Matters of scale [D&D style fantasy]

[SiuiS]

Hi there!


When I was ten, and had a real DM and not just me and some mates with books and a few scrapes together dice with no actual understanding, one of the most fun things that happened was, he took a kindergarten notepad and drew vertical lines, spaces an inch apart – and made a world map, 3 feet by 4 feet, rolled up into a scroll. Tomorrow I'm going to staples, and buying a jumbo pad, and doing that self-same thing.

But... How big should things be?

I'm American. I'm a stereotypical American; my geography skill is so poor other Americans make fun of me. I do not grok scale. They say that to an American a hundred years is a long time, and to a Brit, a hundred miles is a long ways. I believe that to be true, and also detrimental! I want to figure out realistic scale. How far across are towns? How far apart? How do people spread?
I could just pinch the data from BECMI or ACKS, but that's a crutch. This is something I want to understand enough to mess with. I recently learned that during the crusades, the Christian army was able to march about six miles a day – six miles! Couple that with every DM ever either not using a map, or also having no sense of scale (we had one who gave us a fort a full ten miles on a side...) and... Well I've no scale. It makes me sad.

Help me playground! How can I figure out where to even start?

[AMFV]

Hi there!


When I was ten, and had a real DM and not just me and some mates with books and a few scrapes together dice with no actual understanding, one of the most fun things that happened was, he took a kindergarten notepad and drew vertical lines, spaces an inch apart – and made a world map, 3 feet by 4 feet, rolled up into a scroll. Tomorrow I'm going to staples, and buying a jumbo pad, and doing that self-same thing.

But... How big should things be?

I'm American. I'm a stereotypical American; my geography skill is so poor other Americans make fun of me. I do not grok scale. They say that to an American a hundred years is a long time, and to a Brit, a hundred miles is a long ways. I believe that to be true, and also detrimental! I want to figure out realistic scale. How far across are towns? How far apart? How do people spread?
I could just pinch the data from BECMI or ACKS, but that's a crutch. This is something I want to understand enough to mess with. I recently learned that during the crusades, the Christian army was able to march about six miles a day – six miles! Couple that with every DM ever either not using a map, or also having no sense of scale (we had one who gave us a fort a full ten miles on a side...) and... Well I've no scale. It makes me sad.

Help me playground! How can I figure out where to even start?

Six miles a day sounds awfully awfully slow. A forced march pace is usually around 20+ miles a day. I've been on them, and 20-some-odd miles is not unusual, if a bit grueling.

[SiuiS]

Six miles a day sounds awfully awfully slow. A forced march pace is usually around 20+ miles a day. I've been on them, and 20-some-odd miles is not unusual, if a bit grueling.

You're not packing an army, though. :)

Crusaders could only carry enough water for one day of travel before the logistics grew too big; it's the rocket fuel problem, the square cube law. Bringing yourself, your sword, shield and maile, food, a squire or whatever to keep you dressed and armored, a horse, food for the horse, a cart, camp followers, a tent, etc; packing it all up every morning, keeping regimented meals, marching, stopping at appropriate times, for meals and chatting a course through compass navigation and dead reckoning, stopping before dark, setting up camp, drilling, having a good meal, bunking down; all In the middle east desert, making sure to get to an oasis every night so you have the needed water to survive; much more logistically monstrous.

If you're a dude with a backpack, a walking stick, and rations who is a day's foot travel from automated industry, you're not going to have the same sense of things.
E: modern military training admittedly not falling into 'dude with backpack and walking stick'.

I could probably build from the average pace? A fully armed troop will move slower than a pilgrim, will move slower than a cart. Cities can be days apart and peppered with villages in between, especially once roads are built. Forts in wild lands will be closer together because of the need of immediate emergency aid if attacked. I should try to find a listing of keeps across appropriate terrain in he right eras...

[AMFV]

You're not packing an army, though. :)

Crusaders could only carry enough water for one day of travel before the logistics grew too big; it's the rocket fuel problem, the square cube law. Bringing yourself, your sword, shield and maile, food, a squire or whatever to keep you dressed and armored, a horse, food for the horse, a cart, camp followers, a tent, etc; packing it all up every morning, keeping regimented meals, marching, stopping at appropriate times, for meals and chatting a course through compass navigation and dead reckoning, stopping before dark, setting up camp, drilling, having a good meal, bunking down; all In the middle east desert, making sure to get to an oasis every night so you have the needed water to survive; much more logistically monstrous.

If you're a dude with a backpack, a walking stick, and rations who is a day's foot travel from automated industry, you're not going to have the same sense of things.
E: modern military training admittedly not falling into 'dude with backpack and walking stick'.

I could probably build from the average pace? A fully armed troop will move slower than a pilgrim, will move slower than a cart. Cities can be days apart and peppered with villages in between, especially once roads are built. Forts in wild lands will be closer together because of the need of immediate emergency aid if attacked. I should try to find a listing of keeps across appropriate terrain in he right eras...

I was in the military and was referencing military forced marches. You don't carry the water, that'd be the horse and supply train that carries the water.

[Delta]

I was in the military and was referencing military forced marches. You don't carry the water, that'd be the horse and supply train that carries the water.

You're referencing modern military marches. A medieval army from the times of the crusades was basically a small moving city, 6 miles a day sounds much more realistic to me than 20.

Of course, an armed unit of significant size can cover a lot more ground in short time, that's correct, but that means moving away from your supplies, that's always a risky move and was only attempted in either desperate or very specific circumstances.

