Unfortunately, I started working without looking at my older TIMISCHBURG map. Now, to be fair, I need to redraw that reoriented to 90°, but I hadn't actually thought about making any changes. I may have to either make one minor one, or otherwise do a bit of shuffling. In my memory of the old Timischburg map the top edge (which is now the western left edge with the new orientation) had two mountain ranges with the Haunted Forest in the middle. I couldn't for the life of me remember what the other mountain range was, but I was sure it was there. I could remember the Knifetop Mountains. In reality, it was the Knifetop Mountains in the center surrounded by two different forests on either side; the Haunted Forest and the Thursewood. So, of course, I drew the right (eastward) edge of the Hill Country, which abuts Timischburg, wrong. I can obviously still change it, but I kinda like the idea of two vanguards of mountain ranges with a big forest in the middle. Of course, by shifting Timischburg just a bit to the north and giving the southern mountain range a new name, I can solve all of this, but I'm not yet sure what my preferred solution will be. In any case, the Haunted Forest is already detailed to a minor degree and doesn't need any more work at least in the short term. The Knifetop mountains are to the north of it (and the Thursewood further north from that; just off map of my newly drawn Hill Country map) and the southern mountain range will be the Sabtertooth Range.
At the far western edge of the map is the Rudmont Escarpment, a very long and very steep fault line where the elevation changes by 1,000 to 2,000 feet over the course of only about a quarter mile or so; sometimes less. At it's most extreme, this is a gigantic wall of rock, but at other places, it's a little bit more gentle. Very few passes (gulleys with streams, mostly, with difficult roads hacked into them) pierce this escarpment, but some travel does take place between the lowlands of the Hill Country and the Uplands beyond where Baal Hamazi and Kurushat are located. The passes themselves are in the hands of one of those two nations, but guards and small garrisons are placed at the bottom of the passes as well to keep potentially hostile armies from invading from the Plateau of Leng beyond. Realistically, the deterrence factor of these small garrisons is slight, and their mission is more to warn of an encroaching army rather than try to fight it off, but there is some support given to these soldiers, and the Hillmen are cognizant of the potential threat of greedy kemlings or jann thinking that the Hill Country would be nice to be added back to their countries territory once again.
As the name suggests, the escarpment is made of reddish sandstone, and as one moves, in general, from east to west, it gradually gets drier. The basin right in front of the escarpment, making up about a third of the map, is mostly southwestern style desert, with dry grasses, sagebrush, creosote, dagger yuccas, prickly pear cactus, mesquite trees, pinyon pines and junipers making up most of the vegetation. The Hillmen who live here tend to be stock breeders, with herds of small shaggy horses, longhorn cattle, and some woolly sheep. There are also semi-domesticated bison that wander in managed herds in this area, as well as pronghorn antelope, which are more hunted rather than herded in any fashion whatsoever.
But this is the southern part of the basin; the north is filled with a vast freshwater sea called the Darkling Sea, which resembles the Caspian Sea in many respects. To the north of this sea is the Wolfwood, which has small settlements of loggers and homesteaders here and there. They also ship lumber to the ports mentioned below. Into the Darkling Sea flows the Chatterwash River from the Knifetop mountains, although it splits at Waychester into the North Fork and the South Fork and they enter the sea at a considerable distance from each other. Omsbury is a town at the mouth of the North Fork and Milcastle is at the south. Both are vassals to Waychester, and both also trade with Cayminster on the western edge of the sea, although Cayminster is technically politically independent. Waychester is one of the dominant city-states in the region. Most of the northern half of the map is loosely under their protection if not outright sovereignty, and many of the smaller communities would falter economically if not in more dramatic fashion, without the support of the self-styled Grand Duke of Waychester—who would like nothing better than to be called King of Waychester.
Upwater is the other one, which is on the Chokewater River, which also flows east to west out of the more southerly mountains. While the Chatterwash flows through rolling karst kills covered with thick brush, yaupon and live oak and willows, scattered in an open savanna like environment, the Chokewater flows through more desolate country, and trees are more scarce except in the galleries along the river valley itself. Open tallgrass prairie called the Golden Wold makes up the large area in the Bight of the Chokewater, although more broadly speaking, the same type of territory is common all along the length of the river. The Chokewater does not reach the Darkling Sea, but instead peters out in the desert eventually, become first rather small and sluggish, before turning into smallish marshes and eventually just stopping altogether almost at the foot of the southern reaches of the Rudmont Escarpment. While Waychester has better access to lumber from the Wolfwood, Upwater's efforts tend to focus on mining of copper, iron, tin, coal and smaller veins even of gold and silver in the rocky, hilly country south of the open prairie (and within it, at times) and especially at the end of the river. Small communities along the river include Pickdown, nestled at the edge of the Haunted Forest and the Sabertooth Range, Getfield partly up the river towards Upwater, and Rackgrove at the end where large groves of willow trees manage to suck up the last water of the river before it ends. Smaller villages and hamlets are to be found all throughout the southern hills near Lake Byewick, but other than that, ranches, homesteads and smaller family-owned settlements make up most of what can be found.
Upwater and Waychester are culturally nearly identical, and the common people of each tend to like the company of each other, but the leaders of the two communities see each other as rivals for economic and political power, and that has slowly started to sour relationships between the two northern and southern city-states and their claimed areas of influence.
Because much of the territory is still unsettled frontierland, there are other threats besides the ambitions of the two city-states to contend with. Lingering small bands of skraelings can be found, especially in the forests and ranging, from time to time, beyond them. Drylander hunters, not unlike a combination of the Huns, the Mongols and the Comanche, wander the vast basin between the mountain ranges to the east and the Escarpment to the west, and while they are not obligatorily hostile to the Hillmen, they quite often are. Small communities of kemlings and jann are left over from the times in which they ruled the area in ages past, and most of them are not happy about new interlopers from the east, as they see the Hillmen. For the most part, these camps, settlements and areas of influence of these non-Hillmen entities will still need to be marked on the map; I haven't really done that yet.
Anyway, as I continue to develop this, probably my first step will be to make this map a bit more presentable and post a version of it, which can then be gradually filled in and filled out. Keep in mind that I'm not trying to make this completely developed; rather, the Hill Country is to be a territory not unlike 4e's Nentir Vale in some respects; except with more of an "American frontier in the Middle Ages" feel to it, if that makes any sense at all. So, the second step will be to start filling in details, which will in turn drive adding more details to the map. And so it goes. Topics to be the subject of future posts include, then:
- Knifetop Mountains
- Sabertooth Range
- The Darkling Sea
- The Wolfwood
- The Chatterwash River
- Waychester
- Milcastle
- Omsbury
- Cayminster
- The Rudmont Escarpment
- Rackgrove
- Upwater
- Getfield
- Pickdown
- The Golden Wold
- Lake Byewick
- Drylanders
- Kemlings of the Hill Country
- Jann of the Hill Country
- Skraelings of the Hill Country
- Other threats of the Hill Country
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