So I was working on something¹ and in doing some edits/revisions, I decided I needed eight elements for a RPG and DnD-adjacent …um, thing and settled on stone, metal, water, wood, flame, wind, and guile.²

I guess I still need an eighth but its fantasy so stars and/or dragons or quintessence or… no.

No, seven is fine. That’s a decent set of six + the seventh is already a stretch; no need to go for the hail mary pass on top of what’s already a stretch.

Guile is a great word. Quite flavorful. Not used much. Has maybe a negative connotation but that’s fine too, I can work within that as a constraint.

The term I was leaning toward before finding guile was just… Magic. Generic “magic”. Super basic and boring.

What I wanted was ~Magic~ but also in the sense of Art. Tékhnē. Works. Craft. Mage-Craft. Also with a sense of invention, discovery, innovation, and science. Something to embrace spells and potions and clockwork and crafts like blacksmithing, as opposed to just the usual amorphous cosmic preexisting always-there force kinda sense to magic. Elemental Guile, which works for the project just fine.³

But man, guile is such a good word. Let’s see where else that might take us:

What if we add Guile to the ‘standard’ set of six attributes. I’d position it as the spellcasting attribute – cunning, craft, wile, artifice, insight; to be inventive, imaginative, creative, innovative, ingenious, artful; to be deft, clever, shrewd, sly, subtle; to have perception, comprehension, acuity; to devise, contrive, improvise, and invent.

Intelligence is a mix of potential, aptitude, and learned knowledge. Wisdom a mix of insight, empathy, and self-mastery. Charisma a mix of assurance, persuasion, and appeal.

I’d set Guile as being equal to any of those and equivalently relevant.

##

If I were to go back to a different set of old notes⁴, at one point I was thinking on the standard set of six stats and also, being kind of disappointed in them? At the same time, I was entertaining the random idea of writing a RPG source book using Wikipedia⁵. Possibly because I was relying on Wikipedia for a lot of preliminary research⁶. Anyway, if I go back to those notes, I found that Guile slotted right into place. Almost like I was always meant to add it.

I present these notes with some light formatting but also with the disclaimer – I’m going for a low-effort post today so these are just notes: equivalent to pre-first-draft and more about getting the ideas down on paper⁷ than getting everything formatted⁸ and in perfect prose. With that caveat I Present:

10 alternate RPG attributes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_(role-playing_games)

Strength
Endurance
Hardiness
Agility
Deftness

Resolve
Wisdom
Intelligence
Charisma
Guile

Strength
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_strength
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(running)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_training
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_exercise

Endurance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiorespiratory_fitness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-distance_running
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_exercise

Hardiness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_fitness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_density
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver#Functions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_healing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_repair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_healing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_tissue_injury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease

Agility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(ability)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_coordination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexibility_(anatomy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory#Physiology

Deftness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_motor_skill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye-hand_coordination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambidexterity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_memory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory#Fine_motor_memory

Resolve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardiness_(psychology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience

Wisdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

Intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory

Charisma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charisma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superficial_charm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_skills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

Guile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discernment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving

“Your character may have 18 INT but you, my friend, are as dumb as a bag of hammers”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning

The 5 Physical and 5 Mental Attributes can be thought of as parallel and corresponding. mostly. kinda-sort-of

Strength/Resolve
Wisdom/Endurance
Intelligence/Hardiness
Agility/Charisma
& Deftness/Guile

On Agility and Deftness: “A person with high Agility (i.e. good reflexes) will be able to put a hand up when thrown a ball; a person with low Deftness (i.e. bad hand-eye coordination) will have their hand up but not catch it”

On Endurance and Hardiness: “Endurance is running a marathon. Hardiness is surviving the flu.”

“Pick two” – Most DND abilities combine two of these traits (or aspects of two)

• ‘Constitution’ as Endurance and Hardiness
• Or ‘Strength’ as Strength and Endurance
• Dexterity as Agility & Deftness
• ‘Wisdom’ as Wisdom & Resolve
• ‘Charisma’ as Charisma & Guile
• Or ‘Intelligence’ as Intelligence & Guile

Claiming copyright over this set-of-10 would be difficult (and probably not enforceable) & so: I don’t. CC BY-SA 4.0 like the rest of the blog but I’m only asking politely; effectively as common terms in English the list is CC0. Well, “guile” isn’t that common in English anymore but that was kind of my point, way up there at the start. It’s a great word. Feel free to steal it off me.