[SiuiS]

You'll still run into the problem of needing two more horses to Carry the food and water of the horses you already have.

Pre magic (in which I include modern industry) you get to the point where the weight of the gear to support a unit exceeds logistical ease. That's the sort of rubric I want to work with.

[AMFV]

You're referencing modern military marches. A medieval army from the times of the crusades was basically a small moving city, 6 miles a day sounds much more realistic to me than 20.

Of course, an armed unit of significant size can cover a lot more ground in short time, that's correct, but that means moving away from your supplies, that's always a risky move and was only attempted in either desperate or very specific circumstances.

Six miles is still ungodly slow, even for a supply train though. I would expect them to be able to cover 10 or 12 at the least, although training may have a lot to do with it as well. And that's considering that a modern troop movement can move (marching) 26+ miles in a day.

[Grim Portent]

Small discussion of medieval logistics.

Spoiler

Show

Dark Ages and Middle Ages supply trains were composed of some pretty stupid stuff that slowed them a lot and they only got worse the more high ranking nobility you had with you. In order to keep most armies of the time properly supplied and to keep morale up you needed to bring brewers and the supplies to make alcohol at your destination, plus chefs to prepare food for the soldiers, plus craftsmen to repair armour, weapons, wagons and so on.

Nobles would bring private chefs, grooms, manservants, maids and the other trappings of nobility.

Add in that most soldiers were drafted from the peasantry and what you had was more like a civilian hike rather than a military march.

As a result armies tended to find ways to reduce the amount of baggage they had to bring. Invaded nations were often struck with famine because of the food they had to give to their own nations army and the food pillaged by the invaders to bolster their supplies. Of course the loss of a lot of the farmers to the actual fighting didn't help.

Medieval distances were very short in general. Villages had to be within one or two days travel of another village, either by foot or by cart, to facilitate trading for supplies and to enable governance by a central authority.

Villages and towns would usually be near a river or large still body of water to provide water, once again preferably less than a days travel away.

Things like forts would be placed at strategic points on a border, also often not far from towns and villages in order to get supplies in easily.

I would suggest looking up some old maps of Europe to try and get a sense of scale. Admittedly most older maps are pretty hard to get an accurate distance from, and the units have often changed since they were made, but it's still a useful thing to do. It might also help to look at a map of France, there's still a lot of old villages that date back a long time there.

[Rhynn]

First, one useful reference for numbers.

I'll just cheerfully assume that by "world" you mean "campaign setting," as in "playable area."

Map Size & Scale
1200 x 900 miles would be a fairly large playable area, with a lot of room for diversity.

All of China could fit on a map about 3000 x 2100 miles.

Europe from the North African coast to the Barents Sea and from Morocco to the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf would fit on a map about 3500 x 2800 miles.

I'd say 3200 x 2400 miles would make a good upper limit for an entire setting. It leaves you room to develop into later on: the Unknown World outside the bounds of common knowledge.

On a 4 x 3 foot map, you'd get 25 miles to an inch for the 1200x900 mile map, or 66.666 miles to an inch for 3200x2400. Maybe 2400x1800 miles would make more sense, or else 3600x2700.

Mapping
How to draw maps (coasts, mountains, etc., in order) and a lot of other useful worldbuilding things.

Settlements
In settled areas, there's a village about every 6-12 miles, on average. Clusters of villages are going to be centered around larger (probably fortified) towns, usually on a river (or a lake, in a pinch); say, every 24-30 miles. Large cities will be along rivers and on the coast where the river flows into the sea.

Borderlands and poorly settled areas will be sparser.

Basically, there's going be several villages within a short walk from any settled place, a slightly larger town about a day away, and cities will be further apart. Settlement locations will be determined by geography - access to water. The bigger the settlement, the bigger the river/stream needs to be.

I recently learned that during the crusades, the Christian army was able to march about six miles a day – six miles!

That's mostly because of the conditions. Grueling arid heat, sand, etc., make for slow going for an army - they'd have to stop to rest and move from oasis to oasis (because each man would require 2-3 gallons of water a day, and animals would require much more), and just the act of letting everyone drink would take a long while.

In better circumstances 15-18 miles per day was possible. Apparently, Mongol armies could travel 50 miles a day. (A bit surprising, to me, because in later periods, there's reports of men keeping on marching while horses fell from exhaustion.) The English are reported to have covered 270 miles in 14 days during the Hundred Years' War. Harold's march to meet William at Stamford covered 27 miles per day.

During the lead-up to the Battle of Hattin, the Crusaders covered 6 miles by noon (from Sephoria to a spring), and had another 9 miles to Tiberias, having already marched half the day. They elected to press on, were caught by Saladin's army, and were halted. They camped with no access to water, and by the next morning they were already horribly thirsty. (You can work and walk without water for a while, but protracted fighting without access to water is very bad.)

6 miles per day (this was attested in 1183 by a force led by Sir Guy, the Crusader commander at the Battle of Hattin) is a stand-out because it was so incredibly slow, because of the terrible circumstances.

You're referencing modern military marches. A medieval army from the times of the crusades was basically a small moving city, 6 miles a day sounds much more realistic to me than 20.

As it turns out, nope, 20 miles per day is pretty good. It is fast, but it is not too fast - it was clearly achieved by armies on the move, and forced marches could be faster. If they weren't in a hurry, or needed to not be exhausted by the time they arrived, they'd move slower, 10-15 miles per day.

Simply put, history proves that 6 miles per hour was far below standard, and 25+ miles was achievable, for Medieval/Ancient armies. Any argument to the contrary is nonsense.

