It might be. But the other problem with the system is the problem of no bounded accuracy.
You add your spell level to the roll each time. But 9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1=45. So… this is functionally a MP system that has “a handful of risk on the upper limit” and little more. A max level spellcaster is going to have a base MP of like 80+ unless they’re going to risk a lot of exhaustion.
And that is before getting into the problems of the the more dynamic system. (Basically it becomes a lot easier to utilize high level spells. As it is now if you prepare a two 5,6 and 7th level spells you’re only going to get to cast 1 of them per slot. When you spend your 7th slot you’re spending both spells. When you spend your 6th slot you’re spending both spells (unless you still have the seven slot).
It would be far better to use the proposed spell slot system (spellcasters get a few fewer slots I think) and say “you may cast a spell without using a slot by paying a point of exhaustion. The spell fails if you do not make a concentration save equal to 10+the level of the spell slot used.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Even something like "stunned for a round" can take a player out for a solid hour for a large group doing complex combat. Time and time again, I have watched a player hear "you are stunned/petrified/exhausting/dying" and they just whip out their phones cause they're not going to have another decision point till after the pizza's cold.
So my GM had been running three campaigns of mutual friends through a shared homebrew setting. About a year ago he asked if we'd be cool with a big crossover for the finale. We all met up in October and ran the final session over a day and a half. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that 17 people managed to get rounds of combat done in under an hour without anyone's turn getting skipped.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Even something like "stunned for a round" can take a player out for a solid hour for a large group doing complex combat. Time and time again, I have watched a player hear "you are stunned/petrified/exhausting/dying" and they just whip out their phones cause they're not going to have another decision point till after the pizza's cold.
So my GM had been running three campaigns of mutual friends through a shared homebrew setting. About a year ago he asked if we'd be cool with a big crossover for the finale. We all met up in October and ran the final session over a day and a half. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that 17 people managed to get rounds of combat done in under an hour without anyone's turn getting skipped.
I think this experience is on the far end of the bell curve of player outcomes.
It depends so much on who is playing. I can run a full 4E fight in an hour unless it's a straight up major boss fight, but that doesn't make it the standard experience.
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gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Even something like "stunned for a round" can take a player out for a solid hour for a large group doing complex combat. Time and time again, I have watched a player hear "you are stunned/petrified/exhausting/dying" and they just whip out their phones cause they're not going to have another decision point till after the pizza's cold.
So my GM had been running three campaigns of mutual friends through a shared homebrew setting. About a year ago he asked if we'd be cool with a big crossover for the finale. We all met up in October and ran the final session over a day and a half. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that 17 people managed to get rounds of combat done in under an hour without anyone's turn getting skipped.
NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
edited March 2023
So I've fallen down a D&D world-building rabbit hole, and I'm wondering how fellow world-builders feel about the relative world size of the most popular/historically important settings (surface size, I know shit gets weird when you start to include the Underdark/Wildspace/etc.....).
Each of the following fictional worlds I've looked into have been described, in size, roughly as the following:
Toril - Earth-sized
Krynn - About 1/4 to 1/3 Earth size
Exandria - About 1/3 Earth size
Oerth - Roughly Earth-sized
Eberron - A little under 1/3 Earth size
Mystara - About 47% the volume of Earth (but also it's a Hollow planet, there's interior and so let's ignore that weirdness for now).
For the purposes of campaigns that involve significant travel, or otherwise motion toward the importance of large distances, large continents, and the nation-states contained within, how do people feel about these campaign settings?
I've only recently realized, having spent some time looking at these other worlds, that the assumptions I originally made for my homebrew world (and therefore detailed to any degree greater than zero) make it much, much, much smaller than I think it needs to be if I want Big Distances, Long Travel to be interesting or important in any way.
I’m surprised to learn the average D&D world size isn’t the same as Earth, with outliers being some degree bigger.
But coming at it from the sense of what I’ll use at a table personally rather than selling a world to many people, I guess it all depends how they’re travelling and what era the world is roughly comparable to.
On foot, Stone Age? I wouldn’t even complete the design of the continent they’re on.
Horse, Medieval? I’d go the Middle Earth route of creating a Europe to Asia sized place and then get vague after that.