¹ I half-remembered some notes from, I kid you not, twenty freakin’ years ago and yes, I have been transferring them from archive to archive and PC to laptop to laptop to PC and to my current rig. I was using OpenOffice (or maybe even excel?) back in 2002, instead of LibreOffice and Google Docs, but I still have them.

² Sky/Stars was the original 7th, I added Guile (over Magic) as the 8th, & then made the executive decision to pare back down to seven.

³ It is a tarot-style deck of cards and the seven elements are suits in a minor arcana. Yes, with seven suits it’ll end up as a double deck [78×2 = 156]

⁴ these are just from 2020, not 2002.

⁵ I don’t know what I was drinking at the time, but it was merely alcoholic. Not anything stronger.

⁶ …as one does. Not the best way to do research — and of course, you should find a 2nd/backup/reinforcing and perhaps better source before you rely on wiki for anything vital, but wiki is (true to name) fast and with all the cross-links and linked sources (where available), it’s a decent enough place to start.

⁷ Like most of us, I do almost everything from a keyboard into digital files but ya get me

⁸ This includes turning those links from text back into links. Ain’t nobody here got time for that, you are perfectly capable of ctrl-c ctrl-v if you really needed to get there.

Let’s just ignore that I haven’t written anything for the blog in two weeks & we can skip the apology/excuses/justifications and get back to a topic.

“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” per Robert Frost, and he also described it as playing handball without a wall. Most of us don’t play either sport but handball, I’m guessing, is even rarer which is why the front half of the quote is the bit we remember.

I like the handball analogy better because sometimes I don’t get really creative until I literally¹ bounce off a wall. Or until I find the right kind of person to bounce ideas off of. The tennis net always seemed more arbitrary, and when a ball hits the net, it stops. And then you have to reset and go through all the motions to get the ball back in play, which is why players avoid it.

Anyway, the point of Frost was that without some structure and a few rules², you’re not really writing Poetry™, at least as he preferred it. But just like a couple of kids can have fun with two rackets and a tennis ball without having to keep score, free verse is still poetry³.

In designing games, particularly board games where many of the rules will be given both representation and often physical form in the printed board and components, we have all kinds of structure to work within. Our game is the board is the structure is the rules. Folks can ignore the rules⁴ but since we’re using the same pieces, even variations tend to be pretty close to form. Italian sonnets and English sonnets are not the same but 14 lines is 14 lines. Board games are fun, but playthroughs of Monopoly and Risk all tend to look the same – and while both are now traditions in some families, the tradition is also usually to play them just once a year.

Card games, particularly those that use the now-standard deck of 52, in four suits, are probably the closest we get to a “Frostian Poetic” genre of games: there is structure, there are rules. But there is also a lot of creativity in the variations. A single deck but ‘according to Hoyle’ we have a couple hundred variations of play. Within the limits of 10 + 3 times 4 we get Poker, Bridge, Rummy, Cribbage, Blackjack, Solitaire, and War, with all kinds of ways to match, count, or rank cards and just as many ways to ‘take tricks’ and keep score. Eventually we hit limits, and we add a joker — or we get variations like Pinochle, or the UNO deck. We keep the vocabulary (draws, hands, playing out of the hand face up on the table) but use new alphabets.

And eventually we get things like Mille Bornes [1906 or 1955] and Magic: The Gathering [1993]. Is MtG still playing by the same design rules as Poker?⁵ There is a very distant family resemblance. MF Doom and Robert Frost stand a century apart but Doom and other rappers are most assuredly still using rhyme and meter.

And with that, I think I have stretched the analogy just about as far as it’ll stand.

##

RPGs have rules, obviously. And many, many available accessories, minis, and tokens that can make some sessions play more like board games or war games, at least in part.

But RPGs, at least those played on table tops⁶, are more like a free-form collaborative story-telling game. The rules we start with give that story some structure, and also help shape the course of play, but over time we’ll change the rules, too, to get closer to the kinds of stories we want to tell.

Maybe more importantly than the rules of an RPG is the vibe of the RPG. And I specifically chose vibe to describe this because I am Gen X and cringe and trying too hard to sound cool, but also because the Vibe of a Game is a mix of things: quite a bit comes in the published settings or ‘worlds’ of the game, some in the rules-as-written, some from other media including the sources used for inspiration by the game designers, and some from roughly 50 years of playing these games and the 20 years of mid-century sci-fi and fantasy that came before them.

