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SiuiS
2014-03-07, 06:07 AM
Hi there!


When I was ten, and had a real DM and not just me and some mates with books and a few scrapes together dice with no actual understanding, one of the most fun things that happened was, he took a kindergarten notepad and drew vertical lines, spaces an inch apart – and made a world map, 3 feet by 4 feet, rolled up into a scroll. Tomorrow I'm going to staples, and buying a jumbo pad, and doing that self-same thing.

But... How big should things be?

I'm American. I'm a stereotypical American; my geography skill is so poor other Americans make fun of me. I do not grok scale. They say that to an American a hundred years is a long time, and to a Brit, a hundred miles is a long ways. I believe that to be true, and also detrimental! I want to figure out realistic scale. How far across are towns? How far apart? How do people spread?
I could just pinch the data from BECMI or ACKS, but that's a crutch. This is something I want to understand enough to mess with. I recently learned that during the crusades, the Christian army was able to march about six miles a day – six miles! Couple that with every DM ever either not using a map, or also having no sense of scale (we had one who gave us a fort a full ten miles on a side...) and... Well I've no scale. It makes me sad.

Help me playground! How can I figure out where to even start?

AMFV
2014-03-07, 06:12 AM
Hi there!


When I was ten, and had a real DM and not just me and some mates with books and a few scrapes together dice with no actual understanding, one of the most fun things that happened was, he took a kindergarten notepad and drew vertical lines, spaces an inch apart – and made a world map, 3 feet by 4 feet, rolled up into a scroll. Tomorrow I'm going to staples, and buying a jumbo pad, and doing that self-same thing.

But... How big should things be?

I'm American. I'm a stereotypical American; my geography skill is so poor other Americans make fun of me. I do not grok scale. They say that to an American a hundred years is a long time, and to a Brit, a hundred miles is a long ways. I believe that to be true, and also detrimental! I want to figure out realistic scale. How far across are towns? How far apart? How do people spread?
I could just pinch the data from BECMI or ACKS, but that's a crutch. This is something I want to understand enough to mess with. I recently learned that during the crusades, the Christian army was able to march about six miles a day – six miles! Couple that with every DM ever either not using a map, or also having no sense of scale (we had one who gave us a fort a full ten miles on a side...) and... Well I've no scale. It makes me sad.

Help me playground! How can I figure out where to even start?

Six miles a day sounds awfully awfully slow. A forced march pace is usually around 20+ miles a day. I've been on them, and 20-some-odd miles is not unusual, if a bit grueling.

SiuiS
2014-03-07, 06:28 AM
Six miles a day sounds awfully awfully slow. A forced march pace is usually around 20+ miles a day. I've been on them, and 20-some-odd miles is not unusual, if a bit grueling.

You're not packing an army, though. :)

Crusaders could only carry enough water for one day of travel before the logistics grew too big; it's the rocket fuel problem, the square cube law. Bringing yourself, your sword, shield and maile, food, a squire or whatever to keep you dressed and armored, a horse, food for the horse, a cart, camp followers, a tent, etc; packing it all up every morning, keeping regimented meals, marching, stopping at appropriate times, for meals and chatting a course through compass navigation and dead reckoning, stopping before dark, setting up camp, drilling, having a good meal, bunking down; all In the middle east desert, making sure to get to an oasis every night so you have the needed water to survive; much more logistically monstrous.

If you're a dude with a backpack, a walking stick, and rations who is a day's foot travel from automated industry, you're not going to have the same sense of things.
E: modern military training admittedly not falling into 'dude with backpack and walking stick'.

I could probably build from the average pace? A fully armed troop will move slower than a pilgrim, will move slower than a cart. Cities can be days apart and peppered with villages in between, especially once roads are built. Forts in wild lands will be closer together because of the need of immediate emergency aid if attacked. I should try to find a listing of keeps across appropriate terrain in he right eras...

AMFV
2014-03-07, 06:40 AM
You're not packing an army, though. :)

Crusaders could only carry enough water for one day of travel before the logistics grew too big; it's the rocket fuel problem, the square cube law. Bringing yourself, your sword, shield and maile, food, a squire or whatever to keep you dressed and armored, a horse, food for the horse, a cart, camp followers, a tent, etc; packing it all up every morning, keeping regimented meals, marching, stopping at appropriate times, for meals and chatting a course through compass navigation and dead reckoning, stopping before dark, setting up camp, drilling, having a good meal, bunking down; all In the middle east desert, making sure to get to an oasis every night so you have the needed water to survive; much more logistically monstrous.