Galleons, Enlightenment era? Earth sized for sure, since trade of goods and culture should be bending nations by now, so it’s relevant to everyone when the pope denounces the Russian heir and the Mayans (who did not die!) form a peace treaty with Ireland. Still going to leave blank spots around the edge of the known world.
Steam engines, industrialised arcana? Now we’re talking big empires, alliances that span continents plus the odd island on the opposite side of the world they conquered, printed maps. Earth minimum, but it can be bigger if it needs to be to hold whatever funky nation idea you come up with. Even now, it gets vaguer where I don’t intend to visit / leave room to breath if I come up with something or they turn their water elemental powered ship that way.
Once you’re up to wireless radios, aeroplanes and tommy guns I guess there’s a relatively precise atlas out there. Earth minimum. Propaganda can be used to misinform the heroes of how the rest of the world is living, allowing you to make up new or more interesting stuff as they visit these places.
—
Something to consider if you’re going for that general fantasy Sword Times is how small a kingdom can be. In the 5th century Britain was divided into about 9 kingdoms at one point, laughable by today’s standards. You can fit the isles in one American state!
What I’m trying to say is if you look at a lot of fantasy maps, given the kind of time period they’re going for, every country could be cut into three and that’d still be much more stable than our own history.
Man, is Eberron really that small? Certainly feels vast in my mind.
I think if I had to pick somewhere to do a “Round the World in 80 Days” adventure, by top 6 of your picks would be:
6. Oerth
5. Toril
4. Exandria
3. Krynn
2. Eberron
1. Mystara
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
4800 sq miles. Anything more is too big. Where y'all walking to?
I think it can be more than size that can make travel interesting, you can add a lot of travel days, encounters and choices by focusing as much on the natural barriers as the societal ones. The world would have been a lot bigger to folks in the middle ages, when we even take things like bikes for granted.
Think of the Pilgrim trails across Europe to Rome and the Holy Land, there's several large rivers and mountain ranges that need to be crossed. Storms can make some routes risky and can shut down some passes for weeks, meaning you're going to have to pay very well or find an inexperienced or reckless guide to take you up the high pass. You also have the changing of the seasons to come into play, both in how the weather effects travel and routes (those storms shutting down sea travel and closing mountain routes) and how the people respond to travellers. Welcome hands at harvest time might find a stonier welcome in late winter and early spring - even more so if this is not regular pilgrim/travelling season and the inns are not open, forcing you to rely on the generosity of villagers or approach the local nobility.
This might come at a cost of time, the same way that having to forage would and might even have survival elements - there's not enough food to go around in this village already, but for help in the fields, ploughing them ready for the end of the frosts they are happy for you to stay around their hearths during the cold night, and perhaps even a little bread and broth. But doing so adds time and if you need to get to the mountain passes after the storms pass but before the snow begins to melt, it's a risk whether to press on hungry and cold or push your luck with the changing of the season. On top of this, the winter drives raiders and predators out of the forests, so a day at the plough might not be as dull as you initially thought.
After the sowing in spring is good time to travel, but also when the various factions in your world might think of raising their banners and set out to address historical wrongs and forge a destiny for themselves. What should be a straight forward three day walk from this town to the next might stretch across a week or more, as your party is forced off the road to avoid foraging patrols, mercenary robbers and press gangs. Worse still, the Inn you were planning to stop at might have become a temporary barracks for one of the armies, or be completely depleted of food and ale after it moved on. With a similar situation for a whole chain of settlements in the army's wake.
This can continue into summer, with the two sides becoming increasingly desperate and ruthless, but worse still is what comes afterwards - first scavengers, initially the cruel or destitute inhabitants ruined by the passing of the war, then more supernatural ones as things progress, as well as the spectre of plague. Routes that seemed straight forward at the start of the year, now require perhaps even month long detours as you have to travel a significant distance to find another bridge across the great rivers or to a port city. Assuming that these places are even admitting visitors - it will add another two days to your trip, but is it worth taking a detour to that temple? A little divine protection never hurt anyone, but more importantly, they might know whether you are wasting your time heading for the port rather than the northerly bridge town.
