Further DH5 development

It's been quite a while since I made an RPG related post, and that's allegedly the purpose for which I started this blog.  Sure, sure—interest comes and goes, and blog topics as a percentage of blog posts wax and wane over time, but I do think it's important that I do at least maintain a trickle of RPG and setting related posts from time to time.  I'm very delinquent on what I had expected to do in terms of mapping out a Hill Country area and figuring out how to attach it to Timischburg, but one thing that I am quite sure of is that the Hill Country area will be drawn on a piece of paper turned sideways to "landscape" orientation.  Timischburg will be attached to it somewhere in the northeastern corner, but because Timischburg has a sea to the south and the Hill Country cannot really, I'll rotate Timischburg 90° to the counter-clockwise, I think.

I'm a little unsure exactly how this will work.  I had not really envisioned Timischburg and the Hill Country initially as very close to each other, but as I took Timischburg out of the setting that I was starting to develop for it and added it to DH5, and then decided that those two areas would be the only ones that I spent any intellectual capital on working with, I have to work them together somehow.  The Hill Country is loosely based on the Texas Hill Country geographically (if not necessarily ethnologically) while Timischburg was based on the old Tarush Noptii, which was a kind of Mediterranean version of Transylvania.  I guess that will kind of work, but I pretty much have to throw out any connection to real world geography, or even geography that necessarily makes sense.  The Hill Country will be bizarrely warm for it's location, and Transylvania will be maybe a little cooler than anyone would expect. (EDIT: Whoops!  Got that backwards!  Fake Transylvania will be a bit on the warm, Mediterranean side compared to the real thing, and the Hill Country will have cooler, shorter summers than the blazingly hot 6-month or more long summer of southern Texas.) There are also young, sharp, Alps or Rockies like mountains where I'm not sure why there are any, since the "prototype" real world continent that I'm using has, at best, extremely old, eroded, worn-down rounded mountains in the same area.

Ah, well.  Does any of that really matter?  My conception of DH5 as a kind of "calque" of the United States, at least as far west as the Rockies, with Dark Ages European colonial nations on it isn't really very important anymore, since I've determined not to go crazy trying to detail the whole continent anyway.  Much of the Hill Country map will be a kind of mix of the Texas Hill Country, the Davis Mountains of West Texas, and then "soften" up the climate just a bit by assuming the lower jetstream and generally milder temperatures of the last glacial maximum.  So summers won't be quite so hot or so long, and winters will be cool enough to feature snow regularly, although not heavily or for long, and it will melt away off and on throughout the winter as warm fronts blow through.  If you could imagine Fort Davis and Uvalde Texas somehow placed in the same geographical place as today's Grand Junction Colorado or Farmington New Mexico, that's about what I'm thinking, if that makes any sense at all.

The connective tissue, if you will, between the Hill Country and Timischburg will be what is right now the Knifetop Mountains, the Haunted Forest and the Thursewood.  The Knifetop will actually get a significant expansion, and become somewhat more like the Carpathians, in a big, semi-circular arc that surrounds much of the northern and eastern boundaries of the Hill Country.  In the opposite corner, the area will turn into pretty harsh desert, gradually ending in a boundary as difficult as the mountains and hills around Death Valley.

While yeah, I really do need to get around to drawing a Hill Country draft map and re-drawing Timischburg with the corrected orientation, I'd also like to spend a little bit of time exploring this border region; the Knifetop Mountains, the Haunted Forest and the Thursewood.  I'll do another three posts in (relatively) short order going over each of those three areas in a little more detail.