C 08 - Angara

For RISK fans, the map below would correspond more or less to the Irkutsk (minus the bottom third). You might be able to vaguely recognize the shape in the gray border, or that might be my imagination:

Showing Lake Baykal on the bottom right and the Angara River flowing from bottom left of
centre and then off the left side of the map after making a 90-degree bend.  The very large
Lena River rises just west of Lake Baykal and flows off the right edge.  The top of the map
is the Tunguska Plateau.

Back in 2009, when I spent a period living on unemployment, I just kept going east through Russia - I did most of these last four maps during that time, and a whole string of maps to the south of these. Russia just goes on an on . . . but the reader can see some pink hexes in the upper right corner, those being part of the Yakutsk territory (called Trak Dran in my world, a big norker kingdom).  I haven't done that area yet.

C 07 - Lungos

I have been working, in bits, on maps moving steadily east.  The last map I posted is coded C-06 (the Ob & Irtysh basins).  Here is C-07:

Shown is the upper course of the Ob River on the left and the middle course of the Yenisey
River on the right.  The highlands at the bottom of the map (brown hexes)
are the Altai, Khakass and Savan Mountains.  The yellow sloped line marks the
90th Meridian East.

I've shown below how C-06 overlaps with the above map.  North is the upper right corner, and along the 90th meridian the direction of east-west turns 60-degrees.  This is, as ever, due to mapping a round Earth.

Here all three rivers are shown, from left to right, the Irtysh, the Ob and the Yenisey.

All of the C 07 map is occupied by non-humans, mostly hobgoblins of the Vostoch Empire (Lungos Nad and Lungos Sog are the north and south territories along the Yenisey Basin).  The very bottom left and centre of the map is the edge of the dwarven kingdom of Altslok.  All of these are my own D&D names for the territories . . . the Russian names would hardly work for flavour.

Overreach and Western Siberia

At last I finished this map:

At the centre bottom of the map the reader can pick out the town of Sibir, which is the original name for the present city of Omsk, just north of the Kazakhstan border ... that border would run along the bottom of this map, or thereabouts.  The real Sibir was actually further west and north, near the town of Boloine Ob (Tobolsk) that appears on the right side of the last map I posted, the Ural map.  The Russians, however, destroyed that city in 1582 ... and none of this works for the history of my world, since there are no Russians in this part of the world, the Russians never took over, there are orcs and goblins and hobgoblins here, etc.  I wanted a 'Sibir' however, so in renaming many of the Russian cities to give them an 'orc' flavour, I renamed Omsk and so it goes.

At the bottom right there's another large city called Zosk-Sibir; this is actually the correct location for Novosibirsk, which really only means 'New Sibir" anyway.  'Zosk,' then, is colloquial orc-speak for 'New' ... and it all comes together somehow.  Plus I get to retain the justification for calling all of this vast area 'Siberia.'  Which is nice.

For those who do not know their history, Novosibirsk is where the Russians moved the center of their munitions production in the Second World War ... and it has taken me three maps to get this far east.  For fun, I thought I would put all three maps together, what with Moscow being at the far west of all three, and Novosibirsk being at the far east:

I've slightly cut off Zosk-Sibir on the right, but its clear where it is.  The above is the distance in 20 mile hexes - through the hills east of Moscow, then the Urals, then the swamplands of western Sibir - that the Germans would have needed to traverse to finally destroy the Russian war machine, which was supported by America and also by the furnaces of the Kuznetsk and Minusinsk coal and iron basins even further east.

Talk about overreach.

The Urals, Ob & Irtysh

A call out to all those who are still following this blog; I'm still doing a bit here and there on my world, still making maps, which I will probably do all summer as I concentrate on writing.  Here, however, is an update of the Ural Mountains map, now colored:

The Ural Mountains are less stark in the above image; it shows that the 'mountains' are rather low, and narrowest in the center.  Still, they divide the rivers from those going west and south, and those going east and north.  On the east side of the Urals there are two big rivers, the Tavda above and the Tobol below, which meet the Irtysh River just off the map, which then flows along the edge of the map to debouch into the Ob River top right.