Harvest time is a reprieve from all these delays and distractions, with most settlements happy for any extra hands or even just news of how the world has changed (the pilgrim's challenges so far showing them how important these little bits of information are; which villages are still thriving, which bridges are still open, who now owns the mill etc). The challenge is now to stock up on supplies, catch up on journey progress and make sure you have enough for the long sea voyage/swamp, desert or mountain crossing that is the last stage of your travels. Signing up with a larger caravan or perhaps even finding a guide as the biome might be unfamiliar to the party's scout, you might even find a reliable one...
Most adventurers are a pretty metropolitan bunch, they are used to cities, roads and the coaching inns that connect them. This is really just what you'd find in the various kingdom's heartland. Day or two away from the capital and the inns mostly disappear, with many villages not even having a pub or common house. Limited trails that get used a couple of times annually and need to be cleared each year, so very easy to get lost.
If you could just get food whenever you needed it and were walking on a straight road, it's about two weeks walking from Calais in the North of France to Rome or a month to get from Paris to Jerusalem. On a good year, for a wealthy and connected nobleman or merchant, this might be how long it takes. But for a pilgrim or adventurer, I don't think it would be too out of the question to assume that for every day of direct travel you're spending 3-10 days on delays, diversions, resting or distractions. With the longer any of these go on for, the greater the chance you start slipping towards the higher end of that range.
Europe to the Middle East feels like you could be going along one axis of a third of the world, so accounting for more mountain ranges and deserts in a lot of these worlds - around six months to a year to cross from one side to the other based on that Paris to the Holy Land trip with a lot of complications seems like you'd have a lot of scope for travel. I think as soon as a journey includes more than one season, it will feel like a long time and can add some pressure.
Especially if you need to get back!
Sorry, you said something about overthinking things?
in theory earth size feels fine, in practice all distance is way too abstracted for it to matter, who's making an open world video game level for their wilderness?
And that's for easy travelling conditions, across 'civilised Christendom' rather than the wilderness.
Across the wildlands you might be able to make a more consistent if slower speed, the big difference here would be whether it is charted or not.
If uncharted, then "can we make it back" is the question you want preying on their minds. Columbus was considered mad not because he thought the earth was round, but that his maths were so off. Europe knew the circumference of the Earth all the way back to the Ancient Greeks and they knew how far India was away - he was provisioning to take on far too short a journey than was reasonable for a round trip to that known destination. Even on a smaller world, if you don't know how far the desert goes then it is difficult to plan to cross it so two peoples either side of a desert or sea that takes 7 days to cross, will never succeed unless they can carry 15 days of food and water with them. And don't get lost.
If roughly charted (armed with a globe or a pioneer's notebook), finding a mountain pass or a ford that will take your carts is going to add time and stop you travelling in a straight line. Travel becomes more of a treasure hunt that an orienteering and it might not take much to force our explorers into uncharted territory. Perhaps our pioneer was travelling in a different season and uses some of the wild flower meadows as landmarks, or perhaps they travelled in spring rather than autumn and now a bunch of owlbears are fishing on the one known easy ford.
In both cases, a sighting of a dragon flying overhead is going to completely change the nature of travel. Perhaps it was what they were looking for, but they're going to be looking to follow it on land whilst it travels as the crow flies or perhaps this is something way out of their league, so now travel is restricted to night time or via the dense woodland that rings the valley rather than open plains in the middle. What seemed like an easy route across, following a large migration of some beasts they were planning to hunt for food, has turned into an area to avoid at all costs.
in theory earth size feels fine, in practice all distance is way too abstracted for it to matter, who's making an open world video game level for their wilderness?
did daggerfall actually make you walk through the scale wilderness or did it use a zoomed out map abstraction and fast travel? I thought it was mostly the latter
but either way, video game mechanics that don't translate well to tabletop
did daggerfall actually make you walk through the scale wilderness or did it use a zoomed out map abstraction and fast travel? I thought it was mostly the latter
but either way, video game mechanics that don't translate well to tabletop
Fast travel. You could walk though and I think if you did you would find the map much smaller than they claimed it was.