[Aedilred]

Six miles sounds slow, but it doesn't really surprise me. As mentioned, the logistics of moving that number of people (and the first and third Crusades at least were large!) are complicated and slow everything down enormously. Either you're hauling vast quantities of food with you - which means oxen, and they're not known for their speed - or you forage as you go along, which slows everything down. Terrain will also take a serious toll, given that the roads are probably not that good.

It is of course possible to move faster, and armies often did, but not in such numbers, not over such distance (hundreds of miles) and not without better infrastructure.

More generally, if you haven't seen this before, it should probably be your first stop in constructing a realistic society.

That doesn't give you such an idea of geography, of course. The key thing to remember is that the default speed in a pre-industrial society for both good and personnel is walking pace, i.e. about 3-4mph (possibly higher in that sort of society since the populace are likely to be fitter on average, but that's speculative and of course it will vary). It is possible to travel faster than that, of course (i.e. on horseback) but horses tire quickly so much of the time you won't push them faster than normal speed. You'll use a horse to go quickly over short distances, or in emergencies (including times of war). If you want to travel long distances quickly, you'll change horses along the route (there will probably be coaching inns set up along the commonly-travelled routes to accommodate this).

The other way to travel is of course by water, assuming you have a handy river to do so. This is generally much more efficient than chugging along badly-maintained roads, although not much quicker, if at all, because you're still most likely being propelled by your own (or your livestock's) energy. If you can travel under sail that would possibly be quicker but would depend on the wind. Still, water is almost always a better way to transport goods than road, and towns and cities along rivers will tend to develop port trades.


In settlement terms, village is a small settlement with a church. However, it's worth bearing in mind that a "village" might well not be a small cluster of houses, and might actually sprawl over a few miles in agrarian communities. If the land is peaceful and not often threatened, it's not a problem for farmers to live well away from their neighbours. If bandits or monsters are roaming the countryside, people will want to gather together for protection and walk to work in the morning.

In England, at least, a town is defined by the presence of a market. This can operate at whatever regularity - a particularly large town might have a market every day, but a small one might have one only once a month, or on certain feast days. Obviously, people have to get their goods to the market, and the town will also need a food and water supply. Taking into account the travel times, it will need a reasonable agrarian population within about ten miles of the town in order to support it. Nonperishables can be shipped from further afield, but the daily bread will have to come from nearby. For these purposes, cities are essentially like large towns, although in the way they function they might be slightly different, and larger cities can afford to ship goods from further away (essentially feeding off a support network of towns as a town feeds off its villages).

Taking all of this together it should be possible to work out roughly how many towns a given land can support, and how the population will be clustered around them. Generally towns will spring up in areas where the land is good and there is easy access, generally along rivers. Natural bottlenecks like valleys, estuaries, fords and (less naturally) bridges are good places for towns, because travellers will have to pass through there and the population will naturally become more dense.

Bear in mind of course that a lot of the land will not be cultivated, and even where it is it might not be good enough to support a town, so a village will be the largest settlement for many miles around.

[Delta]

In better circumstances 15-18 miles per day was possible. Apparently, Mongol armies could travel 50 miles a day. (A bit surprising, to me, because in later periods, there's reports of men keeping on marching while horses fell from exhaustion.) The English are reported to have covered 270 miles in 14 days during the Hundred Years' War. Harold's march to meet William at Stamford covered 27 miles per day.

Thank you for making my point, all of the examples listed fall under the category of very specific, unusual or desperate circumstances. You absolutely cannot compare the Mongols, a nomadic people used to live on horseback, to a european army from the same time period. Their ridiculous mobility compared to everyone else was one of the things that made them such a terribly effective force.

The other examples are all cases where people absolutely had to cover long distances in short times, as I've said, that was absolutely possible, but not without huge risks and it definitely wasn't the average.

I never denied 6 miles a day is pretty slow and I'm sure a lot of armies did do better. But 20 miles a day as an average as way too high, you would not have been able to have a sizable army move that fast and keep it supplied for any significant amount of time.

[Aedilred]

Thank you for making my point, all of the examples listed fall under the category of very specific, unusual or desperate circumstances. You absolutely cannot compare the Mongols, a nomadic people used to live on horseback, to a european army from the same time period. Their ridiculous mobility compared to everyone else was one of the things that made them such a terribly effective force.

The other examples are all cases where people absolutely had to cover long distances in short times, as I've said, that was absolutely possible, but not without huge risks and it definitely wasn't the average.

Absolutely. Looking at the other examples, they are also exceptional - the extreme examples tend to be. The march from Stamford to Hastings was by a relatively small group of elite troops through friendly territory in an emergency; the Agincourt campaign was through hostile territory, but on similar terms, and conducted more out of desperation than anything else.

It's also worth bearing in mind that many Mediaeval armies weren't that large by comparison with modern ones. In the west at least, fifteen thousand men was stretching the limit for a decent field army. Conscripts and cannon fodder might double that figure. Thirty to forty thousand would have included a lot of untrained peasantry and would have been exceptionally large. Even where a country could support more troops than that (a populous kingdom like France, say), actually getting more than that number of people into the field at any one time was very difficult. Even a major battle like Poitiers, between two of the major military powers in Europe at the time, had well under twenty thousand men total in the field. Eastern armies, where the infrastructure was better, were sometimes larger, but that's a different kettle of fish.

So when looking at travel times for armies, an army of a few thousand troops is going to be more representative than a thirty-thousand-man horde; that's the sort of army that might only be raised once a generation or so.

