PDA

View Full Version : DM Help Distances in World-Building



Seto
2014-09-27, 12:23 PM
Hi playground ! (Be warned : I'm kinda talking to myself here. But at least it may help me clear things, and you'll probably be able to help too).

I'm currently drawing maps for the world I'm building, and scale is a big question. I originally designed it to be about as big as Canada, and that looked wonderful : great and epic kingdoms, huge natural spaces... But now excitation has backed down a bit and I'm wondering about realism. If your Kingdom is 1000km*800km and you're at the age of chivalry, you better be damn efficient if you want to rule it. But ok, my world is moderate-to-high-magic (D&D3.5) and I'm guessing that rulers have access to teleportation. Still...
Thing is, I think my world is either too big or doesn't have nearly enough elements. (A big swamp is nice, 600km*100km is maybe TOO big). Anyway, it's currently too big for the elements it has. So I can reduce its size or add more elements. I'm reluctant to reduce the size, partly because my big original idea (although it's probably been done) is that this world's hours of the day are dependent on space, not time. That is, in a given place it's always 10 AM, if you go far enough west you'll eventually get to 11AM, or go east if you want it to be 9AM, etc. And I'm not really comfortable with reducing scale so that you'd only need, like, 50km to go an hour later. I feel it's better, more realistic and exciting, as it is (200 km). On the other hand, having such big spaces seems unrealistic or sloppy too ; but I'm kind of scared that adding too much states or natural spaces would make the world too big, and my players would be lost in it. ("if you want to go from the capital to the rival kingdom's capital, just go through the marshes, then a big forest, then another big town, then cross the lake, then the paved road for a week"... you get the drift).

What would you do ? What sort of scales do you use ?

DM Nate
2014-09-27, 01:39 PM
In my case (http://www.darkhaunt.net), my characters are spending their entire campaign inside a single city. They won't venture more than a few miles in any given direction. But my campaign is, obviously, not meant to feel as "epic" or "grandiose" as you are trying to make yours.

hymer
2014-09-27, 02:06 PM
I use smaller scales. I like to keep the magic in running a country down. This means (to my mind) that large countries are very hard to make, and if you do manage it, they will be prone to civil wars. You will need troops in far flung places, because no single army can protect/guard/enlarge/assert land borders that long. These armies, or their commanders, will have a tendency to withdraw their support, declare their area independent, or lead their army in a bid for the throne.

I once had a campaign with a vast unexplored area, running it as a sandbox. I put things into the map gradually, in response to where the players wanted to go and what they wanted to do these places. In the end, the players rarely went more than three days' journey in any direction, save to go to civilized areas. In trying to put interesting things everywhere, I made long travel redundant.

Haldir
2014-09-27, 02:32 PM
In a world such as yours, wouldn't the places that are permanently night be devoid of any vegetation? There's a large part of land that is probably going to be scarcely populated and perhaps scarcely understood.

I like to play games where there are wars going on, so my worlds are usually based on forced marches to important geographies, for instance, the objective in my current game takes place in about a 15-20 km radius of a strategic waterway. As for the distances of the world, I use a planet a little larger than our own, I'd wager, though I would scarcely say I've calculated it.

PersonMan
2014-09-27, 03:04 PM
It is entirely possible to rule a massive amount of land with large, low-population regions.

You just have to accept that the vast majority of it will, day-to-day, be more or less independent. Yes, you're the king/emperor/whatever, and you can order them to do things, but for the most part you just let your nobles do their thing and rule in the capitol. As long as it's beneficial for them to stay loyal to you, they will, and being far away won't necessarily make them suddenly decide to be independent. Economic or potential military benefits are plenty of motivation - the Province of Southwood may not be a good target for the expansionist Southern Empire, but the ally-less Kingdom of Southwood is ripe for the taking.

JusticeZero
2014-09-27, 06:32 PM
I actually have a distance question along those lines.. If there are no nobles to defer to - since people don't distribute their fealty that way there, and if you give someone land to watch over, they just declare themselves to be the new king of that area with a loose alliance with you that you can't count on anything from - how big of an area does a king generally hold between them and their troops?

Recaiden
2014-09-27, 07:04 PM
It really depends on what you want the players to be doing. If you want them to travel a lot and run into interesting things along the way, make it big.
If you want them to go back and forth and have a tightly connected world, make it smaller.

