More of Romania Mapped

Personally, I don't need more than two people to urge me to throw out a map.  I learned in communications classes many years ago that for every person who writes into the editor, there's a hundred people with the same notion.  Of course, this is pre-'net; there are no letters, there are no editors ... and I'm sure the 1:100 ratio must be updated.  But enough of this line of thought.

Let's turn to some mindfuckery instead.  First, an image from the excel files I created between 2005 and 2007.  This file gives the latitude and longitude for every hex on my game planet, plus the highest and lowest habited elevations.  The data was methodically compiled from this site, located on the sidebar as "global gazetteer."

Pretty boring, eh?  The hex containing Turnu Severin is between 44.46°N and 44.74°N, and between 22.55°E and 22.92°E.   The other is between 22.93°E and 23.30°E.  Both are part of the "province" of Oltenia, with the upper hex containing some of Serbia.  Turnu Severin and Strehaia are "settlements."  Ring 157 is the number of 20 mile lengths from the North Pole; each ring, obviously, makes a circumference around the world.  Note the elevations shown: 75-1312 for Turnu Severin and 360-1010 for Strehaia.

I used this data to make this part of my 20-mile maps:

This is tilted on its side because it happens to fall very near the 30th meridian E., which requires that my map bends 60° so I can make a flat hexagonal disk rather than distorting it like a traditional Robinson's or Mercator's projection.  There's still a distortion, but this one works for me; anyway, we don't need to worry about that.

In the bottom left corner of each hex is the infrastructure number; in the upper right is the elevation.  The "75" corresponds to the lower elevation in the Turnu-Severin hex; it's also Turnu-Severin's elevation.  "425" is Strehaia's elevation.  The reader can discover more about the meaning behind elevations on my 20-mile maps, and my mapmaking approach, by reading this post from 2015.

While a hex doesn't correspond to a square, for the purpose of plotting hexes and settlements I treat hexes as squares anyway.  It's simply practical.  Let's take both the hexes above and see how they correspond to GoogleEarth, using the latitudes and longitudes I've listed.

There.  That's pretty engaging.  The four corners correspond to the latitude and longitude numbers.  I've removed the map labels to give a general sense of the terrain.  Of course, you can locate this on your own copy of Google earth by punching in the coordinates.  Only, be warned, the coordinates I have from Fallingrain.com are in decimals, while Google Earth records in hours, minutes and seconds.  I created a simple excel file that converts for me, so I can plot the corners of any hex from my excel document.

The above is what I've started to use to place hills, mountains, villages and some rivers in my 6-mile hexes.  Rather than get a general idea of the area, it became necessary for me to create boundaries to work from.  All the village names on my 6-mile map are actual villages and towns, and no where near the sum total that occur in the real world.  More on that later.

Okay, so, here's the same section that we've looked at as a 6-mile map, generated according to the system I've discussed and augmented with notes from GoogleEarth:

Fun, yah?  Sorry about the little white hex mid-bottom, this is the very edge of my map so far and I haven't determined the kind of hex that one is.  The rest of it is a trip.  Some of the above is fictional, though the names aren't; the hills and rivers don't exactly correspond to reality, and I'm okay with that.  The bend in the Danube (the huge river) is a little far south for the GoogleEarth map, and "too wide," but in fact it's representative in size and not intended to be dead accurate.  If I zoom in and make a 2-mile map, then the width of the Danube will be more accurate.

I count 11 towns and villages on the map, and 2 settlements.  That is a lot of damned places, and really, for a game world, TOO MANY to run.  Players would go crazy trying to remember the difference between Jignita and Jidostita, or keeping them all straight as to the order they occur when travelling along a given road.  As a DM, what do I need all these places for?  After all, could I seriously make them truly individual settings ... surely, they'd blend into one another easily.  Nor is it likely I could find more than a sentence on any one of them, except maybe the settlements.  So why?  Why include them?

Because, damn it, they exist.  Not only these, but dozens of others I didn't include; I cherry-picked which village name I'd take for each six-mile hex, usually from between 2 and 5 options.  I could dumb down the countryside for the players, but I'd be taking away from what's really there, and the fact of having to acknowledge that there's a shit-ton of people living in this small accumulation of hexes.  And, more to the point, this isn't even a densely populated collection of hexes.  The area in central Transylvania, that's crowded.

Why shouldn't the players feel confronted by a dozen villages?  I'd guess the whole 6-mile map I've made so far has about three to four hundred.  There are so many "runable" places that I could maintain a campaign in what I've done so far for at least a decade ... provided I could keep the players here.  And oh, just as an aside, I began laying out this map on the evening before February 9th, when I published this post.  That's not even two months ago.  Since that time, here's what I've accomplished.

Oh, and as a reminder.  If you want to see the map close up, left click it to expand it on blogger, then right click the expansion to open in a new tab, so you can zoom in and see the whole map clearly.

I'm laying the map out concentrically, moving clockwise around the outside, doing it now in two-hex pieces (like the two hexes shown above).  Thus I'm spiralling out, which is why the Danube River appears in three parts on the left, bottom right and right.  The overall map has poured onto four sheets, which need to be overlaid together to produce a whole; right now, the complete image is 17mb, because the detail is making my computer sweat.  Eventually, I won't be able to display the whole map in 100%, because it will be too big to load to blogger.

There are at least a dozen places where an interesting campaign could be set; my worldbuilding designs allow for the translation of hundreds of villages into moderate differentiations (which have an inn, whic have a way station, etc.).  And this is just a tiny part of my 20-mile game world.  If I keep going concentrically, I'll bump into the Black Sea, I'll expand south into Bulgaria and Greece, west into Hungary, and north and east into Ukraine.  Somewhere out there is the Mediterranean, the Adriatic and the Baltic Seas.  And there's really no part of it that I can't just keep adding to this map.  I have the preliminary work done, I have GoogleEarth and depending on the occupation of a given hex, I can add it to the map in between 30 seconds (a sea hex) and 25 minutes (an intensely populated multi-village and road hex).  Two hexes a day?  No sweat.  That's close to what I've been doing, plus a few days where I've dug in.

I'll make this a regular feature, updating the map what, once a month?

P.S.,

The nearly white hexes on the map that have no number or production are empty steppelands, too dry for cultivation and without the trees of other wilderness hexes that also don't have numbers.  All of these hexes are "type-8."