[TheStranger]

Scale is hard. Because our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit. People are really, really bad with scale and spatial relationships. Especially modern people, who don't spend all that much time traveling at the pace that our ancestors traveled for millions of years.

As far as filling out a campaign setting, pretty much any scale you like works, as long as you understand what that scale is. You can have an entire campaign in an area the size of Ireland (for instance). What you probably can't have is vast deserts, steppes full of nomads, and a roman-analogue empire, sharing an area the size of Ireland. If you want all those things, you need a bigger scale. Smaller areas means less variety, but small differences matter more. If your campaign setting is the size of Ireland, you'll spend a lot of time on the towns, hills, forests, etc. that make it up. Larger areas means more variety, but also more large swaths of mostly-homogenous area. If your campaign setting is the size of Europe, you just label a small island "Ireland" and worry about the details if and when they come up.

For most fantasy, however, you're usually looking at some approximation of medieval/renaissance Western Europe, with a handful of nations, some wilderness, and maybe some "just off the map" areas like the western desert, eastern steppes, etc. What I suggest doing is deciding how large you want your campaign setting to be, then draw a rectangle about the same size on a real-world map. That probably gives you some sense of how many nations and what amount of terrain variety you should have.

[Rhynn]

Thank you for making my point

Your point appeared to be that 6 is more realistic than 20. That's obviously nonsense, when armies would regularly move 2-3 times your "more realistic" rate, and would break 20 when they needed to march fast.

So when looking at travel times for armies, an army of a few thousand troops is going to be more representative than a thirty-thousand-man horde; that's the sort of army that might only be raised once a generation or so.

Smaller forces are going to move faster, as a rule, so I'm not sure what way you're arguing here.

I'm not sure what you're basing the characterisation of Harold's force as "small" and "elite" on. It's estimated to have been around 7,000, or between 5,000 and 13,000 men, which - according to you - is medium to large, and almost "stretching the limit" for field armies at the upper end. And elite compared to what? It was composed of housecarls (professional warriors) and the fyrd (local militia) - a typical composition. They are thought to have covered 200 miles in a week to get to Stamford Bridge.

10-15 or 12-18 miles per day are pretty good estimates for average speeds, one consertative and the other generous. It's clear that Medieval/Ancient armies could march as much as 20-25+ miles a day for a week or two at a time. (I'm not sure if that even qualifies as a forced march, if it can be maintained for weeks.)

Organization matters, of course: Roman legions (a paper strength of 5400 men) were expected to make 18 miles (20 Roman miles) per day as an ideal, and push a bit further (~23 miles) if they really had to. If you believe Julius Caesar, he once marched an army 63 miles in two days.

Again, 15-18 is a good estimate for actual performance (much closer to 20 than 6). Legionaries were obviously very disciplined and conditioned, but they also had to hump more gear on their own backs than many Medieval forces probably did.

[SiuiS]

Dark Ages and Middle Ages supply trains were composed of some pretty stupid stuff that slowed them a lot and they only got worse the more high ranking nobility you had with you.

You say big, I say feature!

I would suggest looking up some old maps of Europe to try and get a sense of scale. Admittedly most older maps are pretty hard to get an accurate distance from, and the units have often changed since they were made, but it's still a useful thing to do. It might also help to look at a map of France, there's still a lot of old villages that date back a long time there.

France was my go-to, actually! I just wasn't sure how valid it was. I'll do that.

I'll just cheerfully assume that by "world" you mean "campaign setting," as in "playable area."

Yes, and no. Part of scale is "what is worth bothering with", because I tend to map too large or too small. I think 'known world' would be the best term? What clinched it was watching a dramatic re telling of the life of Confucius, and being sad that I don't have a 'Map of China' anymore.

So, yes, not not much no at all.

Map Size & Scale
1200 x 900 miles would be a fairly large playable area, with a lot of room for diversity.

All of China could fit on a map about 3000 x 2100 miles.

Europe from the North African coast to the Barents Sea and from Morocco to the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf would fit on a map about 3500 x 2800 miles.

I'd say 3200 x 2400 miles would make a good upper limit for an entire setting. It leaves you room to develop into later on: the Unknown World outside the bounds of common knowledge.

On a 4 x 3 foot map, you'd get 25 miles to an inch for the 1200x900 mile map, or 66.666 miles to an inch for 3200x2400. Maybe 2400x1800 miles would make more sense, or else 3600x2700.

This is pretty useful, as my mental numbers sort of don't get it. From me to Los Angeles, six hundred miles, is a handful of hours away.

[quote]
Settlements
In settled areas, there's a village about every 6-12 miles, on average. Clusters of villages are going to be centered around larger (probably fortified) towns, usually on a river (or a lake, in a pinch); say, every 24-30 miles. Large cities will be along rivers and on the coast where the river flows into the sea.

Borderlands and poorly settled areas will be sparser.

Basically, there's going be several villages within a short walk from any settled place, a slightly larger town about a day away, and cities will be further apart. Settlement locations will be determined by geography - access to water. The bigger the settlement, the bigger the river/stream needs to be.
[quote]

Would this hold for other cultures? Middle eastern or classical Greece?

That's mostly because of the conditions. Grueling arid heat, sand, etc., make for slow going for an army - they'd have to stop to rest and move from oasis to oasis (because each man would require 2-3 gallons of water a day, and animals would require much more), and just the act of letting everyone drink would take a long while.

