of modern Ankara, which would have been an ancient route that contributed to Sardis and Lydia's enormous wealth 27 centuries ago, while Amisos provides access to the upper Halys valley, the seat of Phrygia, and before that the Hittite Empire, going back 36 to 40 centuries.  Both ports are very old, full of waxing and waning over the centuries, while many wars were fought to control both before the Persians did.  The old fights began after the fall of the Persians and the failed hold of the Seleucids, until the Romans controlled them both again.  Then it was the Byzantines vs. the various tribes that invaded starting in the 10th century, until the Seljuks controlled Amisos after the battle of Manzikert in 1071.  The Othmans controlled Gerze and cut the Byzantines off of trade on the plateau from both ends, ending the latter's income from that alternative route.  The Othmans, later the Ottomans, then strangled Constantinople's trade... which took only two and a half centuries, even after the city was plundered in 1204 by the Venetians.  All fun stuff.

Things like this provide structure to blocks of geography that looks like blobs on most maps, to most poeple. The pleasure I get from seeing the structure generate in close-up scale maps gives me a pleasure it's hard to describe... since people don't, generally, understand or care about maps.

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.

Krivassa along the Dneiper

Been hung up, but still mapmaking.

The above connects the recent work on the Dneiper's course with that I did in December of 2022, when I started mapping the Dneiper from the bottom left of this map down to the Black Sea.  From here, I continue to move southeast to the Black and across the Sea of Azov, I think completing the Crimea east peninsula, the Kerch, showing the strait between it and the Taman Peninsula of what's called Kubanistan, in modern Russia.

The "swamp" land shown is moderate bogland, easily crossed on foot though damp and spongy, and subject to flooding in the late spring.  It is a topography that hasn't existed since the early 20th century, before World War II, so the Germans did not need to contend with it; of course this isn't what the region looks like now, it's a reservoir.  It makes a natural boundary between lands controlled by the Turks south of Kiyev and the Zaporozhian Sich, or cossacks, enabling the latter to strike along routes through the soft country that they know to be firm enough, in some seasons, for their horses.  This makes it hard to defend the lands of Krivassa against raiders, which makes for a good set-up in any campaign.  Obviously, such a wide, treeless soft-bottomed open ground, braided with hundreds of tiny brooks not shown on the map, can be imported into anyone's personally generated setting.

Kamenskoye-Krivassa-Vassia

Ah, broke free from continuously populated quarters of Ukraine.  Open steppe, goes east by southeast with comparatively little occupation, until growing even less populated to the coast of the Caspian.  As I swing around this side from now on, it gets progressively easier.

Kamenskoye is interesting; an isolated river port, few facilities (type-6), a natural backwater accumulating thieves, river pirates, smugglers, adventurer-merchants bound for the Orient and minions of all sorts.  A good jumping off point, a destination to find someone who knows something about an obscure part of the world... and a long and potentially harrowing journey to reach a poorly maintained and unsafe wharf-front.  Sounds ideal.

Technically, the town is under the suzerainty of the Zaporozhian cossacks.  I mentioned these before.  This fiercely aggressive peoples are based in the "Zaporozhian Sich," which are lands following the east bank of the Dneiper.  Their number includes Bohdan Khmelnitsky, whom some will remember is waging a private war against Poland in the time of my game world; as the lands to the south and east of Zaporozhian are, unlike real history, occupied by non-human orcs, haruchai, ogres and trolls, they have larger problems than the Poles... but generally, the sweep of the land is so large that there are ways to be safe, while those on horseback can see a long way.  A party on its own, on horseback, would surely be quickly outnumbered; a party on foot would have much to fear from a small cavalry that might seem to appear from nowhere.

Krivassa-Vassia

The process is steady and patient; the apparent obscurity of another collection of unfamiliar towns and river courses simply impresses on the consciousness how immense the world is, and how many places in it are homes to people who carry no weight in the minds of those who see only grand, sweeping arcs.

Imagine the simple Turkic tax collector who leaves from Constantinople in the mid-17th century, to take a crude cart from an unfamiliar coastal port, along some unknown river to arrive at a desolate steppeland town called "Leksan," only to be told that this represents the height of civilisation for a distance of 30 miles around.  How dismal.

Dneiper Bank-Kamenskoye-Kiyev-Ltava-Vassia

A collection of provinces in central Ukraine along the Dneiper... which created some problems.  I went looking for some record of the original course of the river, since during early Soviet Russia there were several dams built that flooded the valley, displacing thousands of people and drowning villages.  Unfortunately, I could not find such a map.  Apparently, no surveys were done that exist online; even 19th century atlases tend to ignore Russia, apparently as a place where geographers do not go.  Seriously, no map plate at all appears in these.  It goes to show what kind of unearthly place was the czarate before all when sour... and adds to the lesson on what happens when you continually treat a whole people awfully for century after century.

So, made do as best I could, laying the river out as rationally as I could and filling in the basin with slough-lands as I described before.  Some of the cities on the bank of the largest Dneiper reservoir (the 5th largest by area in the world) were moved inward, to fit up against the river.  The effect creates a messy, but somewhat unique landscape.  Unique is always good.

A brief word about Kamenskoye, in the bottom right.  This is the modern Dnepropetrovsk region, or oblast.  Dnipro, formerly Dnepropetrovsk, is a huge city, but it didn't exist until 1776, when it was founded by Catherine the Great as Yekaterinoslav.  None of the settlements in this region are founded prior to 1550... so my population calculations make it a large, uninhabited steppeland, dangerously exposed and thus occupied only by Cossacks.  The settlements are therefore encampments, with few permanent buildings, while little other infrastructure exists at all.  I'll be mapping more of the area soon, but expect it to be largely empty steppe, as the small corner on the map above shows. 

Kiyev-Vassia, southeast of Kiyev

These more obscure parts of the world, where there's not a single familiar name anywhere on the map, though we're drawing out an area much larger than Rhode Island.  We're still in present-day undisputed Ukraine, but in the 17th century the southern part, distinguished by the thick borderline, is the land of Vassia, occupied by the Ottoman Empire.  Thus there is a mix between Turkish names for the larger settlements and Ukrainian for the villages.

Kiyev is the last European region we'll see for awhile; hereafter, the region being mapped is a mixture of Turkic and Mongol influences, particularly as we move through the Zaporozhian hetlands, which are essentially all Cossack.