If you're a dude with a backpack, a walking stick, and rations who is a day's foot travel from automated industry, you're not going to have the same sense of things.
E: modern military training admittedly not falling into 'dude with backpack and walking stick'.

I could probably build from the average pace? A fully armed troop will move slower than a pilgrim, will move slower than a cart. Cities can be days apart and peppered with villages in between, especially once roads are built. Forts in wild lands will be closer together because of the need of immediate emergency aid if attacked. I should try to find a listing of keeps across appropriate terrain in he right eras...

I was in the military and was referencing military forced marches. You don't carry the water, that'd be the horse and supply train that carries the water.

Delta
2014-03-07, 07:05 AM
I was in the military and was referencing military forced marches. You don't carry the water, that'd be the horse and supply train that carries the water.

You're referencing modern military marches. A medieval army from the times of the crusades was basically a small moving city, 6 miles a day sounds much more realistic to me than 20.

Of course, an armed unit of significant size can cover a lot more ground in short time, that's correct, but that means moving away from your supplies, that's always a risky move and was only attempted in either desperate or very specific circumstances.

SiuiS
2014-03-07, 07:06 AM
You'll still run into the problem of needing two more horses to Carry the food and water of the horses you already have. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=17052959&postcount=487)

Pre magic (in which I include modern industry) you get to the point where the weight of the gear to support a unit exceeds logistical ease. That's the sort of rubric I want to work with.

AMFV
2014-03-07, 07:07 AM
You're referencing modern military marches. A medieval army from the times of the crusades was basically a small moving city, 6 miles a day sounds much more realistic to me than 20.

Of course, an armed unit of significant size can cover a lot more ground in short time, that's correct, but that means moving away from your supplies, that's always a risky move and was only attempted in either desperate or very specific circumstances.

Six miles is still ungodly slow, even for a supply train though. I would expect them to be able to cover 10 or 12 at the least, although training may have a lot to do with it as well. And that's considering that a modern troop movement can move (marching) 26+ miles in a day.

Grim Portent
2014-03-07, 07:40 AM
Small discussion of medieval logistics.
Dark Ages and Middle Ages supply trains were composed of some pretty stupid stuff that slowed them a lot and they only got worse the more high ranking nobility you had with you. In order to keep most armies of the time properly supplied and to keep morale up you needed to bring brewers and the supplies to make alcohol at your destination, plus chefs to prepare food for the soldiers, plus craftsmen to repair armour, weapons, wagons and so on.

Nobles would bring private chefs, grooms, manservants, maids and the other trappings of nobility.

Add in that most soldiers were drafted from the peasantry and what you had was more like a civilian hike rather than a military march.

As a result armies tended to find ways to reduce the amount of baggage they had to bring. Invaded nations were often struck with famine because of the food they had to give to their own nations army and the food pillaged by the invaders to bolster their supplies. Of course the loss of a lot of the farmers to the actual fighting didn't help.

Medieval distances were very short in general. Villages had to be within one or two days travel of another village, either by foot or by cart, to facilitate trading for supplies and to enable governance by a central authority.

Villages and towns would usually be near a river or large still body of water to provide water, once again preferably less than a days travel away.

Things like forts would be placed at strategic points on a border, also often not far from towns and villages in order to get supplies in easily.

I would suggest looking up some old maps of Europe to try and get a sense of scale. Admittedly most older maps are pretty hard to get an accurate distance from, and the units have often changed since they were made, but it's still a useful thing to do. It might also help to look at a map of France, there's still a lot of old villages that date back a long time there.

Rhynn
2014-03-07, 08:00 AM
First, one useful reference (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm) for numbers.

I'll just cheerfully assume that by "world" you mean "campaign setting," as in "playable area."

Map Size & Scale
1200 x 900 miles would be a fairly large playable area, with a lot of room for diversity.

All of China could fit on a map about 3000 x 2100 miles.

Europe from the North African coast to the Barents Sea and from Morocco to the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf would fit on a map about 3500 x 2800 miles.

I'd say 3200 x 2400 miles would make a good upper limit for an entire setting. It leaves you room to develop into later on: the Unknown World outside the bounds of common knowledge.