Well I did say crusades, Middle East, and desert

I may have drawn the wrong conclusion, but it was helpful. It jarred me from my modern sensibilities! I'm fine with anachronisms of the sort, as long as they are helpful. "Medieval armies were stupid slow" is acceptable. I'll have to get kiero in here for data on Greek/roman equivalents.

Don't the better, faster armies also have pre-formed roads to travel on?

More generally, if you haven't seen this before, it should probably be your first stop in constructing a realistic society.

I have seen, actually! Still, always good.

In settlement terms, village is a small settlement with a church. However, it's worth bearing in mind that a "village" might well not be a small cluster of houses, and might actually sprawl over a few miles in agrarian communities. If the land is peaceful and not often threatened, it's not a problem for farmers to live well away from their neighbours. If bandits or monsters are roaming the countryside, people will want to gather together for protection and walk to work in the morning.

In England, at least, a town is defined by the presence of a market. This can operate at whatever regularity - a particularly large town might have a market every day, but a small one might have one only once a month, or on certain feast days. Obviously, people have to get their goods to the market, and the town will also need a food and water supply. Taking into account the travel times, it will need a reasonable agrarian population within about ten miles of the town in order to support it. Nonperishables can be shipped from further afield, but the daily bread will have to come from nearby. For these purposes, cities are essentially like large towns, although in the way they function they might be slightly different, and larger cities can afford to ship goods from further away (essentially feeding off a support network of towns as a town feeds off its villages).

Taking all of this together it should be possible to work out roughly how many towns a given land can support, and how the population will be clustered around them. Generally towns will spring up in areas where the land is good and there is easy access, generally along rivers. Natural bottlenecks like valleys, estuaries, fords and (less naturally) bridges are good places for towns, because travellers will have to pass through there and the population will naturally become more dense.

Bear in mind of course that a lot of the land will not be cultivated, and even where it is it might not be good enough to support a town, so a village will be the largest settlement for many miles around.

Neat!




While your point may be valid, stranger, that comic doesn't really help make it except for obliquely. And even then it might just be that I think weird. You highlight my problem though; take Ireland. All those small differences? What makes them matter? At what point does it become relevant to map stuff exactly instead of have an area with encounter maps or town maps or countryside maps?

You're saying the difference between Ireland's counties and all of Europe's countries is moot when they are drawn at the same scale. That's fine. What I want is an idea of which one to choose! Which one provides good framing for town, kingdom, country and warring dynasties all, when drawn on a large (coffee table sized) map? I think Rhynn hit the salient points I needed, for now. But we'll see.

[Aedilred]

I'm not sure what you're basing the characterisation of Harold's force as "small" and "elite" on. It's estimated to have been around 7,000, or between 5,000 and 13,000 men, which - according to you - is medium to large, and almost "stretching the limit" for field armies at the upper end. And elite compared to what? It was composed of housecarls (professional warriors) and the fyrd (local militia) - a typical composition. They are thought to have covered 200 miles in a week to get to Stamford Bridge.

I was thinking of the march to Hastings (the original statement was ambiguous), although the march to Stamford Bridge was indeed probably more impressive. The Hastings journey is hypothesised at least to have been comprised mostly of huscarls, with the fyrd being assembled on arrival.

I think I expressed myself badly, but even 13,000 men including militia is well within the bounds I meant to describe; armies of twenty thousand men were not that uncommon, but the majority of that would be scratch troops with little training. Fifteen thousand professional troops would be exceptional. However an army of under ten thousand men the majority of whom were professional - as in the Agincourt campaign (probably) and Hastings (probably) would qualify as a relatively small, elite group, which explains why they're able to move so quickly. In either case, though, those campaigns are some way off the norm. Even on the way to Stamford, Harold was marching through friendly territory, so will have been able to move rather more quickly than in a normal campaign.

My point was, well, whatever, I think we've got bogged down in irrelevant detail as far as the topic goes - but that there are variables that can't be seen from a raw miles per day figure: size and quality of army is a major factor, and it's also worth considering what size of army a given territory is used to supporting: 30,000 men in eleventh-century western Europe is a much bigger army, relatively, than 30,000 men in contemporary Byzantium. Mongol armies are different again, etc.

[Aedilred]

While your point may be valid, stranger, that comic doesn't really help make it except for obliquely. And even then it might just be that I think weird. You highlight my problem though; take Ireland. All those small differences? What makes them matter? At what point does it become relevant to map stuff exactly instead of have an area with encounter maps or town maps or countryside maps?

You're saying the difference between Ireland's counties and all of Europe's countries is moot when they are drawn at the same scale. That's fine. What I want is an idea of which one to choose! Which one provides good framing for town, kingdom, country and warring dynasties all, when drawn on a large (coffee table sized) map? I think Rhynn hit the salient points I needed, for now. But we'll see.

Soz for the double-post (unless I get ninjad) but this post wasn't here last time and it was easier to quote afresh.

I think the point is that it really depends on the sort of campaign you want to play, and how much diversity of terrain you're likely to want your players to experience. Ireland is certainly big enough to accommodate a campaign, and if you're spending a lot of time there you can play up the differences between these fields and those fields, this forest and that one, the way people here speak and the way people over there speak, and so on. But ultimately you'll be dealing with a bunch of hills, fields and forests, a lot of rain, and everyone talking in an Irish accent. The fauna across the land (and therefore the monsters) is likely to be pretty homogenous with only minor differences between each group. The kobolds might wear different-coloured hats, but they're all still kobolds, not lamias or whatever. Wherever you go, everything's different, but it's all also the same.