Anyway. Maps are difficult. I tend to think that maps don’t matter because travel does not matter in dnd. At least in high fantasy medieval+ settings. There simply are too many people around for “the wilds” to be anything but mildly dangerous.
Think about how armies operated at the time. They marched on their stomach such that the maximum size of an army was dependent on the population density of the area.
Now you might say “but we lose that population density” but this destroys the economy that makes high fantasy work. You must have large populations and large production surpluses in farming in order to sustain. And if you say “Druids just do the farming” then you have a “utopian” society because all those people get to now live in the city and use their free time to become wizards. So travel doesnt matter and the wilds don’t exist except in uncivilized places on the edge of the known world. And those are probably rapidly being colonized if they’re known about. (But hey, that is your job!)
The only way to really make travel work is if you’re like… post Bronze Age collapse. There were civilizations and they fell and now there is ruins. No one knows how they fell because all the history was destroyed when they fell and the people now occupying the land were the prior outcasts. (And only a few remember this situation)
Oo also I forgot to say there should probably be more no-man’s land in a fantasy world. Borders are usually separated by mountains or some other natural terrain that’s hard to cross. In a fantasy world that might be a dragon, an angry forest or a nation that collapsed into the earth.
the haunted killing fields where too many wars were fought and blood was spilled still filled with the restless dead, nobody wants to fight over that border any longer
Oo also I forgot to say there should probably be more no-man’s land in a fantasy world. Borders are usually separated by mountains or some other natural terrain that’s hard to cross. In a fantasy world that might be a dragon, an angry forest or a nation that collapsed into the earth.
Yep. In my worlds, the availability of magic and flying steeds is countered by territorial monsters. You might be able to find a herd of griffons, but good luck flying over an ocean full of krakens, sentient storms, sea hags, aquatic dragons, and deserted island mimics to find new lands.
One thing that always struck me about the old Troika game, Arcanum, was this was a world with steam trains and airships, but if you estimated the size of the world from the amount of time it took to walk from one side to the other it worked out to be around the same size as the island of Borneo.
One thing that always struck me about the old Troika game, Arcanum, was this was a world with steam trains and airships, but if you estimated the size of the world from the amount of time it took to walk from one side to the other it worked out to be around the same size as the island of Borneo.
See, this is the kind of thing I want to avoid. I want my world's civs to have just recently developed/rediscovered airships and rail lines (we have Wizards and Artificers in D&D, so why the fuck not?). But those only make sense (to me) if the world is big enough and the civs want to project power via those transport options.
I go for full space faring and an infinite universe for my setting. Magic punk style. So we’re doing sailing ships and weird shit in space. I’ll define mechanics and overall universal rules of the cosmos but from there it’s left pretty open ended. I think my setting book is gonna end up basically being a guide on how to build a setting with some small pockets of the universe described in example.
Anyway guys here’s my latest campaign setting, looking for feedback I’ve been working on it for seventeen years.
How could you leave out Wales Castleland?
Many mutants with excellent singing skills roam the western Poison Lands, and upon O’na there are those that worship Rugby, the goddess of the oddly shaped ball.
Everything I’m about to post here is obvious, but we don’t think about it much.
1. You can get from Europe to African in less than a day via Spain to Morocco.
2. There’s a huge blurry line between what constitutes someone being Middle Eastern, Asian or Serbian. If you live on the border of Kazakhstan and Mongolia I have no idea what to call your ethnicity.
3. You might even say our current racial divides are pretty arbitrary given that there are “Caucasians” on both sides of the Caucasus Mountains.
4. Alaska exists, anecdotally, because frickin’ look how close Russia actually is. Some parts of a country in your own world might exist purely for their strategic benefit.
5. The North and South American divide is political, they’re one continent, not two.
6. Greenland is big! Do you ever thing about that? But not that big.
7. There is a huge stretch of sea from South American to New Zealand. It’s okay not to fill in every blank area.
8. 90% of borders are along difficult landscape, but there’s some straight lines that are very interesting to me. I wonder what the political history is around Egypt to create those defined lines.