Mork Borg is a Vibe. Apocalypse World is a Vibe. Blades in the Dark is a Vibe.

Pathfinder has a lot of overlap with D&D but the settings of Golarion and Forgotten Realms have very different vibes. [Even within D&D: Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and OG Greyhawk are all very different games to play though technically they share a common rule set — if we fudge a bit. Different D&D settings came out for different editions, and 2nd isn’t 4th isn’t 5th.]

A really neat thing about RPGs is that the rules almost don’t matter. Characters can be defined in different ways, the labels can change. A paladin could be called a Holy Warder, Realm Guardian, Templar, or Lightbound but if a player wants to play a character with that paladin vibe, we find a way for it to fit the overall vibe of the game world and we give that character Smite, because paladins, even if the rest of the class kit and power set are wildly different. I can build a paladin by rolling 4d6 multiple times to generate stats or I can start with 100 points and break out some of the GURPS manuals. I can search online and find the appropriate PbtA Playbook [edit to add: Dungeon World’s Paladin. there ya go.]. I can grab my copy of Band of Blades (it’s in my to-be-read pile) and see what the deal is with Chosen [edit to add: It’s a whole different Vibe].

When even whole rule sets are optional and swappable (to an extent) what is the limitation we put on our RPGs? What’s the rhyme scheme and meter?

When your game can technically be played across an entire whole world, it’s often necessary to drop two sets of parallel lines down and make ourselves a board. Starter village, dungeon, quest hub, capital. Quite a few early sessions fall back on the familiar so we can ground ourselves and figure out the Vibe, both of the game and setting, and also what this particular table, this set of players with with this GM, how that’s going to feel as we play 3-5 hours at a time.

That’s our ‘board’, I think. And across many different genres, I find the parallels. It could be horror-survival on a sci-fi space station but we’ll have a Safe Starting Area, a Dungeon equivalent, eventually a quest hub, and probably a goal, destination or end game — in a fantasy context, the ‘Capital’ — whether that means impressing the monarch or taking their throne. A wild west setting will have some sleepy frontier town, Canyons and Badlands and the things in ‘em, and maybe eventually some sort of slowly simmering plot that leads the story to the Big City, or even Back East. The road there and back again starts in the Shire but eventually takes us to Minas Tirith, and as a “road movie” it’s more about hitting the landmarks than bouncing around a quest hub but there’s comparable story structure there.

Twisting expectations, and (as a GM) finding whole new ways to make a “starter village” and “dungeon”, that’s what keeps the game fresh⁷. And of course: with the biggest dungeons, the whole campaign can just be town and vaults, back and forth but always exploring deeper or farther, until we find the story in it and the eventual endgame.

A lot of us have stuck with D&D (various editions with various additions and often a lot of homebrew) but only because that’s where we started. The basics of D&D have proven to be pretty adaptable, and folks have done some wild things with just 12 classes and a handful of character backgrounds. But the tropes of D&D and our expectations going in are also ‘grounding’ in a way – and grounding in a couple of senses: a foundation underneath us, and a sort of electrical ground for the rules to keep things from short-circuiting.

So to answer my own question, yeah, the tennis net is kind of necessary. Arguably, the rules we agree to, at the table, keep the game ‘on the rails’ just as surely as the clockwise track around Monopoly, and the limits of the setting (fantasy or otherwise) are also the edges of this (huge, imaginary, but still contained) game board. RPGs don’t have to be limited, but we accept the limits. That’s the vibe we like and the type of stories we’re looking to tell.

Just like no one is actually playing Monopoly by the official rules, no two GMs run their table the same way, and no two groups are playing the exact same game either. Everyone adapts something. Every GM has had a player who wanted to do something that required either a creative interpretation of the rules or some sort of exception (hopefully minor) from them. This flexibility is core to RPGs; not unique to RPGs but much more common among them.

So you might disagree with me. The poetry of what you’re making is maybe more spoken word than dactylic hexameter or alliterative Old English or strict quatrains and couplets.⁸ But I feel like some limits are probably necessary, especially when the boundaries of what we can imagine are basically limitless.

