Well, my players are off into the unknown parts of my new campaign world again, which means I'd better start filling in the blank areas of the map ahead of them :D
So far, they've been dealing with small islands, and coastal trade cities out on the edge of the region they are in, for the first few levels - but soon they'll be moving into the meatier larger scale parts of the world.
I have pages of notes that have been piling up as the campaign world has been evolving, so I know what's there, but now it's time to map it out, and something struck me: campaign worlds probably aren't to the same scale as the real world.
Looking at The Forgotten Realms maps to try and figure out the scale of features, it occurred to me that a better way of sizing features is not to their real-world equivalents but in terms of travelling time, or what I'm thinking of as dramatic distance.
In Faerun, local features - small local forests, hilly moors, etc - tend to be 1-3 days travel across: The Ktyptgarden Forest or The Sword Mountains - north of Waterdeep.
Major features - like The High Forest, or The High Moor, or crossing The Cloud Peaks seem to be 3-12 days travel across - but such regions typically contain ruins, and other smaller regions of contrast and interest, and these are spaced out 2-3 days apart. Not all Major regions are like this however, The Wood of Sharp Teeth would take about 10 days to cross, and seems to be pretty monolithic.
Legendary features - like The Anauroch Desert or The Cormanthor Forest seem to scale 15-40 days to cross but a) These are rare and b) They're stuffed with all sorts of adventure worthy features and locations.
I would also want to gauge the character of travel through the region. Deserts and glaciers are likely to have large stretches of travel that are pretty uninteresting - but you can/should narrativly skip over those: " you travel onward, plodding across the sands in the cool of the night, and sheltering from the sun during the day for another 4 days, until you finally spot ... "
So what I'm thinking as rules for scaling the world come down to something like this:
Singular features should only take 1-3 days to traverse, and should probably be no more than 1-3 days apart. Something of note should happen on the journey every 1-3 days: enter/leave a forest, cross a river, spot a ruined tower, etc.
Random encounters can be one of the "things that happen" every 1-3 days - so noted regions where Creature X is known to roam/hunt/have lairs is an acceptable type of feature that one can run into every 1-3 days.
Larger features can exist, but they set the character of the travel, and contain other features the players encounter on their travel. Travelling over the open road, or travelling inside The Great Forest should have a very different atmosphere, character, difficulties, and potential creatures - but there should either be internal regions and details to meet the 1-3 days between points of interest, or the DM should narrativly accelerate travel over these emptier regions, but stress the plodding drudge of travel day-over-day to emphasize the size of the region the players are fast-forwarding through.
Any thoughts or suggestions on these as rules-of-thumb?
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The straight line distance From The Icewind Dale to the tip of the peninsula containing The Jungles of Chult is about 2,000 miles (3,200 Km), while the straight line distance from Velen on the west coast by Asavir's Channel to Khalab on the Brightstar Lake north of The Plains of Purple Dust is about 3,000 miles ( 4,800 Km ) .
So I guess technically you could walk across the world in 125 days, providing there's a straight-path paved road from one side to the other, with absolutely no rough terrain. Maybe the Wizards of Thay started putting in a highway system?
But I'm not talking about the limits of the world's dimensions, so much as trying to gauge the size and density of the internal features.
If a campaign world is filled with twice as much detail per square kilometer than the real world then it is actually twice as large as its gross dimensions would indicate - from a practical perspective.
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Well, my players are off into the unknown parts of my new campaign world again, which means I'd better start filling in the blank areas of the map ahead of them :D
So far, they've been dealing with small islands, and coastal trade cities out on the edge of the region they are in, for the first few levels - but soon they'll be moving into the meatier larger scale parts of the world.
I have pages of notes that have been piling up as the campaign world has been evolving, so I know what's there, but now it's time to map it out, and something struck me: campaign worlds probably aren't to the same scale as the real world.
Looking at The Forgotten Realms maps to try and figure out the scale of features, it occurred to me that a better way of sizing features is not to their real-world equivalents but in terms of travelling time, or what I'm thinking of as dramatic distance.
In Faerun, local features - small local forests, hilly moors, etc - tend to be 1-3 days travel across: The Ktyptgarden Forest or The Sword Mountains - north of Waterdeep.
Major features - like The High Forest, or The High Moor, or crossing The Cloud Peaks seem to be 3-12 days travel across - but such regions typically contain ruins, and other smaller regions of contrast and interest, and these are spaced out 2-3 days apart. Not all Major regions are like this however, The Wood of Sharp Teeth would take about 10 days to cross, and seems to be pretty monolithic.
Legendary features - like The Anauroch Desert or The Cormanthor Forest seem to scale 15-40 days to cross but a) These are rare and b) They're stuffed with all sorts of adventure worthy features and locations.
I would also want to gauge the character of travel through the region. Deserts and glaciers are likely to have large stretches of travel that are pretty uninteresting - but you can/should narrativly skip over those: " you travel onward, plodding across the sands in the cool of the night, and sheltering from the sun during the day for another 4 days, until you finally spot ... "
So what I'm thinking as rules for scaling the world come down to something like this:
Any thoughts or suggestions on these as rules-of-thumb?
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Let's start with map of Faerun: http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/File:Faerun_map.jpg
On foot players can travel 8 hours per day with speed of 3 miles per hour. So players can travel 24 miles per day.
Map of Faerun is about 3000 miles wide so it can take about 125 days to walk from Baldur's Gate to Winter Keep.
My current projects, One click download PDFs:
- Clam Island campaign questbook: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/By3s5Uqqf (Levels 1-4)
- Frostglade Tundra campaign questbook: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/SyZ_4eEyKE (Levels 1-4)
- Goldfish Archipelago campaign questbook: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/-3HajWXM (Sequel to Clam Island, Levels 5-8)
I was using this map of Faerun here - http://loremaps.azurewebsites.net/Maps/Faerun - which has a nifty Google Maps style distance tool.
The straight line distance From The Icewind Dale to the tip of the peninsula containing The Jungles of Chult is about 2,000 miles (3,200 Km), while the straight line distance from Velen on the west coast by Asavir's Channel to Khalab on the Brightstar Lake north of The Plains of Purple Dust is about 3,000 miles ( 4,800 Km ) .
So I guess technically you could walk across the world in 125 days, providing there's a straight-path paved road from one side to the other, with absolutely no rough terrain. Maybe the Wizards of Thay started putting in a highway system?
But I'm not talking about the limits of the world's dimensions, so much as trying to gauge the size and density of the internal features.
If a campaign world is filled with twice as much detail per square kilometer than the real world then it is actually twice as large as its gross dimensions would indicate - from a practical perspective.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
As you already said if players travel long ways from one place to another you need list of events that can happen while travelling, for example table like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/2sl94j/random_road_encounters/
Are you going to use which one approach to your map / world?
1. Decide size of area and fill it with places (I use this for my current project)
2. Decide amount of places and these places can be found randomly along the way
My current projects, One click download PDFs:
- Clam Island campaign questbook: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/By3s5Uqqf (Levels 1-4)
- Frostglade Tundra campaign questbook: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/SyZ_4eEyKE (Levels 1-4)
- Goldfish Archipelago campaign questbook: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/-3HajWXM (Sequel to Clam Island, Levels 5-8)