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.
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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