##

The image at the top of the post is only tenuously, tangentially related. Though I needed some starting point for thinking about the post today, & I took the literal boundary drawn on an otherwise completely open-ended map. It’s the latest version of the template I’ve been working on for making hex World Maps (for fantasy settings or other things that work well on hexagonal grids) – you can see the last couple of posts for more on the scale for the map, and what the rectangular overlay is for.

Eventually I’ll find a final template I like and work up a couple of samples that use it and put together a packet, a pdf, & make that available on Itch.io

¹ “literally” in its modern meaning, not literally literally.

² Like the Pirate’s Code, rules for poetry is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules

³ Frost was using a version of the tennis-and-net analogy as far back as 1933, Ginsberg wrote Howl in ’55. So whatever trend Frost was responding to, it wasn’t specifically the Beats or Ginsberg. And arguably the use of repetition in Howl gives it a structure and, especially when performed, the spoken word cadence is just as effective as a strict poetic meter would have been. But enough commentary on poetry I am way out of my depth here.

⁴ Everyone is playing Monopoly wrong, for example.

⁵ Magic should probably be compared to games like Rummy instead of Poker, in that a bunch of cards are played in front of each player and you can react to what your opponent played on your own board, albeit in a limited fashion

⁶ Table tops, real or virtual. A lot of people play the game on screens these days, so we can’t differentiate just based on ‘is it software?’ anymore. But for MMOs, JRPGs, and other computer RPGs the game world is kind of a fixed thing, and you interact through your PC (both your Player Character and your personal computer) and your options are strictly limited to those of the interface. For “table top” RPGs, we’re playing as the PCs and we interact with each other. The options are close to being unlimited, so long as we agree to keep telling this particular story to each other, even if we do occasionally let the dice decide some outcomes. There may eventually be some sort of hybrid, certainly some companies keep working toward that as a goal. But the original sort of game, played in person in living rooms, dens, and at kitchen tables, with or without a lot of battlemaps and minis, will always be an option available to us.

⁷ …plus new options for character fantasies: classes, subclasses, ancestries, backgrounds — we’ve been building this kit for decades.

⁸ makin’ that analogy work.

So first, let me recommend www.worldmapgenerator.com, which is where I found the source maps. In this case it’s a Robinson Projection though I was also able to use the tools at worldmapgenerator.com to shift my center point from 0° 0° to 120° E and 120° W longitude to ‘re-center’ each of the three maps. And while I could have exported the source maps as SVG files (and then proceeded with some kind of digital work flow), the files weren’t really what I was looking for. I used my templates, and while relying heavily on the map reference, I tried free-hand drawing the coastlines.¹

Here’s the triptych:

I’m making the most of the real estate available given the 8.5×11 restriction – The presentation could have been six equally sized² hexagons, but here we have three maps, each page showing two hexagons overlapping.

And the scale is 1 Hex = 600 nautical miles = 10° of latitude.

If comments were enabled on this blog³, the first comment would no doubt be some variation on, “why?”

Using the Most Obvious Model Available seemed like a good way to test the template and to also get a real feel for the scales involved. Africa is a handy ruler to have: 40° to 40° and right on top of the equator where distortion is minimal. It’s something I’ll definitely keep in mind as sketch out fantasy continents. It was also an exercise in how much detail is lost at this scale. A lot of my map making will no doubt be one scale down (zoomed in one scale) as opposed to these ‘world maps’ – either the triptych or the set of six hexagons. But the work so far has been great — both the output and practice — and I’m pleased to have the tools and these templates in my map-making toolbox.

Edit to add: these were sketched on my multi-use, kitchen sink template but at some point I’ll bust open inkscape again and make one for you that is specifically equator +/- 70° and includes the latitude and longitude grid lines over the hex map. Probably two, both the 8.5×11 that I’ve used above, and a ‘single hex’ variant. AT SOME POINT but not soon, unless I get a kick-in-the-ass that persuades me otherwise.⁵

¹ Coastlines are hard, yo. Europe, Indonesia, and the Philippines were designed by a vicious, angry god who wanted to punish cartographers particularly. Actively punish them.

² the planet we live on has this weird northern hemisphere bias, so on at least two of the maps you can see where I had to go way past 65° N latitude to capture the familiar coastlines. This is fine; the templates were designed to allow ‘coloring outside the lines’ as a feature, but it still could be a neater presentation.