9. Russia is huge for three reasons. It’s pretty flat. It’s desolate. Historically an empire, which means rule by military force. That last one has been in most place’s history, so I’d say ironically it’s so huge because well, no one is fighting over who gets all that flat tundra. I’m greatly generalising here, but food for thought when you make country sizes.
10. It’s wild that Greece is considered a poor country despite being the birthplace of Western civilisation. Britain is devouring itself. Japan is doing okay, but is in population decline. The empires of the past have receded. Maybe have a think about who used to run things when you make a world.
11. I would say the entire indigenous population of America was smashed to pieces decades ago. It’s almost unthinkable. I can’t even think of what to say. It’s almost too horrifying to put into a fictional world’s history.
12. Oh hey maps lie. Australia might officially be the whole island, but no one is living in the middle. No one can.
13. You made it this far? This one is important. Countries are not rated as more or less civilised by their size. Is Latvia more or less civilised than Canada? Who can say, but certainly a small country is not barbaric.
14. Last thought, there are always countries not on the map. I know for a fact the Kurds are just going about their business despite Kurdistan being defunct on the world stage.
—
All that to say, just go wild. For every historic fact you make, leave two weird things barely explained. Want a tiny place to take over the world? We did that. Want nomadic tribes under an enigmatic leader to slam dunk over the world then dissolve its power over night? We did that. Straight line borders? Landmass shaped like a boot? You get it.
Endless_Serpents on
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NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
Point of Order: Map Projections are important to understand, because they overstate (sometimes grossly) or understate (less frequently) the actual size of a landmass. Greenland is big, but not that big! The Mercator projection isn't perfect.
Point of Order: Map Projections are important to understand, because they overstate (sometimes grossly) or understate (less frequently) the actual size of a landmass. Greenland is big, but not that big! The Mercator projection isn't perfect.
That said, largely good points to think about.
I was just about to post this. Somebody is wrong on the Internet syndrome 🤣
Y'all ever read your own posts before you post something and think man, this is condescending and maybe I should rephrase some of this?
Welp, mea culpa. I guess I’m the type of person who finds over-generalizations irritating, but comes off as infinitely more irritating being the ‘well, actually’ guy.
I’ll look at that post again and I’ll try to not be that particular brand of silly goose in the future.
I am amused that that map of Europe can't actually fit all the smaller country names. Also, TIL that "Czechia" is the recommended English name for the Czech Republic now.
Posts
You add your spell level to the roll each time. But 9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1=45. So… this is functionally a MP system that has “a handful of risk on the upper limit” and little more. A max level spellcaster is going to have a base MP of like 80+ unless they’re going to risk a lot of exhaustion.
And that is before getting into the problems of the the more dynamic system. (Basically it becomes a lot easier to utilize high level spells. As it is now if you prepare a two 5,6 and 7th level spells you’re only going to get to cast 1 of them per slot. When you spend your 7th slot you’re spending both spells. When you spend your 6th slot you’re spending both spells (unless you still have the seven slot).
It would be far better to use the proposed spell slot system (spellcasters get a few fewer slots I think) and say “you may cast a spell without using a slot by paying a point of exhaustion. The spell fails if you do not make a concentration save equal to 10+the level of the spell slot used.
So my GM had been running three campaigns of mutual friends through a shared homebrew setting. About a year ago he asked if we'd be cool with a big crossover for the finale. We all met up in October and ran the final session over a day and a half. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that 17 people managed to get rounds of combat done in under an hour without anyone's turn getting skipped.
I think this experience is on the far end of the bell curve of player outcomes.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
So who's your patron? How's the eldritch blast?
Each of the following fictional worlds I've looked into have been described, in size, roughly as the following:
Toril - Earth-sized
Krynn - About 1/4 to 1/3 Earth size
Exandria - About 1/3 Earth size
Oerth - Roughly Earth-sized
Eberron - A little under 1/3 Earth size
Mystara - About 47% the volume of Earth (but also it's a Hollow planet, there's interior and so let's ignore that weirdness for now).
For the purposes of campaigns that involve significant travel, or otherwise motion toward the importance of large distances, large continents, and the nation-states contained within, how do people feel about these campaign settings?
