Basse-Georges - political & historical

[jbgibson]

My May 2011 "Map a Nation" entry, the extended edition:


As time was running out on the May '11 contest I was fiddling with a couple of historic views to add as insets. I wound up doing a more careful job later - this version. The WIP contest thread gives all the details. Construction in brief - I took outline and city locations from a much smaller scale map of the region, then did a lot of tracing and drawing in Serif PhotoPlus. I was shooting for a web-illustration style, crisp and fairly low-filesize. I sometimes stick totally with pixel fonts and flat colors to make publication as a Gif possible - here, some aliasing was called for to get things looking right.

In the shared geofiction world of Scandia, I run a confederation of twenty-five distinct sovereign republics (and kingdoms, and despotisms... not exactly a matched set!) Basse-Georges is one such - at 10 million population one of the more populous. The historic insets depict the neighborhood about 75 and 150 years "ago". The Haromszeki republics get along okay these days (a rough Earth-today equivalent), but did not always - Basse-Georges' Duchies and Counties have changed hand hands about as often as territory in Earth's Germany or Italy before unification. As you can see, contiguous territories are far from universal. For more information on the nation behind the map, Basse-Georges has its own wiki article, as does the overall Haromszeki Confederation. Wikis make a great way to organize a cooperative geofiction project.

I considered doing a battle map of one of the innumerable past Haromszeki conflicts, instead of my offbeat Bluemarble Battle, I just knew it'd take me a hundred hours or more to do it well enough to consider it properly done.... I'm not nearly as fast as some of you folks.