I have been working hard on a setting of my home state in another universe. It's been way too long since I've run a game and I'm getting itchy. So far, this has been a good test of things I've learned and things I'm learning, and its given me an opportunity to re-write a lot of the market code in particular. That's helped clean things up and hopefully erased some hidden errors.
I've divided up the region into nine "regions." Not kingdoms, exactly. But distinct culturally (in the real world) and thus a good proxy for translation into a fantasy version. Some populations get swapped over to halfling, elven, orc, dwarf, etc.
The main challenge now is to apply these principles to the regions. There are some differences in tech level here, ranging from a T-8 chiefdom all the way up to T-12. The danger is that I will not be clever enough to avoid "sameness" in the relatively small areas in question (around twenty 20mile hexes). Of course, sameness is not necessarily a bad thing - these regions will share trade routes as well as language - but we want the variety to mean something. Otherwise, there is no reason for them to be separate autonomous regions.
My familiarity with the real-world terrain is also a crutch. Because the farmland is so fertile, nearly every square inch of land that can be farmed is being farmed, a development only in the last 100 or so years. Reconstructing the "original" terrain for a much less populous society has been an interesting challenge.
I will no doubt continue to refine the descriptions of and relationships between the regions, and my next task will be to seed the commodity list with enough stuff to satisfy a party starting out. A work like this is never done, but I want to get it into a playable state. I also have 1mile maps ready for many of the hexes, particularly in the northern part of the state.