³ heh. [4]

⁴ still my best decision from 2017

⁵ Under the current regime: I have to work 40 hours a week and I’ll be honest, sometimes that work leaves me completely drained. This blog reflects what I like to do to unwind, it is a hobby — not my primary job — and you are gonna get what you get. I don’t anticipate these circumstances changing. So, “at some point” means: at some point. IF *I* need the tool sooner, it will be sooner, but I appreciate your patience and your willingness to use the tools and templates shared to date to get there even if I can’t, at this moment, hold your hand and make every step super easy with extra super-specialized tools and templates.

For most tabletop RPGs, where players and the referee alike enjoy a fair amount of simulation and crunch¹ maps can be an important part of the game. Sometimes maps are just flavor, or props, and that is perfectly fine. In the front cover of many fantasy novels, there’s a basic map to give you the names of the various locations and how they relate to each other, but the author probably wasn’t thinking of exact scales or GPS precision accurate to 5 meters.² In many games though, we do include a scale, and a grid (for anything bigger than a village: a hex grid, almost always)³, and with some depiction of terrain, either artistically rendered or abstracted a bit, to colors and icons. A lot of gamers who came up the same time I did will remember the gorgeous two-piece four color 34”×44” wall map of Greyhawk⁴, from either the 1981 ‘folio’ or 1983 box set.

Map scales are arbitrary⁵ and generally come down to just two things: how big of a thing (province, kingdom, region, continent, world) did we want to represent on what is typically just a sheet or two of paper, and how do we ‘play’ the map.

Play is maybe more important: with that G in RPG, I’m still talking about games. But another pillar of RPGs is the idea that we are collectively telling a story, so sometimes we’ll make a map that is important for narrative (or for sparking imaginations) and not just because our board game needs a game board. I think we’ll cover both bases with this collection of scales, but there’s also a general trend in that as the scale gets bigger, our maps are more about story and less about simulation. Enough intro? That feels like enough intro.

##

Scale One: 5 feet.

One inch = five feet and if you’ve played the game with 25mm or 28mm miniatures you are probably already very familiar with the game at this scale. This is how many of us set up and resolve combat (minis, and a few dice rolls) and as a D&D or Pathfinder player you’re probably also familiar with something like a 24”×36” vinyl mat with a square grid and your GM breaking out the dry-erase (or back in the day, wet-erase) markers. You can also buy a lot of professionally produced color maps at this scale — many sold in packs or as map tiles, intended to be used several at a time and shuffled around as needed. The latest in tech, Virtual Table Tops, also utilize maps at this scale that are either shared with players online via a video conferencing setup, or for those with the means, via a monitor or projector that brings the virtual back around again to a physical gaming table.

Five feet is melee range. Your move speed is most often listed as some multiple. Not everyone thinks of a battle mat or miniatures setup with cardboard and stand-in tokens as a map per se, but this is our smallest map scale.

Five feet may also be the first and last map scale nearly everyone agrees on. From here, I’m listing my preferences, and probably goes without saying but your mileage may vary⁶

Scale Two: Villages.

A village map usually isn’t a tactical map but nearly every starting adventure has one. The Village of Hommlet [AD&D Module T1] is one example that uses a square grid and a scale of one square = 20ft. (in most printings this adds up to 80ft. to the inch). The village of Phandalin from the D&D 5E Starter Set isn’t on a square grid but includes a map scale that’s roughly the same.

Village maps are typically, but not always, props for use at the table, to give players an idea of where they’re at and some of the relationships between buildings, locations, and NPCs. For this purpose, the Phandalin map is probably a better example than Hommlet. As a story-telling aid, a village map can be handy to show that the dour, loner NPC does in fact keep his distance from the rest of the village, or that a nearby abandoned shrine is probably somehow related to the village but definitely apart from it. I don’t think I’ve seen a village map broken down tactically to 5-foot scale so we can simulate street-by-street combat in an invasion or bandit raid scenario but now that I’ve typed that sentence I kind of want to play it? So I’ll probably be making that at some point.

There may be other examples that would be handy to map at this ‘village’ scale – for example, something like a full legion on the march and your players need a map of their encampment at the forest edge and river ford, so they can figure out how to infiltrate the camp. Or a castle siege. Or a small part of much larger city. But the purposes are usually going to be narrative over tactical, and involve a lot of gameplay and character actions that aren’t turn-by-turn combat.