On a 4 x 3 foot map, you'd get 25 miles to an inch for the 1200x900 mile map, or 66.666 miles to an inch for 3200x2400. Maybe 2400x1800 miles would make more sense, or else 3600x2700.

Mapping
How to draw maps (http://batintheattic.blogspot.fi/2009/08/how-to-make-fantasy-sandbox.html) (coasts, mountains, etc., in order) and a lot of other useful worldbuilding things.

Settlements
In settled areas, there's a village about every 6-12 miles, on average. Clusters of villages are going to be centered around larger (probably fortified) towns, usually on a river (or a lake, in a pinch); say, every 24-30 miles. Large cities will be along rivers and on the coast where the river flows into the sea.

Borderlands and poorly settled areas will be sparser.

Basically, there's going be several villages within a short walk from any settled place, a slightly larger town about a day away, and cities will be further apart. Settlement locations will be determined by geography - access to water. The bigger the settlement, the bigger the river/stream needs to be.


I recently learned that during the crusades, the Christian army was able to march about six miles a day – six miles!

That's mostly because of the conditions. Grueling arid heat, sand, etc., make for slow going for an army - they'd have to stop to rest and move from oasis to oasis (because each man would require 2-3 gallons of water a day, and animals would require much more), and just the act of letting everyone drink would take a long while.

In better circumstances 15-18 miles per day was possible. Apparently, Mongol armies could travel 50 miles a day. (A bit surprising, to me, because in later periods, there's reports of men keeping on marching while horses fell from exhaustion.) The English are reported to have covered 270 miles in 14 days during the Hundred Years' War. Harold's march to meet William at Stamford covered 27 miles per day.

During the lead-up to the Battle of Hattin, the Crusaders covered 6 miles by noon (from Sephoria to a spring), and had another 9 miles to Tiberias, having already marched half the day. They elected to press on, were caught by Saladin's army, and were halted. They camped with no access to water, and by the next morning they were already horribly thirsty. (You can work and walk without water for a while, but protracted fighting without access to water is very bad.)

6 miles per day (this was attested in 1183 by a force led by Sir Guy, the Crusader commander at the Battle of Hattin) is a stand-out because it was so incredibly slow, because of the terrible circumstances.


You're referencing modern military marches. A medieval army from the times of the crusades was basically a small moving city, 6 miles a day sounds much more realistic to me than 20.

As it turns out, nope, 20 miles per day is pretty good. It is fast, but it is not too fast - it was clearly achieved by armies on the move, and forced marches could be faster. If they weren't in a hurry, or needed to not be exhausted by the time they arrived, they'd move slower, 10-15 miles per day.

Simply put, history proves that 6 miles per hour was far below standard, and 25+ miles was achievable, for Medieval/Ancient armies. Any argument to the contrary is nonsense.

Aedilred
2014-03-07, 08:08 AM
Six miles sounds slow, but it doesn't really surprise me. As mentioned, the logistics of moving that number of people (and the first and third Crusades at least were large!) are complicated and slow everything down enormously. Either you're hauling vast quantities of food with you - which means oxen, and they're not known for their speed - or you forage as you go along, which slows everything down. Terrain will also take a serious toll, given that the roads are probably not that good.

It is of course possible to move faster, and armies often did, but not in such numbers, not over such distance (hundreds of miles) and not without better infrastructure.

More generally, if you haven't seen this (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm) before, it should probably be your first stop in constructing a realistic society.

That doesn't give you such an idea of geography, of course. The key thing to remember is that the default speed in a pre-industrial society for both good and personnel is walking pace, i.e. about 3-4mph (possibly higher in that sort of society since the populace are likely to be fitter on average, but that's speculative and of course it will vary). It is possible to travel faster than that, of course (i.e. on horseback) but horses tire quickly so much of the time you won't push them faster than normal speed. You'll use a horse to go quickly over short distances, or in emergencies (including times of war). If you want to travel long distances quickly, you'll change horses along the route (there will probably be coaching inns set up along the commonly-travelled routes to accommodate this).

The other way to travel is of course by water, assuming you have a handy river to do so. This is generally much more efficient than chugging along badly-maintained roads, although not much quicker, if at all, because you're still most likely being propelled by your own (or your livestock's) energy. If you can travel under sail that would possibly be quicker but would depend on the wind. Still, water is almost always a better way to transport goods than road, and towns and cities along rivers will tend to develop port trades.