On the other hand, you might want to vary your terrain up a bit and have a desert bit, a mountain bit, a forest bit, a castles bit, and so forth. That will give you more diversity of culture and monsters as well, but you won't have the luxury of playing up minor differences within territories in the same way. In that case you'll want a whole continent to play with.

In the former case, you can model pretty much the whole of a small country in some detail, down to individual villages if you like, and let your players run all over it. In the latter case, you'll probably be modelling only small areas of larger countries and ignoring the rest, because it won't be relevant for your campaign. You probably won't need to map anything below the scale of major rivers, the capital city and whichever part of the country your players are supposed to visit.

Each approach has its merits and it's up to you which you pick. The former type probably has a more low fantasy vibe, and the latter is more classic epic fantasy quest, but that doesn't make either of them any more or less valid. The former also probably makes a better sandbox if you put the effort in; the latter is too big to give your players completely free rein over.

As far as what sort of map will look good goes, depending on your style I think either can be made to look great. On a country-sized map you'll be impressing people with the level of detail; on a continent-sized one it'll be the scale and the scope of it, the grand sweep of mountain ranges or the vast expanses of deserts, what have you. The former will probably have a denser, more cluttered style, and the latter a more sparse, arty one (although there are plenty of wonderful cluttered maps of Europe). If you like colouring in, a continent-map gives better opportunities for colour-coding your different polities, too. In fact the way you design your map will probably affect the way your players think of the setting: more detail will lead them to treat it as a smaller area, less detail and they'll think of it as bigger, almost regardless of what scale you tell them.

[Felhammer]

In the real world, settlements are spaced one mile from each other. In stereotypical fantasy, settlements are spaced three or more miles from one another.

In general 8% of a realm's population was urban, with the other 92% being rural.

The Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe book states that if you multiply the rural population by 2, you get the total amount of acreage under cultivation. So if your realm had a million people, then it would need 1,840,000 acres under the till.

Generally speaking, villages and towns are serviced by 3 or 4 rural settlements. Towns are spaced 5 miles from one another, while cities were 20 miles apart. Additionally, realms usually only had one metropolis (which was the capital).

Remember that the largest western European country right now is France and it is smaller than Texas.

Depending on the strength of a given monarch, the territory that comprises his realm could actually be made up virtually independent nobles, while he himself directly controls only a sliver of land. In England, the monarch doled out land to his nobles in a piecemeal fashion (so they would have a castle here, a swathe of farm land there, etc.). A noble wound up with roughly the same amount of land and titles as a continental noble but his territory was spread out across the realm (which made it vastly more difficult for a noble to amass the resources necessary to rebel or challenge the King).

[Rhynn]

Would this hold for other cultures? Middle eastern or classical Greece?

As far as I'm aware, the basics hold true for most pre-industrial (Medieval/Ancient) agricultural societies. The main factor is how densely populated the area is. The social structures are different, but the physical infrastructure tended to be similar. Maybe the "hub" was a temple run by bureaucrat-priests who tax the farms and re-distribute the food, or whatever....

Don't the better, faster armies also have pre-formed roads to travel on?

That probably varied, but paved roads were generally rare-ish, so I doubt most of those numbes assume them.

Edit: Oh, acreage... I've got basically the same numbers (2-4 people per acre of cropland), but when you add fallow, pasture, etc., we're talking more like 4 acres per person.

If you're interested about this on a detailed level, HârnManor, Lisa J. Steele's Fief, and Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe are great, in that order.

[Aedilred]

Remember that the largest western European country right now is France and it is smaller than Texas.

Depending on the strength of a given monarch, the territory that comprises his realm could actually be made up virtually independent nobles, while he himself directly controls only a sliver of land. In England, the monarch doled out land to his nobles in a piecemeal fashion (so they would have a castle here, a swathe of farm land there, etc.). A noble wound up with roughly the same amount of land and titles as a continental noble but his territory was spread out across the realm (which made it vastly more difficult for a noble to amass the resources necessary to rebel or challenge the King).

Indeed. Although it's worth bearing in mind that both England and France are actually pretty bad examples of how things worked. They're obvious examples to reach for, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone, but for different reasons they're not really exemplary.

Spoiler

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France is the largest country in western Europe now, but for most of its history it was the largest by far. Periodically a kingdom of similar size would be established elsewhere, but until the rise of dynastic imperialism in the early modern era (mostly by the Habsburgs), they didn't tend to last long. And France had a lot of issues with uppity nobles and losing effective control of territory and the little business of the Hundred Years War for a lot of its history, but it just about managed to hold itself together. It was just exceptionally big.

Note that that's one key difference between eastern and western Europe, though: kingdoms in eastern Europe managed to go bigger for longer than they generally did in the west.

England, by contrast, is administratively exceptional. While Germany was busy tearing itself apart in the 10th-11th centuries, and the French kings were watching their domain shrink almost visibly, England was centralising. The institutions of power were unusually concentrated, and the king of England arguably the most personally powerful in Europe. This had quite an effect on the way that society operated, at least until the later High Middle Ages when the old system was largely dismantled under pressure from the aristocracy and the church.

But then it's difficult to identify a "typical" state* in a world where they're all different. That in itself is something worth bearing in mind if you're designing more than one country for world-building purposes: they don't necessarily have to follow the same rules, be the same size or really look that much like each other in a lot of respects. It helps to have an idea of what you're doing, of course, so you don't go completely off-piste, but there's nothing unreasonable in having a decentralised state with lots of small-to-medium sized cities near to one with a massive capital city and hardly anything else above a town.