The Urals at this point correspond two the modern oblasts of Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk - on the map they appear as 'Eykhoth' and 'Kord.'  This is one of the richest mineral producing areas in the world, which was why I decided to assign the area to the Dwarves.  Thus, these are both big Dwarven cities, and the central part of this map is under the Kingdom of Hoth.  The lands around Great Bolger, on the west of the mountains, is 'Bulgrastan,' which is a left-over territory from the Mongol raids, always remembering that the Mongols were orcs (urukai).  Bulgrastan is controlled by a hierarchy of ogres ruling urukai, so it's a mean little region.  North of Bulgrastan is the Kingdom of Bjarmaland, land of the gnolls, while south of Bulgrastan, and showing partly on the southeastern corner of the map, is the great Jagatai Empire ... which I've linked to the real thing. My Jagatai, however, is occupied by orcs.  The history comes pretty close to matching up, although the exact borders are a bit different (my version is larger, as it includes parts that Russia never seized in my game).  Finally, the northeast corner of the map is occupied by the Kingdom of Magloshkagok, or that of the goblins.

The dwarves, then, are in a sea of enemy races, but the dwarves are easily the strongest, most protected force in the region; except for Bulgrastan and the ogres, Hoth is well able to manage their own affairs ... and there is always a way to stir up the orcs or the gnolls against Bulgrastan if need be, as the dwarves are very rich.

Very well.  Further east, I've begun working on this map:

This shows the enormous flatlands between two great river basins, the Ob on the north, and the Irtysh on the south.  Both rise in the mountains that border on West China, and as was shown on the previous map, they inevitably meet.  The rivers are highways through central Russia ... and indeed create a means of travel that extends to the Yenisey, the Lena and the Amur, right across the Asian Continent.  Each of these rivers flows generally north, and are deep.  They have tributaries that are deep as well, and the tributaries run east-west; thus, the Russians in the 18th century were able to ride up a tributary of the Ob, portage to a tributary of the Yenisey (showing in the very top right corner), then ride down the Yenisey in order to find another tributary going even further east.  Roads were unnecessary, as the whole continent could be travelled fairly quickly by water.  This was the manner in which Russia conquered the top of Asia.

Of course, there were no orcs, hobgoblins, goblins and other creatures in the real world, so Russia wasn't met with formidable enemies.  My world, on the other hand ...

The map above is divided into three entities; Magloshkagok on the northwest, the Jagatai Empire in the south, and the great Vostoch Empire, controlled by hobgoblins, in the northeast.  Of these, the hobgoblins are the most warlike; but they are chiefly concerned with threats to the east of their Empire, and the great swamplands (shown above in yellow) of Vasyugan are virtually uninhabited.

I trust the reader is enjoying these.  When I finish the Ob & Irtysh map above, I'll post it again.

Ural Mountains - Rough

I crashed last night from writing early, which for me means I relaxed and worked on a project that requires attention but practically zero creativity.  Yes, you guessed it, another map.  This seems to be all I'm up for doing lately, what with the book sucking up all my creative juices.  When the book is finished this blog should actually get a shot in the arm.

Anyway, this is as far as I got.  The map below is directly east of the Upper Volga map I posted last - in a way, it shows the Ural mountains down the middle:

The only hexes colored are those that show desolate mountains (grey), muskeg swamp (whitish yellow)
and hexes below 500 feet elevation. Thus the Ural Mountains are shown starkly highlighted, right down
the centre of the map.  The rolling hills of the Russian plain are west of the mountains, while
the edge of the great Ob River flatland are to the east. 

I'll post a finished version in a few days, when I have the time to color in the rest.

Upper Volga

I haven't had much time to work on my world - this below took two weeks.  And what with decisions I've made today, that are not discussed anywhere on my blog, I don't know how much work I'll get done in the next few months.

But, here's the Upper Volga map, fully reformatted for the new publisher program:

Just one big flat part of the world.