In settlement terms, village is a small settlement with a church. However, it's worth bearing in mind that a "village" might well not be a small cluster of houses, and might actually sprawl over a few miles in agrarian communities. If the land is peaceful and not often threatened, it's not a problem for farmers to live well away from their neighbours. If bandits or monsters are roaming the countryside, people will want to gather together for protection and walk to work in the morning.

In England, at least, a town is defined by the presence of a market. This can operate at whatever regularity - a particularly large town might have a market every day, but a small one might have one only once a month, or on certain feast days. Obviously, people have to get their goods to the market, and the town will also need a food and water supply. Taking into account the travel times, it will need a reasonable agrarian population within about ten miles of the town in order to support it. Nonperishables can be shipped from further afield, but the daily bread will have to come from nearby. For these purposes, cities are essentially like large towns, although in the way they function they might be slightly different, and larger cities can afford to ship goods from further away (essentially feeding off a support network of towns as a town feeds off its villages).

Taking all of this together it should be possible to work out roughly how many towns a given land can support, and how the population will be clustered around them. Generally towns will spring up in areas where the land is good and there is easy access, generally along rivers. Natural bottlenecks like valleys, estuaries, fords and (less naturally) bridges are good places for towns, because travellers will have to pass through there and the population will naturally become more dense.

Bear in mind of course that a lot of the land will not be cultivated, and even where it is it might not be good enough to support a town, so a village will be the largest settlement for many miles around.

Delta
2014-03-07, 08:28 AM
In better circumstances 15-18 miles per day was possible. Apparently, Mongol armies could travel 50 miles a day. (A bit surprising, to me, because in later periods, there's reports of men keeping on marching while horses fell from exhaustion.) The English are reported to have covered 270 miles in 14 days during the Hundred Years' War. Harold's march to meet William at Stamford covered 27 miles per day.

Thank you for making my point, all of the examples listed fall under the category of very specific, unusual or desperate circumstances. You absolutely cannot compare the Mongols, a nomadic people used to live on horseback, to a european army from the same time period. Their ridiculous mobility compared to everyone else was one of the things that made them such a terribly effective force.

The other examples are all cases where people absolutely had to cover long distances in short times, as I've said, that was absolutely possible, but not without huge risks and it definitely wasn't the average.

I never denied 6 miles a day is pretty slow and I'm sure a lot of armies did do better. But 20 miles a day as an average as way too high, you would not have been able to have a sizable army move that fast and keep it supplied for any significant amount of time.

Aedilred
2014-03-07, 09:01 AM
Thank you for making my point, all of the examples listed fall under the category of very specific, unusual or desperate circumstances. You absolutely cannot compare the Mongols, a nomadic people used to live on horseback, to a european army from the same time period. Their ridiculous mobility compared to everyone else was one of the things that made them such a terribly effective force.

The other examples are all cases where people absolutely had to cover long distances in short times, as I've said, that was absolutely possible, but not without huge risks and it definitely wasn't the average.
Absolutely. Looking at the other examples, they are also exceptional - the extreme examples tend to be. The march from Stamford to Hastings was by a relatively small group of elite troops through friendly territory in an emergency; the Agincourt campaign was through hostile territory, but on similar terms, and conducted more out of desperation than anything else.

It's also worth bearing in mind that many Mediaeval armies weren't that large by comparison with modern ones. In the west at least, fifteen thousand men was stretching the limit for a decent field army. Conscripts and cannon fodder might double that figure. Thirty to forty thousand would have included a lot of untrained peasantry and would have been exceptionally large. Even where a country could support more troops than that (a populous kingdom like France, say), actually getting more than that number of people into the field at any one time was very difficult. Even a major battle like Poitiers, between two of the major military powers in Europe at the time, had well under twenty thousand men total in the field. Eastern armies, where the infrastructure was better, were sometimes larger, but that's a different kettle of fish.

So when looking at travel times for armies, an army of a few thousand troops is going to be more representative than a thirty-thousand-man horde; that's the sort of army that might only be raised once a generation or so.

TheStranger
2014-03-07, 09:31 AM
Scale is hard. Because our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit (http://xkcd.com/915/). People are really, really bad with scale and spatial relationships. Especially modern people, who don't spend all that much time traveling at the pace that our ancestors traveled for millions of years.

