Reading Expert and got a pile of inspiration

Last night I decided to sit and read the D&D Expert rules for wilderness travel.  Mostly just to get it all in my head prior to the game on friday.  I have to admit I've way over prepped for this game.  I doubt they will even get to the island on Friday night.  In reading the rules I started thinking about games (of course), and settings.  There is so much golden material in those 2 sets of books.

I read thru the creating a campaign section, the typical start small (village) and a small area of land to explore.  It made me quickly realize that with those random tables in the book (combined with the wonderful dungeon building stuff in the 1e DMG) there is nothing you can't do as a DM.  I remember seeing a post by my buddy Thaumiel where he was prepping a hexcrawl, and he had basically just coloured a hexmap with pencil crayons.  I guess he had a few triggered hexes, dungeons etc.  But really this idea of a western marches (marshes?) campaign really appeals to me.

I know I'm going all A.D.D. Gamer here.  But the idea of setting up a small barony, a village, hand writing a few dungeons and doing a wilderness crawl really appeals to me.  Even the looseness of Isle Of Dread still feels a wee bit restricting on my brain (because I want to make sure I do my best when i run it.... hope that makes sense).

So I'm running the isle, because I've been saying that for a LONG time.  But you know what, I think I'm going to work on a small barony as well.  Maybe a new settlement, in a land that hasn't been well explored (sure we can kotb it I suppose).

I dunno.... All i'm saying is if you are looking for inspiration, pick up the basic/expert books and read em.

I also find this and want to play around with it: https://campaignwiki.org/text-mapper/smale