This was waaaaay, way more work than I expected.  That multiplicity of rivers was a major bitch.  I see that google has made the swampy hexes blue; there are four of them, areas 20 miles in diameter with no civilization in them, even modern civilization.  But then, this is quite a ways north; people in North America really don't conceive how far north Moscow or St. Petersburg is (my world has no St. Petersburg, it was founded by Peter the Great in 1703).

I'm glad this one is behind me.  I prefer maps with lots of mountains.

First C-Ring Map - Upper Volga

To tell the truth, the book is really getting in the way of my working on my world.  Sigh.  I didn't get to work on the cleric sage table, so there it sits, maddeningly five subjects from completion, while I am pushed and pulled by other things.  But those subjects take mental work, whereas remaking maps is relaxing and more gratifying.

Here and there, starting a week ago, I've been working at the first C-Ring map I'm going to post here.  This is C 04 - Upper Volga, in mid-reconstruction:

Russia between Moscow and the Ural Mountains, which are just slightly off the map to the right.
At the low center, the Oka River (from the southwest) and the Volga River (northwest) join
together at Nizhniy-Novgorod, which would today be called Gorkiy.  Gorkiy's importance
derives from the joining of these two rivers.  The Volga flows east to meet the big Kama
River from the Urals.  

It's actually further along than it looks; I've redrawn the many, many rivers and the rest gets easier.  Some of the details at the top of the map are missing; that is only because they are temporarily behind the hexes, as I am layering things.  The best way I find to do this is to sweep through everything that should be on top and then send that to the back.  Then the same with the next type of thing, and the next, until everything is stacked.  As each new group is sent to the back, it puts the first thing that was sent there further in front.  If that makes any sense.  Anyway, first the titles and text go back, then the cities, then the lakes and coast, then the rivers, the roads, the borders and finally the hexes.

The roads on this map that are in pink still need to be redrawn as red, and the borders that are in orange still need to be redrawn in grey.  Some of the lakes need to be redrawn.  And many of the text has light blue borders that need to be cleared off.  Somehow, this happened when transferring from the old to the new program.  Never has before.  C'est la vie.

The more clever among you will notice that the map is 33 hexes wide, and not my usual 30 (if you're even aware there is a 'usual' number).  You might also wonder why I'm starting with C-04 and not C-01.  This is hard to explain.

Each ring has six square maps that represent the point where the direction of east-west turns 60-degrees (there's an orange line running down the middle of the map for the 30th E, 90th E, 150th E, 150th W, 90th W and 30th W parallels).  For the remaining maps of the ring, east and west is always a straight line.  On the map above, the orange line (which is not a boundary, but is the 30th E parallel) can be seen in the top left corner.  The reader can compare this with other maps I've shown in the B-Ring, such as the Yak'Margug Map or the Tunguska Map.  Note how the orange line is always in the same place on either of those maps as it is on the map above.

Now look at the Lofoten Map of north Norway, or the Ob Gulf Map.  Note how there's an orange line, again, but it is through the two corner hexes on the upper right.  This is consistent all around the B-Ring, so that there is a turning map (B-02), then two straight maps (B-03, B-04), then a turning map (B-05), etc., until all 18 maps circle the earth.

I wish to do the same with the C-Ring maps, but while I know that there should be three maps between the turning maps, I'm not precisely certain how many hexes there should be to create those three maps.  The distance is (I think) 94 hexes.  Add that each map overlaps two hexes, and that means that the straight maps should have at least 33 hexes each.  Anyway, the best way to tell is to draw those maps and prove it.

This is all crazy map-making shit that can't possibly interest anyone except crazy, map-making people, but anyway it is all carefully constructed.  C-04 is the first of three straight east-west maps, so once I know that it, C-05 and C-6 are exactly the right dimensions, then I can work out C-01 through C-03.  I used to just make ALL the maps 30 hexes wide, but that was creating problems at the turns, and I knew I'd have to adjust for that.  Anyway, it's just a game, right?  Certainly it's nothing that challenges my brain.