As far as filling out a campaign setting, pretty much any scale you like works, as long as you understand what that scale is. You can have an entire campaign in an area the size of Ireland (for instance). What you probably can't have is vast deserts, steppes full of nomads, and a roman-analogue empire, sharing an area the size of Ireland. If you want all those things, you need a bigger scale. Smaller areas means less variety, but small differences matter more. If your campaign setting is the size of Ireland, you'll spend a lot of time on the towns, hills, forests, etc. that make it up. Larger areas means more variety, but also more large swaths of mostly-homogenous area. If your campaign setting is the size of Europe, you just label a small island "Ireland" and worry about the details if and when they come up.

For most fantasy, however, you're usually looking at some approximation of medieval/renaissance Western Europe, with a handful of nations, some wilderness, and maybe some "just off the map" areas like the western desert, eastern steppes, etc. What I suggest doing is deciding how large you want your campaign setting to be, then draw a rectangle about the same size on a real-world map. That probably gives you some sense of how many nations and what amount of terrain variety you should have.

Rhynn
2014-03-07, 09:54 AM
Thank you for making my point

Your point appeared to be that 6 is more realistic than 20. That's obviously nonsense, when armies would regularly move 2-3 times your "more realistic" rate, and would break 20 when they needed to march fast.


So when looking at travel times for armies, an army of a few thousand troops is going to be more representative than a thirty-thousand-man horde; that's the sort of army that might only be raised once a generation or so.

Smaller forces are going to move faster, as a rule, so I'm not sure what way you're arguing here.

I'm not sure what you're basing the characterisation of Harold's force as "small" and "elite" on. It's estimated to have been around 7,000, or between 5,000 and 13,000 men, which - according to you - is medium to large, and almost "stretching the limit" for field armies at the upper end. And elite compared to what? It was composed of housecarls (professional warriors) and the fyrd (local militia) - a typical composition. They are thought to have covered 200 miles in a week to get to Stamford Bridge.

10-15 or 12-18 miles per day are pretty good estimates for average speeds, one consertative and the other generous. It's clear that Medieval/Ancient armies could march as much as 20-25+ miles a day for a week or two at a time. (I'm not sure if that even qualifies as a forced march, if it can be maintained for weeks.)

Organization matters, of course: Roman legions (a paper strength of 5400 men) were expected to make 18 miles (20 Roman miles) per day as an ideal, and push a bit further (~23 miles) if they really had to. If you believe Julius Caesar, he once marched an army 63 miles in two days.

Again, 15-18 is a good estimate for actual performance (much closer to 20 than 6). Legionaries were obviously very disciplined and conditioned, but they also had to hump more gear on their own backs than many Medieval forces probably did.

SiuiS
2014-03-07, 09:59 AM
Dark Ages and Middle Ages supply trains were composed of some pretty stupid stuff that slowed them a lot and they only got worse the more high ranking nobility you had with you.


You say big, I say feature!



I would suggest looking up some old maps of Europe to try and get a sense of scale. Admittedly most older maps are pretty hard to get an accurate distance from, and the units have often changed since they were made, but it's still a useful thing to do. It might also help to look at a map of France, there's still a lot of old villages that date back a long time there.

France was my go-to, actually! I just wasn't sure how valid it was. I'll do that.



I'll just cheerfully assume that by "world" you mean "campaign setting," as in "playable area."

Yes, and no. Part of scale is "what is worth bothering with", because I tend to map too large or too small. I think 'known world' would be the best term? What clinched it was watching a dramatic re telling of the life of Confucius, and being sad that I don't have a 'Map of China' anymore.

So, yes, not not much no at all.


Map Size & Scale
1200 x 900 miles would be a fairly large playable area, with a lot of room for diversity.

All of China could fit on a map about 3000 x 2100 miles.

Europe from the North African coast to the Barents Sea and from Morocco to the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf would fit on a map about 3500 x 2800 miles.

I'd say 3200 x 2400 miles would make a good upper limit for an entire setting. It leaves you room to develop into later on: the Unknown World outside the bounds of common knowledge.

On a 4 x 3 foot map, you'd get 25 miles to an inch for the 1200x900 mile map, or 66.666 miles to an inch for 3200x2400. Maybe 2400x1800 miles would make more sense, or else 3600x2700.

This is pretty useful, as my mental numbers sort of don't get it. From me to Los Angeles, six hundred miles, is a handful of hours away.



Settlements
In settled areas, there's a village about every 6-12 miles, on average. Clusters of villages are going to be centered around larger (probably fortified) towns, usually on a river (or a lake, in a pinch); say, every 24-30 miles. Large cities will be along rivers and on the coast where the river flows into the sea.