I ran a campaign that covered the length and breadth of a continent, and at the beginning every pass and road was another step of the adventure. The power level increased rather quickly, so later on the PCs would go 'we teleport back to the capital' and that was fine too. The focus had changed around by then.

Beleriphon
2014-09-27, 07:09 PM
Hi playground ! (Be warned : I'm kinda talking to myself here. But at least it may help me clear things, and you'll probably be able to help too).

I'm currently drawing maps for the world I'm building, and scale is a big question. I originally designed it to be about as big as Canada,

Full stop, hold up. I think people seriously minunderstand how massive Canada is. It takes four days to travel one end of the country to the other on a train, a train that doesn't stop once along the route. If you take the "Scenic" version its a two week trip. Flying from Toronto to Vancouver takes four hours, the same as going from Toronto to the Dominican Republic.

The land mass of Canada is 9,984,670 km2. That's kind of hard number to rationalized, in comparison a large country in Europe (other than Russia) is Ukraine at 603,628 km2. Let that sink in for a second. Just as point of comparison, all of Europe is 10,180,000 km2. Canada is 98% of the size of ALL of Europe.

DM Nate
2014-09-27, 09:50 PM
I think he was acknowledging that Canada was big. He went into how the scale of it could be a problem.

Seto
2014-09-28, 04:57 AM
In a world such as yours, wouldn't the places that are permanently night be devoid of any vegetation? There's a large part of land that is probably going to be scarcely populated and perhaps scarcely understood.

Absolutely. Actually, the human realms expand from 3PM to 7PM approximately (which is still quite big). Far far East, the Origin Island (sounds like Pokémon) is the last dark hour of the night whispering with nascent life ; far far West, the Cursed Lands are devoid of vegetation, warmth and light, and their huge emptiness constantly changes hands in the eternal struggle between the Undead Lords. Neither has been much explored, much less mapped, by humans. In this world, the cosmology (just the Prime cosmology, I also slightly refluffed the Planes but nothing big) goes together with the geography : from the beginning of the day to the end of it (from east to west), life grows, flourishes, attains its peak, gets more complex, then withers and dies.


I think he was acknowledging that Canada was big. He went into how the scale of it could be a problem.

Yeah, that's the thing. I wanted a world-continent, something one would take weeks to travel with horses. That even sounded reasonable : going from the Origin Island alone is supposed to be an epic journey (not literally Epic, though), going from the Origin Island to the Cursed Lands in a few days would just be silly. Plus, there are lands (ie., the Desolate Lands in eternal sunset) that are precisely meant to be huge wastelands with some forest of bushes here and there and some Gargantuan Vermins roaming the place, and I imagined travel there as something long and tiring.
My problem is more with actual populated regions. Which is mostly the humans, because from 10h to 14h there's a gigantic forest with elf settlements of varying importance ; there are also plenty of mountains for the dwarves, a desert for the Orcs (which are going to be mostly Desert Orcs in this world), and everywhere for the daring Halflings and the social Gnomes. I'm afraid that too big is too big. I could multiply the existing Kingdoms by 2 or 3, but the political battles would become a lot more complicated and maybe drown the players. Or maybe not, maybe they'll handle it. I don't know.

Piedmon_Sama
2014-09-28, 10:29 AM
What level are you beginning the game at? Because for low-level characters, I don't think high-level macroscale politics are going to matter. Or what's going on 1200 miles away. Basically in my experience, your first concern should be 1) where are the PCs starting out? (if it's a village, what services are available there?); 2) what are the most interesting encounters/adventure hooks that could be within a 60-mile radius (e.g about a three-day journey) of that starting point? That's going to be what matters to your players, whatever's right in front of them. It's fine to have an idea of what's going on, macroscale-wise, in your campaign setting. But from my experience, trying to tell your players what's going on in the Dwarf Hills 600 miles west like they should care is something of a vain effort.

bulbaquil
2014-09-28, 10:39 AM
What PersonMan said, basically.

This is honestly more or less how feudalism works - the king doesn't rule the entirety of the kingdom directly; he delegates it unto lesser landed nobility (barons, counts, and the like) and tries to maintain loyalty from them. There are very few national/kingdom-wide laws, and what such laws there are are seldom going to impact the peasantry much; in fact, unless they live in or around the capital (which is usually the monarch's personal barony) or the kingdom is at war with another kingdom, most peasants probably think of the king only in very abstract terms. The local baron/count/whatever is considerably more important - he's the one collecting taxes, levying militias, enforcing laws, and the like.

