World Scale

[Goober4473]

I'm about to start a new campaign, and the continent it's set on is about 200x100 miles. It's one layer of a shattered Prime, so it's not the whole world, but it struck me because I notice a lot of settings are massive in comparison, more like our world. Add in other planes, and we're talking very large settings.

What scale do you normally play on, or design when you make a setting, regardless of how big the whole world is? Maybe you like to play games mostly in one city and its surroundings, maybe you like to use an island, country, continent, multiverse, or whatever else. What do you tend towards?

[Zincorium]

Small, with a few nearby places and then various 'exotic' locales to send them to once they get teleport. Because if you don't give them somewhere meaningful to teleport to, they tend to get mischievous with it.

I don't like having drawn out travel, and cutting it short arbitrarily is rarely satisfying either, so all in all travel should be purely voluntary on the player's parts, and if they aren't bored where they are, there's little reason to go anywhere else on their own initiative.


As far as advice, I'd say no more than five meaningful cities/towns, past that you're going to have the players looking through notes (if they even took them) to even figure out where they are.

The size you've picked is very reasonable, with a lot of room for wilderness and rural areas around the towns.

[Jimbob]

I only do about 20 miles from the characters starting point., lots of detail, samll towns, vilalges, farms, ruines, old castles, stuff like that. Keep what ever polt you have with the area, your players become attached and the know the area well, not alot of time wasted with random monsters travilling days to get to one place.

[Afraidofsharpie]

Well I have a homebrew setting that is...quite large. However rarely has a single adventure group covered the entire ground of the planet alone, the reason it's so large is so that my group(s) don't feel like they're always in the same place and to let several of the overarching stories to not fight for spotlight. But then again I've also had my players use an ancient gate system to travel to other planets but thats just me being an arrogant plot guy.