Marshes and bayous

In part because of Red Dead Online, which I've been playing a lot of the last two months or so (I'm now up to level 95 or 96, and I have maxed out all roles except for the Bounty Hunter, but I'm at level 15 there, so I'll finish that soon too.) I've thought that some bayou and or marshes would be a good addition to the Hill Country. It's certainly a feature of the Texan landscape that I'm kinda sorta borrowing, and wetlands are certainly common in the Old World too. Lord of the Rings had the Dead Marshes and the Midgewater Marshes both, for instance.  Where would I put them? I think the obvious place is that biggish blank spot between the southern edge of the Sabertooth Range and Lake Byewick, south of the Chokewater River, although another good pace would be on the other side of Lake Byewick, west of the Copper Hills and where the south fork of the Chokewater River kind of ends. I like the first option because it puts the orc/goblin settlement next to the swamps, which I think is appropriate, but I like the second option because it makes more geographic sense, and it allows for savage, voodoo, Nightfolk like skraelings to linger in the marshes.

I'll decide which of the two I prefer, and probably actually redraw the map in a hex map application, like I did in the past for Timischburg, at 30x50. (I need to redraw Timischburg, since it's been flipped on it's side and now needs to be a "profile" rather than "landscape" map, which will require some rejiggering of locations as well. But that's not urgent, since I'm obviously focusing more on the Hill Country than Timischburg as the "star area" of the setting right now.)  And, of course, maybe I'll opt for different marshes in both areas.

As an aside, as you can see from that map, if you map it a new window so you can get it full size, there is plenty of marsh or swamp territory in Timischburg. I think the Hill Country needs it too, even if it treads the same territory, because I'm much less likely to use stuff in Timischburg, honestly. I've really kind of migrated my interest more to the Hill Country as a setting, and Timischburg is very definitely "the alternate" setting, not the main setting. The Hill Country needs to be able to do it all on its own without reference to Timischburg, or Normaund, or Trondmark, or Carlovingia or Terassa, or any of the other nations that are just there to be used as points of reference, and their geography and history is never meant to really be explored or detailed. Although Timischburg, at least, did get some geographical and historical detail, a bit, and if anything ever needs to leave the Hill Country, then Timischburg is where I expect it to go.

I think I said that that map was 1 hex = 5 miles, but that may be excessive, and that's probably about right; that makes it 250 miles wide by 150 miles tall, or 37,500 square miles. That's smack dab in between the sizes of Indiana and Kentucky; a bit bigger than Scotland, but somewhat smaller than England, for point of reference. Plenty of room for plenty of adventure. In fact, maybe even a wee bit too big... but I'll opt for leaving myself options to fill in more stuff later if desired. And if not, some empty space of wilderness to travel through is hardly something to be eschewed.

Anyway, speaking of adding new things, here's some Red Dead images of their marshes for point of reference and inspiration as I consider where to put whatever marshes I end up adding in to the map I'm working on.