Borderlands and poorly settled areas will be sparser.

Basically, there's going be several villages within a short walk from any settled place, a slightly larger town about a day away, and cities will be further apart. Settlement locations will be determined by geography - access to water. The bigger the settlement, the bigger the river/stream needs to be.
[quote]

Would this hold for other cultures? Middle eastern or classical Greece?

[quote]That's mostly because of the conditions. Grueling arid heat, sand, etc., make for slow going for an army - they'd have to stop to rest and move from oasis to oasis (because each man would require 2-3 gallons of water a day, and animals would require much more), and just the act of letting everyone drink would take a long while.

Well I did say crusades, Middle East, and desert :smalltongue:

I may have drawn the wrong conclusion, but it was helpful. It jarred me from my modern sensibilities! I'm fine with anachronisms of the sort, as long as they are helpful. "Medieval armies were stupid slow" is acceptable. I'll have to get kiero in here for data on Greek/roman equivalents.

Don't the better, faster armies also have pre-formed roads to travel on?



More generally, if you haven't seen this (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm) before, it should probably be your first stop in constructing a realistic society.


I have seen, actually! Still, always good.



In settlement terms, village is a small settlement with a church. However, it's worth bearing in mind that a "village" might well not be a small cluster of houses, and might actually sprawl over a few miles in agrarian communities. If the land is peaceful and not often threatened, it's not a problem for farmers to live well away from their neighbours. If bandits or monsters are roaming the countryside, people will want to gather together for protection and walk to work in the morning.

In England, at least, a town is defined by the presence of a market. This can operate at whatever regularity - a particularly large town might have a market every day, but a small one might have one only once a month, or on certain feast days. Obviously, people have to get their goods to the market, and the town will also need a food and water supply. Taking into account the travel times, it will need a reasonable agrarian population within about ten miles of the town in order to support it. Nonperishables can be shipped from further afield, but the daily bread will have to come from nearby. For these purposes, cities are essentially like large towns, although in the way they function they might be slightly different, and larger cities can afford to ship goods from further away (essentially feeding off a support network of towns as a town feeds off its villages).

Taking all of this together it should be possible to work out roughly how many towns a given land can support, and how the population will be clustered around them. Generally towns will spring up in areas where the land is good and there is easy access, generally along rivers. Natural bottlenecks like valleys, estuaries, fords and (less naturally) bridges are good places for towns, because travellers will have to pass through there and the population will naturally become more dense.

Bear in mind of course that a lot of the land will not be cultivated, and even where it is it might not be good enough to support a town, so a village will be the largest settlement for many miles around.

Neat!




While your point may be valid, stranger, that comic doesn't really help make it except for obliquely. And even then it might just be that I think weird. You highlight my problem though; take Ireland. All those small differences? What makes them matter? At what point does it become relevant to map stuff exactly instead of have an area with encounter maps or town maps or countryside maps?

You're saying the difference between Ireland's counties and all of Europe's countries is moot when they are drawn at the same scale. That's fine. What I want is an idea of which one to choose! Which one provides good framing for town, kingdom, country and warring dynasties all, when drawn on a large (coffee table sized) map? I think Rhynn hit the salient points I needed, for now. But we'll see.

Aedilred
2014-03-07, 10:15 AM
I'm not sure what you're basing the characterisation of Harold's force as "small" and "elite" on. It's estimated to have been around 7,000, or between 5,000 and 13,000 men, which - according to you - is medium to large, and almost "stretching the limit" for field armies at the upper end. And elite compared to what? It was composed of housecarls (professional warriors) and the fyrd (local militia) - a typical composition. They are thought to have covered 200 miles in a week to get to Stamford Bridge.
I was thinking of the march to Hastings (the original statement was ambiguous), although the march to Stamford Bridge was indeed probably more impressive. The Hastings journey is hypothesised at least to have been comprised mostly of huscarls, with the fyrd being assembled on arrival.

I think I expressed myself badly, but even 13,000 men including militia is well within the bounds I meant to describe; armies of twenty thousand men were not that uncommon, but the majority of that would be scratch troops with little training. Fifteen thousand professional troops would be exceptional. However an army of under ten thousand men the majority of whom were professional - as in the Agincourt campaign (probably) and Hastings (probably) would qualify as a relatively small, elite group, which explains why they're able to move so quickly. In either case, though, those campaigns are some way off the norm. Even on the way to Stamford, Harold was marching through friendly territory, so will have been able to move rather more quickly than in a normal campaign.