Around the B-Ring

I have been working on maps, but there hasn't been much time to post them.  On Saturday, I got completely around the world (with the B-Ring).  So here are those maps (note the pretty maps are on the bottom):

The eastern extension of Baffin island, which comprises no more than isolated villages.  Like
most of these maps, this will look much more familiar when the coast line is added. 

Across the Davis Strait from Baffin, this is the first real coastline that's emerged since Russia.  This
is the west coast of Greenland, which looks busy - but remember the hexes are 20 miles wide
and are therefore still mostly empty.  The three pink hexes on the far right represent a
piece of Greenland's east coast.

This is the Denmark Strait between the east coast of Greenland and Iceland.  That's Iceland on the
right.  The orange line is the 30th parallel west, and the remaining bits are the east coast of
Greenland.  Nearly all the way around.

And this is the east end of Iceland.  I'm not sure what that bit is higher up, left of centre; I'm fairly certain
it's Greenland stretching towards the east.  Jan Mayan land, for those who might be interested,
should be somewhere on the right hand side - but it has no permanent habitation, so
until I create coastlines for this map, it won't appear.

And this is the coast of Norway above Tromso, with part of Sweden to boot.  This part HAS been
made, and what a difference.  I remember how nasty was that coastline when I drew it - and then again
when I upgraded this map.

This, of course, is northern Finland, Sweden and Norway, with part of the Kola Peninsula of Russia.
The eastern shoreline around the White Sea is mostly occupied by an Elven Kingdom, Ulthua,
while northern Sweden is dominated by Gnomes.  But its a comfort that the left areas on this map,
Lansi, Nordland and Angermanland, are parts of human Sweden and Norway.

Last map; this is mostly the Gnoll Kingdom of Bjarmaland, divided between Glu'Bak, Gaa'Kaa and
Yak'Margug.  As a reminder, the darker gray areas are barren mountains, the lighter gray are
barren tundra and the yellow are muskeg swamps.  Jotunheim, at the top, is mythically
the Kingdom of the Frost Giants.  I haven't had anyone visit yet.

Going all the way around the world, then, that's 18 maps in the B-Ring.  The C-Ring will have 24.  Which is to say I haven't hardly begun to add maps ... but most of the ones above did not take much time, just plotting the few occupied hexes on a big empty nothing.  The coastlines for those will take MUCH longer.

Remember that these are pretty big maps - 600 miles by 700.  Yet it takes many dozens to even map the upper part of the globe. Thankfully, much of the globe is covered by empty ocean, which does not require detailed coastlines or even islands.  The B-Ring is, I think, the only one where all the way around the globe there are no sea-only maps.

But of course I'll have to see.

Empty Maps in Canada

So little to show, so little to show.  Was working heavily on my book last night.  Worse, I am working my way across northern Canada, which is sadly bereft of inhabitation:

It's very difficult even to imagine what part of the world this might be.  In fact, it is an area called
the Barren Grounds, stretching across what was once the Districts of Mackenzie and Keewatin,
 largely taken up by Nunavut today.  Empty.  Staggeringly empty. 

And this ... the 90th Parallel west, which would be approximately the north-west shore of Hudson Bay,
which I can use the European name for because it was discovered 40 years before the time of my world.  The map
(I think) would also include part of Baffin Island, along with Foxe Basin and the island of Southampton.
I wonder what on earth a party would be doing here?

City Workbooks, with Maps B-11 & B-12

There are a couple of maps further down, that I'm adding as I continue to work my way east around the world, between 62 and 73 degrees north. First, I've been doing some prep work for Spain, with the expectation of mapping it, and a very little bit of research work for Britain (specifically Ireland); those files can be found on the wiki.

A lot of the work I do has no immediate sexy impact, which is part of the reason I wanted to start this blog. I wanted to give a sense for how much time some of these things take, plus the fairly worthless way I spend my life (heh heh).