One thing I would actually take issue with about the Mediaeval Demographics Made Easy page is on universities, which he says to compute by continent. As per usual, of course, it would vary by period, but computing by polity (largest appropriate) seems to make more sense to me. Like anything else, a university is a status symbol, and a king/archbishop/whoever isn't going to hold back from establishing one just because there's a good one in the land next door that's perfectly capable of educating his people as well - if anything, that might serve as a motivation to create a better one! Of course, England remains a bad example, but just for point of reference, it had two universities in a population of 3-4 million by 1300, whereas if you were calculating top down from the figures provided on the MDME page you probably wouldn't have given it even one.

*inasmuch as that means anything either

[Rhynn]

In the Medieval period, England and France were also both exceptional because they were at the opposite ends of population density: England had the lowest, France the highest, more or less.

Unfortunately, they tend to be the main sources in contemporary English-language non-academical material...

[TheStranger]

The point of the comic wasn't really to make my argument, just to give proper credit for my quote. Anyway, if you want standard high fantasy, you probably want something roughly half the size of the U.S. (you could go the whole size of the U.S. if you want, but that would be on the large side). That gives you, at least potentially, a range of climate, terrain, culture, and language. By the way, I'm a huge fan of using the real world to take shortcuts in worldbuilding - not that you should just steal a real-world map and put fantasy labels on it, but you can definitely use the real world to help refine your sense of scale.

At this scale, you're looking at nations that are pretty large in practical terms (conveniently, the size of the states in the eastern U.S. is probably a fair approximation). Whether you're walking or riding, it takes a few weeks to cross an average-sized nation, though some would be smaller or larger. A traveling army might move a bit more slowly, though I suspect the six miles a day figure is close to a worst-case scenario (see if you can find maps of troop movements during the Revolutionary War, that's probably a good way to cheat). A single nation is big enough to have a bit of variety in climate, terrain, and culture. Crossing your map is going to take several months, maybe a bit less if you go by sea. Remember, the world is going to "feel" much larger than the eastern U.S. feels to you today, because communication and travel were slower. That area is going to contain pretty much all the variety of European history and culture, not be a single nation like it is today.

When you make your initial map, you're probably looking at 25 or 50 miles to a 1-inch square (give or take, I didn't do the math). Which means that at that point, you're not worried about the distance between settlements because there would be several within a single square. What you're really doing at that scale is marking out geography, nations, major towns and cities, and a rough approximation of what areas are settled and which ones are wilderness.

[AMFV]

Thank you for making my point, all of the examples listed fall under the category of very specific, unusual or desperate circumstances. You absolutely cannot compare the Mongols, a nomadic people used to live on horseback, to a european army from the same time period. Their ridiculous mobility compared to everyone else was one of the things that made them such a terribly effective force.

The other examples are all cases where people absolutely had to cover long distances in short times, as I've said, that was absolutely possible, but not without huge risks and it definitely wasn't the average.

I never denied 6 miles a day is pretty slow and I'm sure a lot of armies did do better. But 20 miles a day as an average as way too high, you would not have been able to have a sizable army move that fast and keep it supplied for any significant amount of time.

20 is not a forced march pace, that's a regular pace for a modern marching army with full kit (so roughly 100+ lbs of equipment). Forced march pace is around 26 - 30+ depending on how aggressively you march. So, while training is a factor, the fact that Roman Legionare's regularly exceeded your pace is enough to suggest that 6 is not more realistic unless your army is made up of untrained peasants.

[Rhynn]

Fitting the contents of the map to the scale is very important. Here is a great example of a very detailed, realisic geographic map (at 20 km/12.5 miles to a hex) from HârnMaster. With hexes that large, there's just enough room to fit in all the 50-100 people manor villages (at approx. 2 mile intervals).

For playing in Hârn, just that map could set you up for a local campaign that could last a good while, but Hârn is a very "low fantasy"/"gritty fantasy" game with a focus on semi-realistic Medieval feel.

Here is the island of Hârn on a very different scale. Only the largest settlements (royal castles & cities and ducal castles) are marked on the map.

Hârn was actually originally mapped on two scales, and the smaller maps (comparable to the first, above) broke up the hexes of the larger map into sub-hexes, making everything easy to match up by chess-style column-row notation (A1, etc.).

You also need to think about what map scale matters for your style of play. If I'm running HârnMaster, I need a very accurate scale, because you can bet every village on the way to anywhere will be mentioned. But in other games, only the large cities matter... and you may not wish to map things out very accurately to begin with, going with general mapping and then adding notes about villages the PCs came across that you created on the fly (possibly using tables to make it easier and less work in the long run!).

Edit:

unless your army is made up of untrained peasants.

Yeah. Of course, sometimes that was the case, but it wasn't really the rule...

[1337 b4k4]

Something to consider:

All of this talk of armies is great, but settlements aren't built or determined by armies (though they may be rearranged by them). They're built by people. People seeking resources. A good walking pace is about 3 miles an hour. That means in a full day of walking a person can cover between 24 and 30 miles (8 - 10 hours of walking), and in general 30 miles in considered a daily traveling distance for horse and rider when not pushing things. Now, bring up google maps and break out the distance measuring tool (in the labs link) and check it out. Large cities (especially in the US but even europe too) tend to be a full days journey. Smaller towns and cities are in between, usually about a half a day.

So design your terrain and find the major source of water and resources. Place a major city there. Branch out from there, following either water or resources and place smaller villages and settlements within 5 to 10 miles. Then put the next major city at the next major water/resource site within 30 miles. And don't forget that even within the spaces between these villages and cities, there will probably be inhabitants, just not enough to qualify as a feature on a map.