I've only recently realized, having spent some time looking at these other worlds, that the assumptions I originally made for my homebrew world (and therefore detailed to any degree greater than zero) make it much, much, much smaller than I think it needs to be if I want Big Distances, Long Travel to be interesting or important in any way.
I know, this is maybe overthinking it.
I’m surprised to learn the average D&D world size isn’t the same as Earth, with outliers being some degree bigger.
But coming at it from the sense of what I’ll use at a table personally rather than selling a world to many people, I guess it all depends how they’re travelling and what era the world is roughly comparable to.
On foot, Stone Age? I wouldn’t even complete the design of the continent they’re on.
Horse, Medieval? I’d go the Middle Earth route of creating a Europe to Asia sized place and then get vague after that.
Galleons, Enlightenment era? Earth sized for sure, since trade of goods and culture should be bending nations by now, so it’s relevant to everyone when the pope denounces the Russian heir and the Mayans (who did not die!) form a peace treaty with Ireland. Still going to leave blank spots around the edge of the known world.
Steam engines, industrialised arcana? Now we’re talking big empires, alliances that span continents plus the odd island on the opposite side of the world they conquered, printed maps. Earth minimum, but it can be bigger if it needs to be to hold whatever funky nation idea you come up with. Even now, it gets vaguer where I don’t intend to visit / leave room to breath if I come up with something or they turn their water elemental powered ship that way.
Once you’re up to wireless radios, aeroplanes and tommy guns I guess there’s a relatively precise atlas out there. Earth minimum. Propaganda can be used to misinform the heroes of how the rest of the world is living, allowing you to make up new or more interesting stuff as they visit these places.
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Something to consider if you’re going for that general fantasy Sword Times is how small a kingdom can be. In the 5th century Britain was divided into about 9 kingdoms at one point, laughable by today’s standards. You can fit the isles in one American state!
9 but I agree with the sentiment.
What I’m trying to say is if you look at a lot of fantasy maps, given the kind of time period they’re going for, every country could be cut into three and that’d still be much more stable than our own history.
I think if I had to pick somewhere to do a “Round the World in 80 Days” adventure, by top 6 of your picks would be:
6. Oerth
5. Toril
4. Exandria
3. Krynn
2. Eberron
1. Mystara
Think of the Pilgrim trails across Europe to Rome and the Holy Land, there's several large rivers and mountain ranges that need to be crossed. Storms can make some routes risky and can shut down some passes for weeks, meaning you're going to have to pay very well or find an inexperienced or reckless guide to take you up the high pass. You also have the changing of the seasons to come into play, both in how the weather effects travel and routes (those storms shutting down sea travel and closing mountain routes) and how the people respond to travellers. Welcome hands at harvest time might find a stonier welcome in late winter and early spring - even more so if this is not regular pilgrim/travelling season and the inns are not open, forcing you to rely on the generosity of villagers or approach the local nobility.
This might come at a cost of time, the same way that having to forage would and might even have survival elements - there's not enough food to go around in this village already, but for help in the fields, ploughing them ready for the end of the frosts they are happy for you to stay around their hearths during the cold night, and perhaps even a little bread and broth. But doing so adds time and if you need to get to the mountain passes after the storms pass but before the snow begins to melt, it's a risk whether to press on hungry and cold or push your luck with the changing of the season. On top of this, the winter drives raiders and predators out of the forests, so a day at the plough might not be as dull as you initially thought.
After the sowing in spring is good time to travel, but also when the various factions in your world might think of raising their banners and set out to address historical wrongs and forge a destiny for themselves. What should be a straight forward three day walk from this town to the next might stretch across a week or more, as your party is forced off the road to avoid foraging patrols, mercenary robbers and press gangs. Worse still, the Inn you were planning to stop at might have become a temporary barracks for one of the armies, or be completely depleted of food and ale after it moved on. With a similar situation for a whole chain of settlements in the army's wake.
This can continue into summer, with the two sides becoming increasingly desperate and ruthless, but worse still is what comes afterwards - first scavengers, initially the cruel or destitute inhabitants ruined by the passing of the war, then more supernatural ones as things progress, as well as the spectre of plague. Routes that seemed straight forward at the start of the year, now require perhaps even month long detours as you have to travel a significant distance to find another bridge across the great rivers or to a port city. Assuming that these places are even admitting visitors - it will add another two days to your trip, but is it worth taking a detour to that temple? A little divine protection never hurt anyone, but more importantly, they might know whether you are wasting your time heading for the port rather than the northerly bridge town.