I admit that I probably do spend too much time mapmaking, when I could be working on redesigning the spells or characters like I was last year, or getting myself together to get work done on upgrading the monsters - but heck, I like maps. So here they are:

Here is the 60-degree turn in the hex map that matches the 150th Parallel west (or as I call it, 210 E).  This cuts
right through the middle of Alaska.  The square in the upper left is the previous map, B-10, overlapping.  The
top of the map would be the Beaufort Sea.

A dismal map, for certain.  Only the left side of the map is actually taken up by the Yukon territory.  The
drift of inhabited hexes (pink) from the bottom right to top middle follows the giant Mackenzie River, which
I'll end up calling something else for my D&D world ... if I ever figure out just what lives here.
A lot of big animals, probably.  And maybe stone giants.

Tunguska III & East

Over the weekend, apart from other activities, I worked on the five maps below.  I'll write some notes for each to help them make sense:



Tunguska, completed.



Immediately east of Tunguska, the Arctic Ocean coast has been added to the top of the map;
The large white vertical area in the centre is the Verkhoyansk Range in Siberia, known to be one
of the coldest places on earth. 

The diagonal rectangle in the upper left is where the Verkhoy map overlaps this one, which has the
150th East parallel through the center.  The map turns 60 degrees at is point.  The cluster of pink
hexes on the left is the Indigirka River basin; the cluster of pink hexes on the right is the
Kolyma River basin, the largest source of gold in the world outside of South Africa.

This seems very much like a group of scattered dots, I know; this is east of the Indigirka/Kolyma basins
(the Kolyma River debouches into the Arctic where there's a cluster of pink hexes at the top left).
On a map, you might be able to identify this with the narrowing of the eastern stretch of Siberia
between Kamchatka and the Arctic Sea.

This is the meeting between the far eastern point of Siberia and Alaska.  Alaska is on the right, and the
coastline for it can be dimly grasped if you're familiar with it.  The extension of Russia is more clear,
mostly because (I think) Russia was more adamant about settling people in forced camps along
the Bering Sea, where today they exist as a string of fishing villages.

I grant, not the most interesting of maps.  It does give a sense for how BIG the empty stretches of Siberia really are ... and that even at this latitude, it takes 18 maps at 20 miles a hex, and 30 hexes a map, to go around the world.  I'm always struck by how truly big the whole world is, and how much of a task I took on in daring to map it to this scale.  Still, it's a labour of love, so it's all good.

For awhile longer I'm going to be making this sort of map, just tagging the individual hexes for the data I have for each, as it helps with both my organization and setting something up on the fly, if needed.  In awhile I'll be swinging back around to Europe and then moving one map ring south.

(Incidentally, as an aside, the bottom of these maps is about 62.5 degrees north).

Coastline Mapping

Cooked this up today to demonstrate the technique I use for making the coastlines on my hex maps, those I've been posting all week:

Tunguska II

So, I should put up an old picture of what Tunguska had looked like, before changes:

Funny that, formerly, I liked the strong colors ... but since, I've changed my mind about it.  Gets to be hard looking on the eyes.

Here's today's image, after the work done since posting yesterday:

The right half of the map, where it is white, would represent the western edge of Yakutia, or 'Yakutsk' as the RISK board calls it.  This is the border between what I've mapped and what I haven't ... so that much of this map, all that which is right of the hard gray line down the middle, has no work done on it at all except that I've identified with numbers what hexes would be inhabited.  Extending this further eastward is the goal for the next two weeks, so this new blog is going to be awfully boring for most people (I'm not getting much feedback, but I can't blame the reader).  I think in the long run, if I keep this up for several years (which would be the plan), the pile of data will get quite meaningful ... so I'm not worrying right now that all I'm adding are some empty maps of a pretty obscure part of the globe.

For those who really can't picture where this above is (and let's face it, that is virtually everyone), I'll offer these two maps.  First, an image of approximately the same area, gained from Google:

Yeah, no doubt that is TOTALLY not helpful.  Also, the features don't quite match up, but I've said many times, my world is only 'like' earth ... the rivers sometimes have a different shape.  Still, the small lake in the middle is recognizable and so is that bit of the sea at the top of the map.  I didn't include that big pond at the top left, though, because the map I originally worked from (a National Geographic map) didn't show it.  Perhaps its something we know about now, post cold war (I've caught the N.G. being wrong before), or perhaps it's a case of a section of permafrost melting due to global warming (which I've also seen when comparing old and new maps).  Either way, I'm probably not going to add it to my game map.  Or I might.