Now, the larger your kingdom is, the harder it will be to defend... but if much of your kingdom is wilderness...

Ettina
2014-09-28, 11:47 AM
How I would go about calculating this thing out, if I wanted to be super-accurate, would be to calculate cost & time to get a message from the furthest parts of the kingdom to the capital, and see how that compares with real-life empires.

Beleriphon
2014-09-28, 03:35 PM
Yeah, that's the thing. I wanted a world-continent, something one would take weeks to travel with horses. That even sounded reasonable : going from the Origin Island alone is supposed to be an epic journey (not literally Epic, though), going from the Origin Island to the Cursed Lands in a few days would just be silly. Plus, there are lands (ie., the Desolate Lands in eternal sunset) that are precisely meant to be huge wastelands with some forest of bushes here and there and some Gargantuan Vermins roaming the place, and I imagined travel there as something long and tiring.

Which is cool, but remember travelling by horse for weeks is roughly the same speed as walking, its just you can carry way more stuff at the same pace. Also the major thing to remember with stuff like swamps isn't that they're necessarily huge in terms of square kilometres but at they force people to go around them. Even a swamp only covered an area of say 10x10 kilometres that's still 100 km2, and it means that you're going 20kms out of your way adding around a half a day onto any given trip. Going through isn't practical for carts and baggage trains. Also, keep in mind a swamp the size of Lake Superior isn't unreasonable, just look at the Florida Everglades.


My problem is more with actual populated regions. Which is mostly the humans, because from 10h to 14h there's a gigantic forest with elf settlements of varying importance ; there are also plenty of mountains for the dwarves, a desert for the Orcs (which are going to be mostly Desert Orcs in this world), and everywhere for the daring Halflings and the social Gnomes. I'm afraid that too big is too big. I could multiply the existing Kingdoms by 2 or 3, but the political battles would become a lot more complicated and maybe drown the players. Or maybe not, maybe they'll handle it. I don't know.

Okay, so what you need to do is figure out how face a character can travel in one hour, figure out how long you want each timezone to last and just mutliply it out. Keep in mind that if you wanted to travel by foot, or say wagon, the untamed wilderness of the Oregon Trail could take four to five months to travel, and that was only half way across the contient. If you want something bigger its 1) uncontrollable at a practical level at least via a central authority and 2) its going to take close to a year to hike straight across something the size of North America without roads.

The average person moves around four miles per hour. So a 100 mile trip on foot is going to take at least twenty-five hours, or three days assuming either hours of actual travel each day. That's assuming clear relatively flat terrain. Even going a distance from Montreal to Toronto is 313 miles (its about a five to six hour drive), so you're looking at probably ten days, a week if you really push hard every day of travel. Even with horses you'd be looking at the same time frames, you can just carry more stuff.

I hope that was at least helpful.

TheThan
2014-09-28, 04:11 PM
So the Oregon trail is a 2,200 miles long and it took what… three months to travel via foot or wagon. That should give you an idea of how long takes to cross vast expanses of land.

you might want to keep that in mind when world building.

Seto
2014-09-30, 12:51 AM
I hope that was at least helpful.

It was. Thanks, and thank you all for your interesting answers !

Coidzor
2014-09-30, 01:43 AM
I've got one setting which I need to get back on where I'm still shaking out the actual relative sizes, but I started by taking the size of the areas I was making analogs to and plopping them down as placeholders. So my Holy Roman Empire/Germany-equivalent is about the size of Germany+Austria. My Mongolia equivalent is about the size of the Central+East Asian steppe. My Greco-Roman area is about the size of Greece+Italy, though I'm considering adding in landmass equivalent to the Iberian peninsula too.

I've got one island nation which has gone from the size of Great Britain+Eire to the size of the subcontinent of India to an island about the size of Great Britain with an archipelago of lesser isles that is roughly the size of India.

So, as a random stab I'd say the entire thing is roughly the size of Canada, though a fair bit of it is the shallow sea inbetween the main landmass and islands.

And this is all set in an endless ocean that has the actual distance between any given two landmasses shift and change from time to time due to wibbly wobbly metaphysics.

I generally try not to have anything too much larger than Pangea though.