Harvest time is a reprieve from all these delays and distractions, with most settlements happy for any extra hands or even just news of how the world has changed (the pilgrim's challenges so far showing them how important these little bits of information are; which villages are still thriving, which bridges are still open, who now owns the mill etc). The challenge is now to stock up on supplies, catch up on journey progress and make sure you have enough for the long sea voyage/swamp, desert or mountain crossing that is the last stage of your travels. Signing up with a larger caravan or perhaps even finding a guide as the biome might be unfamiliar to the party's scout, you might even find a reliable one...
Most adventurers are a pretty metropolitan bunch, they are used to cities, roads and the coaching inns that connect them. This is really just what you'd find in the various kingdom's heartland. Day or two away from the capital and the inns mostly disappear, with many villages not even having a pub or common house. Limited trails that get used a couple of times annually and need to be cleared each year, so very easy to get lost.
If you could just get food whenever you needed it and were walking on a straight road, it's about two weeks walking from Calais in the North of France to Rome or a month to get from Paris to Jerusalem. On a good year, for a wealthy and connected nobleman or merchant, this might be how long it takes. But for a pilgrim or adventurer, I don't think it would be too out of the question to assume that for every day of direct travel you're spending 3-10 days on delays, diversions, resting or distractions. With the longer any of these go on for, the greater the chance you start slipping towards the higher end of that range.
Europe to the Middle East feels like you could be going along one axis of a third of the world, so accounting for more mountain ranges and deserts in a lot of these worlds - around six months to a year to cross from one side to the other based on that Paris to the Holy Land trip with a lot of complications seems like you'd have a lot of scope for travel. I think as soon as a journey includes more than one season, it will feel like a long time and can add some pressure.
Especially if you need to get back!
Sorry, you said something about overthinking things?
You need to time it as I understand it and just position yourself right so that you can shove them right out of the game.
Or at least that's the way it was in prior patches.
Across the wildlands you might be able to make a more consistent if slower speed, the big difference here would be whether it is charted or not.
If uncharted, then "can we make it back" is the question you want preying on their minds. Columbus was considered mad not because he thought the earth was round, but that his maths were so off. Europe knew the circumference of the Earth all the way back to the Ancient Greeks and they knew how far India was away - he was provisioning to take on far too short a journey than was reasonable for a round trip to that known destination. Even on a smaller world, if you don't know how far the desert goes then it is difficult to plan to cross it so two peoples either side of a desert or sea that takes 7 days to cross, will never succeed unless they can carry 15 days of food and water with them. And don't get lost.
If roughly charted (armed with a globe or a pioneer's notebook), finding a mountain pass or a ford that will take your carts is going to add time and stop you travelling in a straight line. Travel becomes more of a treasure hunt that an orienteering and it might not take much to force our explorers into uncharted territory. Perhaps our pioneer was travelling in a different season and uses some of the wild flower meadows as landmarks, or perhaps they travelled in spring rather than autumn and now a bunch of owlbears are fishing on the one known easy ford.
In both cases, a sighting of a dragon flying overhead is going to completely change the nature of travel. Perhaps it was what they were looking for, but they're going to be looking to follow it on land whilst it travels as the crow flies or perhaps this is something way out of their league, so now travel is restricted to night time or via the dense woodland that rings the valley rather than open plains in the middle. What seemed like an easy route across, following a large migration of some beasts they were planning to hunt for food, has turned into an area to avoid at all costs.
I think that's called Daggerfall
but either way, video game mechanics that don't translate well to tabletop
Fast travel. You could walk though and I think if you did you would find the map much smaller than they claimed it was.
Anyway. Maps are difficult. I tend to think that maps don’t matter because travel does not matter in dnd. At least in high fantasy medieval+ settings. There simply are too many people around for “the wilds” to be anything but mildly dangerous.
Think about how armies operated at the time. They marched on their stomach such that the maximum size of an army was dependent on the population density of the area.