Perhaps this might help the reader get their bearings:

Is that better?  Can we see where we are now?  Granted, the bigger map shows a lot of 'Tunguska' is in fact west of the map above (in fact, the principal knot of Tunguska is off the above map altogether), but it sounded like a better name than 'West Central Yakutsk.'  Believe me, if you do a lot of maps of a world, you want to stay away from calling everying North That and East This.  After awhile, it gets confusing.  Best to have a code tag for every map (Tunguska is B 06) just to keep everything straight.

Okay, I'm going to let go of this post; I'm going to write a bit more on the main blog, however, so you might want to have a glance at that.

Tunguska

I'm starting a new map today, the next one over that's directly east of the Lower Yenisey map I've been working on. This one is called Tunguska. I want to start with my hex map template, and these can be downloaded from the wiki. These are 30 squares by 35, making for a nice big map, and if you use your Microsoft Office editor for pictures you can pare off the white space so that they can be overlapped to make even bigger maps. Beware of printing them, however, because the hexes are almost an inch in diameter, so the hex map will be multiple sheets if printed. Here's a png of the hex map (the boxes on the file are without borders, so the boxes won't appear:

Even though I darkened the hexes quite a lot, they're still dim - I prefer the hex lines to be quite soft, because in fact this makes the colors of the map seem brighter and the overall effect more aesthetically pleasing. I feel its important that things like this look good, as we're naturally drawn, and thus fascinated, to things that are easy to stare at.

For my own use, I prefer the hexes be colored pink to start, as pink is very definitely a color that doesn't appear anywhere on the map when I'm done ... thus, I can easily see what I haven't changed or fixed.

The first thing I do with a new map is first include a two-hex overlap for areas that have been previously upgraded. Thus, in this map of Tunguska, the previous done parts are the lines at the top (north) and of course west (Lower Yenisey):

Here is some sincere advice: overlap your maps. Don't just draw them so they synch up along the edges; overlapping them will help with continuity from map to map, and will better the experience of being able to look at only one map at a time, and not needed to pull out two or four sheets when the party happens to be at the corner of the map you've drawn. Overlap them! Well, it's not much, but that hex map should be useful to some of you. More tomorrow.

Earth Hex Plotting

This finishes the reformat, so that the color scheme and hex reshape has been completed:

At some future point I'll take another pass at this and insert more descriptive labels and properly layer the elements.  Recently I've just been interested in trying to sort out old work and plot all the maps as they would appear everywhere on the globe.  This is a big task, one that I'm not going to complete anytime soon.

I tend to go at my world in phases, so that for a couple of weeks I will work on just one thing to the exclusion of all else.  The blog won't just be about maps, that just happens to be what I'm doing at the moment.

There is something I wanted to show.  These files are the backbone of my map building system. Here's a shot showing partial Rings 66, 67 & 68:

The reader can compare this to the map above. Note the numbers at the right side of the map; these are the ring numbers. Two rows down form line 65 is line 67 ... and there one can see the numbers from the image above, all of them showing '104.'  On the image, the numbers next to Ring 67 show "(70.48-70.76)" are the latitude numbers. The numbers that read in three columns, "90.45 to 91.33", are the longitude numbers east of Greenwich.

Now, this is important. Any hex with a river will show the LOWEST number. Thus these are all 104, even though the lines read 104-269, 104-265, 204-656 and so on. 269, 265 & 656 are the highest elevations those hexes possess (that I have data for).

This next part is tricky. It will seem to the reader that there's been an error; that there should be a '98' to the left of the string of 104 elevation hexes with the river in it. But here's where the hexes change the game. BECAUSE the world is round, and because the center is a hex, every 60 degrees all around the globe the map must 'bend' to fit. This map of the Lower Yenisey includes that bend.