In my own design space, I’d say anything still on graph paper instead of hexes and from 20 feet to 25 yards to a square fits as “village” scale.

Scale Three: Battlefield.

It is rare (in my experience) that a table-top RPG campaign gets to the point where two armies will meet on the battlefield and the players will want to wargame it – my bias is perhaps apparent in my choice of verb there, ‘war games’ are a different genre. TL;DR It’s 100 yards, and I’ll see you in the footnotes.⁷

Scale Four: Local Travel

Keeping with that TL;DR spirit, let’s lead with the lede: 6000 yards. That’s three miles — we have redefined our fantasy mile to be exactly 2000 yards, because we can, and because that other number (1760) is stupid.⁸ With a base walking speed of 3 miles an hour, a hex at this scale takes one hour to cross – that’s if it’s flat, level, not too muddy, & has a decent trail or basic road on it. You can take that and run with it.

Defining One Hex as being One League (3 miles) and taking One Hour works pretty well.

The basic measure to consider here isn’t any particular unit of distance but instead that unit of time. “How long do we have to walk to get to the Dungeon” has an impact over gameplay greater than knowing exactly how many furlongs, cubits, or Scandinavian miles that happens to be. Even when we handwave away a lot of exact details of travel, knowing the travel time will matter — how often will the party need to make camp, will there be random encounters, how likely is the party to get lost?

For local travel, especially low-level play that often takes place in a single small region around a starter town or other quest hub, being no more than a couple of days away from each dungeon-delve seems about right. One or two nights to camp, one or two days to roll for random encounters.

On an 8½ x 11 or A4 sheet of paper, and hexes in the neighborhood of 1cm in size, your party of adventurers could travel from the center of the map to any corner in one to two days of in-game time, maybe a week over really rough terrain, and then back again. This seems to work well for many starting campaigns with a ‘home base’ in an outpost, a fortress, a village, or a stargate/portal back home – mysteries and adventures await! …but mostly we’re back home in time for dinner.

I’m going to skip two, but we’ll come back to them. Scale Five is regional travel, Scale Six is that “wall map” I referenced in the intro and the footnotes. But I’m going to stick with 2000 yard miles for a minute and go all the way up to global scale.

Scale Seven: Global

One very handy unit of measure at global scale is the Nautical Mile, which is defined as one minute of latitude⁹ — 60 minutes to a degree so one degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles. A nautical mile is also really damn close to 2000 yards, which is handy because someone already redefined our fantasy land miles to be 2000 yards.

Using nautical miles and latitude is also handy at the global scale because latitude gives us a lot of information about average temperature, prevailing winds, and prevalent biomes – you know, for the world-building nerds who like that kind of thing. Scaling up to a map that has nice divisions at something like 10° is handy because those are also usually the lines on (real world) globes and world maps. So our global scale could be a Hex 10° or 600 miles tall. How we get from 3 miles to 600 to go from Local to Global is the question, and one where you might need more than one answer or option.

One that I’ve considered is 15s. I’ve worked up my own template, which you can download for free from mdotblind.itch.io/mdotblind-dungeon23

These are nesting scales. Building up from a local map, 3 mile scale, 15 hexes tall, each local map becomes a unit hex at Scale Five: Regional where hexes are 45 miles in scale and the whole map (15 hexes tall) is 675 miles.

At Scale Six: Wall Map we switch from printing at 8½ x 11 to poster size. And these would stich together as many of the roughly 8”×8” regional maps as might fit on our poster, while keeping that one hex = 15 league (45mi) scale. Something like the Greyhawk double wall map, 33” × 44”, would fit 18-20 regional maps, 80 by 100 hexes if those hexes are still 1cm or so in size¹⁰

Scaling by 15s is a compromise. But the Regional maps still span roughly 10° latitude, north to south. And a secondary design consideration was having a set of maps that nest, a way to zoom in and out.

This is what I’m using currently using for my own designs, and the 2023 world building project. I should have more to share once that work is done. I encourage you to build on this for your own projects. The one take-away I hope you do keep is to ignore the map scale advice in WotC’s Dungeon Master’s Guide and adopt 6000 yards: one hex, one hour, three sensible fantasy miles.