My point was, well, whatever, I think we've got bogged down in irrelevant detail as far as the topic goes - but that there are variables that can't be seen from a raw miles per day figure: size and quality of army is a major factor, and it's also worth considering what size of army a given territory is used to supporting: 30,000 men in eleventh-century western Europe is a much bigger army, relatively, than 30,000 men in contemporary Byzantium. Mongol armies are different again, etc.

Aedilred
2014-03-07, 10:34 AM
While your point may be valid, stranger, that comic doesn't really help make it except for obliquely. And even then it might just be that I think weird. You highlight my problem though; take Ireland. All those small differences? What makes them matter? At what point does it become relevant to map stuff exactly instead of have an area with encounter maps or town maps or countryside maps?

You're saying the difference between Ireland's counties and all of Europe's countries is moot when they are drawn at the same scale. That's fine. What I want is an idea of which one to choose! Which one provides good framing for town, kingdom, country and warring dynasties all, when drawn on a large (coffee table sized) map? I think Rhynn hit the salient points I needed, for now. But we'll see.
Soz for the double-post (unless I get ninjad) but this post wasn't here last time and it was easier to quote afresh.

I think the point is that it really depends on the sort of campaign you want to play, and how much diversity of terrain you're likely to want your players to experience. Ireland is certainly big enough to accommodate a campaign, and if you're spending a lot of time there you can play up the differences between these fields and those fields, this forest and that one, the way people here speak and the way people over there speak, and so on. But ultimately you'll be dealing with a bunch of hills, fields and forests, a lot of rain, and everyone talking in an Irish accent. The fauna across the land (and therefore the monsters) is likely to be pretty homogenous with only minor differences between each group. The kobolds might wear different-coloured hats, but they're all still kobolds, not lamias or whatever. Wherever you go, everything's different, but it's all also the same.

On the other hand, you might want to vary your terrain up a bit and have a desert bit, a mountain bit, a forest bit, a castles bit, and so forth. That will give you more diversity of culture and monsters as well, but you won't have the luxury of playing up minor differences within territories in the same way. In that case you'll want a whole continent to play with.

In the former case, you can model pretty much the whole of a small country in some detail, down to individual villages if you like, and let your players run all over it. In the latter case, you'll probably be modelling only small areas of larger countries and ignoring the rest, because it won't be relevant for your campaign. You probably won't need to map anything below the scale of major rivers, the capital city and whichever part of the country your players are supposed to visit.

Each approach has its merits and it's up to you which you pick. The former type probably has a more low fantasy vibe, and the latter is more classic epic fantasy quest, but that doesn't make either of them any more or less valid. The former also probably makes a better sandbox if you put the effort in; the latter is too big to give your players completely free rein over.

As far as what sort of map will look good goes, depending on your style I think either can be made to look great. On a country-sized map you'll be impressing people with the level of detail; on a continent-sized one it'll be the scale and the scope of it, the grand sweep of mountain ranges or the vast expanses of deserts, what have you. The former will probably have a denser, more cluttered style, and the latter a more sparse, arty one (although there are plenty of wonderful cluttered maps of Europe). If you like colouring in, a continent-map gives better opportunities for colour-coding your different polities, too. In fact the way you design your map will probably affect the way your players think of the setting: more detail will lead them to treat it as a smaller area, less detail and they'll think of it as bigger, almost regardless of what scale you tell them.

Felhammer
2014-03-07, 11:26 AM
In the real world, settlements are spaced one mile from each other. In stereotypical fantasy, settlements are spaced three or more miles from one another.

In general 8% of a realm's population was urban, with the other 92% being rural.

The Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe book states that if you multiply the rural population by 2, you get the total amount of acreage under cultivation. So if your realm had a million people, then it would need 1,840,000 acres under the till.

Generally speaking, villages and towns are serviced by 3 or 4 rural settlements. Towns are spaced 5 miles from one another, while cities were 20 miles apart. Additionally, realms usually only had one metropolis (which was the capital).

Remember that the largest western European country right now is France and it is smaller than Texas.