Note that the left most 104 hex corresponds to the longitued 89.55 to 90.44. That's the 90th Parallel, where the map bends. The bend is shown on the map above by the orange line. That is why, in fact, the '98' elevation hex (longitude 88.66 to 89.54) is UP and to the left - and shows '108' on the map, because it doesn't contain a river so the HIGHEST number is used.

I know that's not very clear, but it all makes perfect sense to me. I've been doing this for awhile. If you want to get it, and it's just not evident, please ask a question and I'll do what I can to get this across to you.

My point is from the linked files above (those that go to my wiki), that the whole world is already plotted. I know what is in every hex, everywhere, and what latitude and longitude anywhere corresponds to what hex. This is what makes the mapping possible, and helps keep everything straight and controlled.

Is this beyond normal D&D mapmaking? Oh yeah. But frankly, I think this would make for a spectacular computer generated environment scheme, if I had the money to make it. Imagine a computer image of every elevation, world-wide, plotted using these tables, then merely 'adjusted' for aesthetics. Google Earth would be helpful for that.

But really, I'm not interested in Google Earth for mapping purposes. Google Earth is pretty and lovely, but it doesn't offer me the control that this template offers, where I can plop in what I want and create the 3D world that is my own.

Lower Yenisey II

A day's work on the Lower Yenisey map:

This is far from anywhere; Biyetia is part of the goblin kingdom of Magloshkagok.  Samoyadia is a gnoll kingdom
far to the north on the Arctic Ocean.  Lungos Nad is an extension of the Vostoch Empire, a vast hobgoblin
collective occupying what we would call Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk and the Tomsk Oblast.  Finally, Nissi An
is an obscure, reclusive Bugbear tribal enclave occupying the Tunguska Plateau.  What a place for a party!

Adding a few labels, finishing the rivers and some of the hex fill.  Still need to redraw the borders (orange lines) in gray, then make sure the different elements are layered correctly (text over water features, water features over border, everything over background, etc.

River, Sea & Hex Work

Just a brief video supporting some of the work I have been doing with the map I posted earlier this afternoon:

Siberian Maps

I have been thinking about starting this blog for awhile, just to keep the usual blog for the regular topics, ideas, opinions and the like, and to have an ongoing blog where I - for no particular reason - highlight the work I'm doing in progress.  I have this stupid idea some world creators might find that useful.  So I'm going to get back to work producing some videos, and just keeping track of what I'm doing week to week, or even day to day.

For instance, on the weekend I was relaxing between stabs at the book on reformatting my old publisher maps into new publisher maps.  Here is an old publisher map of the lower Yenisey river, as it appeared before:

And here it is after I ripped that all to shreds and turned it sixty degrees:

There are a bunch of reasons for the reformat. My old 2004 publisher program, which this was designed on, would not draw a fluid curved line, whereas the new program designed in 2009 does ... but - I did a lot of maps after 2004, and did not decide to finally shift to the new program until 2011. So I've been working on one map area at a time. Also, I wanted to change the color scheme. And make my hexes more exactly with 60 degree angles all around (the old hexes are a little flatter than the new ones are). I also finished this on the weekend, which is the map immediately to the west of the Yenisey map:

This one of Biyetia (modern northern Krasnoyarsk Krai in modern day Russia) (*Oops!  No it's not.  It's the Yamalo-Nenets Okrug; the Khasnoyarsk Krai applies to the above Yenisey map) can be compared with the old map on this post, though admittedly I've adjusted what the map portrays since then and done work east of the Yamal Peninsula since those days (you can see from the image on the link that I hadn't in August of 2009. Still, the reader can compare the old color scheme. I never was happy with that Yenisey color scheme, it was too dark and cluttered looking. The same with the old swamplands in Biyetia (which were green, and are now white with dull yellow-brown spots). Basically those swamps are all muskeg anyhow, so brown seems a better color to define them. At any rate, as I improve the Yenisey map, I'll be sure and post it on this blog.