Now you might say “but we lose that population density” but this destroys the economy that makes high fantasy work. You must have large populations and large production surpluses in farming in order to sustain. And if you say “Druids just do the farming” then you have a “utopian” society because all those people get to now live in the city and use their free time to become wizards. So travel doesnt matter and the wilds don’t exist except in uncivilized places on the edge of the known world. And those are probably rapidly being colonized if they’re known about. (But hey, that is your job!)
The only way to really make travel work is if you’re like… post Bronze Age collapse. There were civilizations and they fell and now there is ruins. No one knows how they fell because all the history was destroyed when they fell and the people now occupying the land were the prior outcasts. (And only a few remember this situation)
Yep. In my worlds, the availability of magic and flying steeds is countered by territorial monsters. You might be able to find a herd of griffons, but good luck flying over an ocean full of krakens, sentient storms, sea hags, aquatic dragons, and deserted island mimics to find new lands.
Let’s bring this back honestly.
See, this is the kind of thing I want to avoid. I want my world's civs to have just recently developed/rediscovered airships and rail lines (we have Wizards and Artificers in D&D, so why the fuck not?). But those only make sense (to me) if the world is big enough and the civs want to project power via those transport options.
How could you leave out Wales Castleland?
Many mutants with excellent singing skills roam the western Poison Lands, and upon O’na there are those that worship Rugby, the goddess of the oddly shaped ball.
Everything I’m about to post here is obvious, but we don’t think about it much.
1. You can get from Europe to African in less than a day via Spain to Morocco.
2. There’s a huge blurry line between what constitutes someone being Middle Eastern, Asian or Serbian. If you live on the border of Kazakhstan and Mongolia I have no idea what to call your ethnicity.
3. You might even say our current racial divides are pretty arbitrary given that there are “Caucasians” on both sides of the Caucasus Mountains.
4. Alaska exists, anecdotally, because frickin’ look how close Russia actually is. Some parts of a country in your own world might exist purely for their strategic benefit.
5. The North and South American divide is political, they’re one continent, not two.
6. Greenland is big! Do you ever thing about that? But not that big.
7. There is a huge stretch of sea from South American to New Zealand. It’s okay not to fill in every blank area.
8. 90% of borders are along difficult landscape, but there’s some straight lines that are very interesting to me. I wonder what the political history is around Egypt to create those defined lines.
9. Russia is huge for three reasons. It’s pretty flat. It’s desolate. Historically an empire, which means rule by military force. That last one has been in most place’s history, so I’d say ironically it’s so huge because well, no one is fighting over who gets all that flat tundra. I’m greatly generalising here, but food for thought when you make country sizes.
10. It’s wild that Greece is considered a poor country despite being the birthplace of Western civilisation. Britain is devouring itself. Japan is doing okay, but is in population decline. The empires of the past have receded. Maybe have a think about who used to run things when you make a world.
11. I would say the entire indigenous population of America was smashed to pieces decades ago. It’s almost unthinkable. I can’t even think of what to say. It’s almost too horrifying to put into a fictional world’s history.
12. Oh hey maps lie. Australia might officially be the whole island, but no one is living in the middle. No one can.
13. You made it this far? This one is important. Countries are not rated as more or less civilised by their size. Is Latvia more or less civilised than Canada? Who can say, but certainly a small country is not barbaric.
14. Last thought, there are always countries not on the map. I know for a fact the Kurds are just going about their business despite Kurdistan being defunct on the world stage.
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All that to say, just go wild. For every historic fact you make, leave two weird things barely explained. Want a tiny place to take over the world? We did that. Want nomadic tribes under an enigmatic leader to slam dunk over the world then dissolve its power over night? We did that. Straight line borders? Landmass shaped like a boot? You get it.
That said, largely good points to think about.
I was just about to post this. Somebody is wrong on the Internet syndrome 🤣
Welp, mea culpa. I guess I’m the type of person who finds over-generalizations irritating, but comes off as infinitely more irritating being the ‘well, actually’ guy.
I’ll look at that post again and I’ll try to not be that particular brand of silly goose in the future.
I didn’t research that post. If was off the cuff.