¹ “Crunch” is a common, and perhaps overly casual, way to refer to deep rulesets that try to cover as many eventualities of play as possible. Crunchy can be considered the opposite of “rules light” in some ways but it’s not a directly opposed design philosophy. “Simulation” in games is perhaps best illustrated by the use of miniatures and battle maps on the table. A lot of things are abstracted [e.g. hit points instead of specific wounds] but things like movement, positioning, cover, and ranges are simulated. This is the legacy of Chainmail and other proto-RPG war games, and reflected in combat mechanics especially. But “simulation” can also be the GM creating the geography, rivers, roads, and settlements and mapping them to scale, when things like travel can also be abstracted & just as easily handled by some narration and random encounter rolls. If I get around to a series of posts on game design I might dive deeper into both concepts. All that said: I do love me some Fantasy Maps.

² Tolkien’s map may be an outlier in this, given that so much of the actual plot of both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings is about travel. Both are literal road trip stories, ‘there and back again’. So his distances (probably) aren’t going to be exact but when it takes weeks to walk even part-way across his continent you definitely see that and feel that in his map. Tolkien also gets due props for the hand-drawn aesthetic and how his maps feel like in-world artifacts — arguably they’re also why we encounter so many maps in every fantasy novel that followed, and why we love to include them with our games.

³ Hex maps are another legacy from tabletop war games, with the earliest examples (probably) being a pair of Civil War simulations from Avalon Hill in 1961: Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, both designed by Charles S. Roberts. The 1961 version of Gettysburg updated a 1958 release and changed its maps from a square grid to hexes.

⁴ The “Darlene” map, from the artist of the same name [she professionally goes by the single name]. At the top of the post you’ll see a ‘thumbnail’ version of the wall map. And honestly, producing a map like this for a world of my own is a game design goal I’ve been chasing for a very long time.

⁵ our units of measure are just as arbitrary, but that’s a different rant/discussion.

⁶ yes, pun fully intended and of course I had to pull that phrase in somewhere in this post.

⁷ So we might consider a battlefield scale, with squads or companies or cohorts or maniples instead of individual combatants as a “missing middle” scale for RPGs. Not that we can’t make battlefield maps, it’s just that we usually don’t. In an RPG campaign, if a huge battle is coming up, the heroes are often off on a quest or sidequest, doing their usual D&D things, while the armies prepare off-screen in the background. The outcome of the battle no doubt hangs on what the party does behind the scenes (mcguffin found, allies raised, BBEG defeated in their lair) but the players and their characters aren’t taking up a battlefield command. But. To pick a scale, I’d think about how fast ‘units’ can move – 30ft per round, times 10 rounds per minute, and we’re at 300ft or 100 yards. 100 yards is a fairly intuitive distance for most, being roughly the length of a football field (US) or football pitch (everywhere else). Without getting too “crunchy” in writing some quick ad hoc rules in the footnotes of a blog post, units of roughly 100 taking a minute to move one square or hex, 100 yards, meeting along ‘fronts’ which are the borders between squares/hexes, and choosing actions like Push, Hold, Entrench, Charge, and then rolling dice.

⁸ I picked 2000 yard ‘miles’ for at least two other reasons, one of them making the math easier when scaling maps down and a second reason that we’ll get to soon when looking at maps at ‘world’ scale. However, if you’re a stickler for rules-as-written we can also get there a 3rd way: with a basic move speed of 30ft per six-second round, a character would walk 18,000 feet or 6000 yards (3.4 miles) in one hour. I’m perfectly happy to call a distance of 6000 yards a league and to redefine our fantasy miles to be exactly 2000 yards each – but (please forgive the 2nd invocation of the pun) your mileage may vary.

⁹ Latitude uses angular measures, degree-minute-second, where one degree is equal to one-360th of the circle measurement and that circle is the distance round the earth. Degrees are divided into 60 minutes, which are then also divided into 60 seconds. Longitude uses similar divisions but the meridians of longitude are not parallel — they all run through the poles and intersect there — so the degrees of longitude aren’t a consistent measure. Lines of latitude run parallel to each other (and are, in fact, called Parallels) and while each parallel of latitude gets smaller as you head north (or south) of the equator, they are always the same distance apart — 60 nautical miles per degree. The actual measure of the nautical mile is 2025.37 yards but again, using the magic of fantasy cartography, I hereby define it for my use as being exactly 2000. I guess the yards are 1% bigger or the whole fantasy planet is 1% smaller due to the prevalence of handwavium in the molten core, either excuse works.