[Rhynn]

Settlements
In settled areas, there's a village about every 6-12 miles, on average. Clusters of villages are going to be centered around larger (probably fortified) towns, usually on a river (or a lake, in a pinch); say, every 24-30 miles. Large cities will be along rivers and on the coast where the river flows into the sea.

Yeah the 6-12 miles number was definitely excessive, 1-6 is probably much more accurate, although it's going to depend on the region.

Those villages will probably be in the size range of 50-150 people, maybe a bit smaller or a bit larger, depending on the terrain and region.

[Aedilred]

20 is not a forced march pace, that's a regular pace for a modern marching army with full kit (so roughly 100+ lbs of equipment). Forced march pace is around 26 - 30+ depending on how aggressively you march. So, while training is a factor, the fact that Roman Legionare's regularly exceeded your pace is enough to suggest that 6 is not more realistic unless your army is made up of untrained peasants.

Roman legionaries moved exceptionally quickly, though. They had all those lovely roads to march on, they were full-time soldiers and they had a proper, rigorous military infrastructure and organisation, even down to their diet. Like the Mongols, they're off the charts among their contemporaries or even their successors in these terms: it's how they were able to conquer the world. For a pre-modern army, the marching pace of Roman legionaries is almost always going to be right at the upper end of the scale, and not representative of an army in the Middle Ages on the march. And (post-early) modern armies are even less comparable to Mediaeval ones.

Also, while armies comprised entirely of peasant rabble were uncommon, you don't need it to be for them to slow you down. An army is going to march at the pace of its slowest members, unless you make a conscious decision to leave them behind. If you let your units move at their own pace, they get strung out and vulnerable and you end up with a disaster like the Battle of Muret.

But as has been mentioned, the marching pace of armies is something of a tangent from what the thread's actually about, in any case.

[Felhammer]

For the map, the size of each square of hex will say a lot about what happens to go on the map. If each cell is 25 miles large, then very little detail will be seen, other than the broad strokes that define the continent (mountain ranges, borders, cities, big rivers, seas, oceans, etc.).

If each cell is instead just 6 miles large, then far more detail can be included in the map, details that would be far more useful for a campaign (ruins, towns, villages, streams, hills, etc.).

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to make more than one map. Make a continental map, then drill down into a map of each Kingdom, then drill down and make a map of the areas where the campaign will be located. Each time you zoom in quite a bit and pick up more and more details as you go.

Spoiler: @Aedilred

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An interesting thing I think gets forgotten quite a bit by world builders is the fact that Kingdoms, especially in the early and middle medieval period, was how much of a patchwork kingdoms really were. Kings would only directly rule 50% or less of their realm, the rest being divided up by the nobles. Those nobles would then divide up their territory in the same fashion. As families intermarried, lands and titles would intermingle and get passed around. After centuries of this, a noble could easily wind up with a great diversity titles spread out across a kingdom, or even the continent. The Hapsburgs were masters of this. They were originally centered in the Austria-area but eventually expanded to include the Netherlands, Spain, Bohemia, Naples, Milan and Franche-Comté (as well as a smattering of other German territories).

All too often when people make medieval-inspired worlds, they forget that this is how real-life worked and instead adopt something more akin the early modern period, where Kingdoms were countries and had precise borders and there was little overlay between different countries.

Another aspect to keep in mind is why Kingdoms expend so much effort holding onto (or conquering) territories that perhaps should belong to a different kingdom. The Aquitaine for example. The Kings of England were able to acquire the territory through marriage. The region was well developed and quite wealthy. The tax revenue generated from the export of wine alone was greater than the tax revenue generated from all the shires in England. That is a stunning amount of wealth and goes to show you why the English Monarchs fought so hard to keep hold of their French territories. Back during the early medieval period, the Holy Roman Emperors fought campaign after campaign to control northern Italy because the tax revenue from those handful of city states was greater than revenue created by all of the Emperor's German holdings combined.

[Ravens_cry]

In the real world, settlements are spaced one mile from each other. In stereotypical fantasy, settlements are spaced three or more miles from one another.

They are? Admittedly, this is coming from the land of the ice and snow, where polar bears roar and mounties roam, but that seems incredibly dense to me. It's certainly not as regular as that, no matter the scale.

[AMFV]

Roman legionaries moved exceptionally quickly, though. They had all those lovely roads to march on, they were full-time soldiers and they had a proper, rigorous military infrastructure and organisation, even down to their diet. Like the Mongols, they're off the charts among their contemporaries or even their successors in these terms: it's how they were able to conquer the world. For a pre-modern army, the marching pace of Roman legionaries is almost always going to be right at the upper end of the scale, and not representative of an army in the Middle Ages on the march. And (post-early) modern armies are even less comparable to Mediaeval ones.

Also, while armies comprised entirely of peasant rabble were uncommon, you don't need it to be for them to slow you down. An army is going to march at the pace of its slowest members, unless you make a conscious decision to leave them behind. If you let your units move at their own pace, they get strung out and vulnerable and you end up with a disaster like the Battle of Muret.

But as has been mentioned, the marching pace of armies is something of a tangent from what the thread's actually about, in any case.

It is a tangent...

However, if your army is trained 6 miles per day is absurdly slow. That is 2-3 hours of walking at a fast pace. If you can only manage that then you are really bad off, and you're going to get flanked and cut off and all those lovely things.