All's Quiet on the Hobby Blog Front

I am, in fact, still alive.

I'm still in the zone of playing more than running, although some friends of mine have persuaded me to run a role-playing heavy D&D 4e game.  Since they apparently want to tackle geopolitics in this game, it will give me the perfect opportunity to run a hexcrawl sandbox.  I'm still developing things for it, but I've started a map:

Click to enlarge.

It's obviously a work in progress — I don't have all the features sketched out yet, and I only have a few cities, but it's 1,000,000 square miles of territory.  I'll likely start the PCs at the inn in hex 04.04.

As for the geopolitics side, I have five kingdoms and one city in the borderlands.  Two of the kingdoms are demihuman kingdoms and the other three kingdoms are kingdoms of men.  The elf kingdom of the Lanirilis Protectorate is a magocracy ruled by the Istyatár or Istyatári ("philosopher-king/queen" in Tolkien Elvish), and the dwarf kingdom of the Farhelfik Commonwealth (totally a reference to the English Commonwealth, by the way) is a theocracy ruled by the Bofmorndin ("great peak" in D&D Dwarven, a title for the priest-king of the dwarves).  As for the three human kingdoms, they're predominantly based off historical kingdoms.  Ardhiyawata is based on several of the old African empires — Ghana, Mali, and Zimbabwe — with the monarch title "Mwene" being a derivative of old Zimbabwean title for "prince."  Hörundsflúr remixes Camelot, the Carolingian Empire, and the Iceni tribe; it calls its monarch a king or queen.  The Gallic Region of Khem emulates the brief Napoleonic rule of Egypt with a heavy dose of the Ottoman Empire and a burgeoning Arab Revolt no doubt in the works; Khem calls its monarch the Empress-Regent (or Emperor-Regent), as the true "Emperor" of Gallia resides in a distant land.

The lone city (so far) I've developed for the borderlands is a place called Khajanarata, the City of 10,000 Pleasures.  A major trading center, it has the feel of medieval and early modern India, and the Persian Empire, although the initial design seed was totally the Swar from Wraith: The Oblivion.  Sprawling, decadent, sword-and-sorcery cities such as Lankhmar, Xuchotl, Mos Eisley, and their ilk also serve as inspirations.  The inhabitants call their leader a Rajpandit ("priest-king").

Interested parties can see the six monarchs in the document, The Rulers of the Five Great Kingdoms of Khemenelda.