¹⁰ The Greyhawk map has a scale of one hex = 10 leagues, 30 miles, for comparison. And I’m sure my approximation for what a wall map would look like is off because this is all just back-of-the-envelope math

I don’t know why I’ve been so muddy-brained recently but let’s document it.

No fever, no body-aches, no GI symptoms, and nothing in my head or chest. This seems to rule out most of the common bugs and viruses that roll through the population in winter, including cold and flu. I’m tired but it’s not a physically-exhausted kind of tired, and it’s not the sort that has me nodding off mid-morning after not getting enough sleep.

I’m getting plenty of sleep. I’m getting possibly too much [?] sleep.

I can ‘get by’ on six hours of sleep, when I have to. I can function 3 to 4 days that way, almost a whole work week, when I know I can catch up on the weekend. This last weekend started out like that. I went to bed early on Friday and slept 12 hours, 9 to 9. I slept well, sometimes I wake up every three hours or so but that night I was out and only got up once, after like 7½ hours (bladder), and was able to immediately get back to sleep. “Fantastic!” I think to myself, “I’ll be so productive this weekend.”

On Saturday night I went to bed at 7:30. It’s winter, the sun sets early, no big deal, and I figured my body was telling me it needed the sleep. Catching up on a sleep deficit.¹ But this still wasn’t so far out of the ordinary, and since I have in the past suffered from insomnia, I was almost happy. I missed out on a few hours when I was going to stream/binge some new TV but that was the only drawback.

Sunday I went to bed at 5:30. I was a little concerned — not at the time, at the time it was bedtime — while ‘catching up’ on sleep is normal and sleeping in is one of my favorite things about the weekends, this new thing with sleeping 12 hours a day was… unusual for me.

Now that I’m into my work week again and my 5:30am alarm and getting to work well before 7am and all that, I figured I’d go back to ‘the usual’ and not get enough sleep.² But no, not yet. With the alarm I’m getting up early enough that I can’t get 12 hours of sleep, but so far this week I’ve been getting 10½.

I’m still fairly firmly in the camp that listening to what my body needs is good. If the damn machine needs sleep, I guess I have to put up with that for a while yet, while it works to repair whatever the hell is wrong. But I’ve also read the articles about Long Covid, so I have to wonder if that’s a factor (or a new reality I’m suddenly living with). I don’t know.

And with what’s going on at work³ I shouldn’t be too surprised that I need those extra hours of sleep. And that I’m finding it hard to concentrate, or to find the enthusiasm each evening to tackle my side projects and the things I’d rather be doing over the stuff I have to do because we live in a capitalist hellscape where you have to trade hours of your life for the means to afford even basic necessities. I mean, I love my job.⁴ But there are also things I’d rather do and a few small goals I’ve set for myself for this year and the reality is: it’s still 8 hours out of my day, 40 hours every week, the treadmill that never ends.⁵

This counts as a project update. Look, it’s been a long week.

On the plus side: Whatever was wrong with me for the past week or so, I think I’m on the other side of it.⁶ I’m looking forward to getting back to the various side projects too, and just the fact that I’m looking forward to it bodes well. I’m not going to mess with my sleep by drinking an espresso or a venti iced coffee at like 3 in the afternoon⁷ but maybe this evening I have something light for dinner, like a salad, and then pull together notes and sit down at my dining room table⁸ and draw some things and map some things and write random bits of a fantasy world — at a bare minimum, my dreaming brain has had plenty of time to work behind-the-scenes on things & I should be able to tap some of that inspiration.

¹ To be fair, I’ve been running a sleep deficit since I was 14

² which would then be a good [?] thing?

³ see the last blog post; Friday of last week was rough and yeah maybe it is just work and the fact that I turn 50 this year.

⁴ “love” is too strong a word; of currently available options I find the situation workable with most other things I’d rather do and preferable over many, many others.

⁵ four day work week WHEN, already. long overdue.

⁶ not least because I’ve managed to fight off the muddy-brained feeling long enough to write this up, in a way that I hope is cogent.

⁷ at least not yet. I’m hanging onto that as an option for next week, if I have another ‘lost weekend’.

⁸ my preferred ‘workspace’ for things that aren’t work. oddly, I can’t be productive at the computer or at my desk.