A new campaign?

I am currently thinking about starting a new narrative-style campaign, inspired by the famous Hyboria campaign. I am not sure about how I will run it though. Doing it old-school style, by having players giving orders for all units every so many weeks is doomed to fail in my opinion. So, I will probably do something where players can add to the story using story-game mechanics. Players can add to the developing story, without being linked to any country or side in particular. We'll see ...

But anyway, the first thing to do is to generate a map. I played around with some old maps I had lying around from an old boardgame (I did this before...), and assembled a large map.

Luckily, the scans of these maps are available on boardgamegeek, so I downloaded them and assembled them all in photoshop, and cleaned them up a bit.

Next, I imagined different countries and added some colored layers.

I even came up with a Casus Belli already! The uninhabited islands in the middle of the map contain a newly discovered valuable resource. So the various countries will start to scramble for them.

Now for the period. The obvious choice would be doing it in a Hyboria/Fantasy style, but I'm more thinking of doing it late 19th century / pre WW1, so I can use my glossy toy soldiers.