Depending on the strength of a given monarch, the territory that comprises his realm could actually be made up virtually independent nobles, while he himself directly controls only a sliver of land. In England, the monarch doled out land to his nobles in a piecemeal fashion (so they would have a castle here, a swathe of farm land there, etc.). A noble wound up with roughly the same amount of land and titles as a continental noble but his territory was spread out across the realm (which made it vastly more difficult for a noble to amass the resources necessary to rebel or challenge the King).

Rhynn
2014-03-07, 12:04 PM
Would this hold for other cultures? Middle eastern or classical Greece?

As far as I'm aware, the basics hold true for most pre-industrial (Medieval/Ancient) agricultural societies. The main factor is how densely populated the area is. The social structures are different, but the physical infrastructure tended to be similar. Maybe the "hub" was a temple run by bureaucrat-priests who tax the farms and re-distribute the food, or whatever....


Don't the better, faster armies also have pre-formed roads to travel on?

That probably varied, but paved roads were generally rare-ish, so I doubt most of those numbes assume them.

Edit: Oh, acreage... I've got basically the same numbers (2-4 people per acre of cropland), but when you add fallow, pasture, etc., we're talking more like 4 acres per person.

If you're interested about this on a detailed level, HârnManor, Lisa J. Steele's Fief, and Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe are great, in that order.

Aedilred
2014-03-07, 12:08 PM
Remember that the largest western European country right now is France and it is smaller than Texas.

Depending on the strength of a given monarch, the territory that comprises his realm could actually be made up virtually independent nobles, while he himself directly controls only a sliver of land. In England, the monarch doled out land to his nobles in a piecemeal fashion (so they would have a castle here, a swathe of farm land there, etc.). A noble wound up with roughly the same amount of land and titles as a continental noble but his territory was spread out across the realm (which made it vastly more difficult for a noble to amass the resources necessary to rebel or challenge the King).

Indeed. Although it's worth bearing in mind that both England and France are actually pretty bad examples of how things worked. They're obvious examples to reach for, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone, but for different reasons they're not really exemplary.

France is the largest country in western Europe now, but for most of its history it was the largest by far. Periodically a kingdom of similar size would be established elsewhere, but until the rise of dynastic imperialism in the early modern era (mostly by the Habsburgs), they didn't tend to last long. And France had a lot of issues with uppity nobles and losing effective control of territory and the little business of the Hundred Years War for a lot of its history, but it just about managed to hold itself together. It was just exceptionally big.

Note that that's one key difference between eastern and western Europe, though: kingdoms in eastern Europe managed to go bigger for longer than they generally did in the west.

England, by contrast, is administratively exceptional. While Germany was busy tearing itself apart in the 10th-11th centuries, and the French kings were watching their domain shrink almost visibly, England was centralising. The institutions of power were unusually concentrated, and the king of England arguably the most personally powerful in Europe. This had quite an effect on the way that society operated, at least until the later High Middle Ages when the old system was largely dismantled under pressure from the aristocracy and the church.

But then it's difficult to identify a "typical" state* in a world where they're all different. That in itself is something worth bearing in mind if you're designing more than one country for world-building purposes: they don't necessarily have to follow the same rules, be the same size or really look that much like each other in a lot of respects. It helps to have an idea of what you're doing, of course, so you don't go completely off-piste, but there's nothing unreasonable in having a decentralised state with lots of small-to-medium sized cities near to one with a massive capital city and hardly anything else above a town.

One thing I would actually take issue with about the Mediaeval Demographics Made Easy page is on universities, which he says to compute by continent. As per usual, of course, it would vary by period, but computing by polity (largest appropriate) seems to make more sense to me. Like anything else, a university is a status symbol, and a king/archbishop/whoever isn't going to hold back from establishing one just because there's a good one in the land next door that's perfectly capable of educating his people as well - if anything, that might serve as a motivation to create a better one! Of course, England remains a bad example, but just for point of reference, it had two universities in a population of 3-4 million by 1300, whereas if you were calculating top down from the figures provided on the MDME page you probably wouldn't have given it even one.

*inasmuch as that means anything either

Rhynn
2014-03-07, 12:11 PM
In the Medieval period, England and France were also both exceptional because they were at the opposite ends of population density: England had the lowest, France the highest, more or less.

Unfortunately, they tend to be the main sources in contemporary English-language non-academical material...

TheStranger
2014-03-07, 12:59 PM
The point of the comic wasn't really to make my argument, just to give proper credit for my quote. Anyway, if you want standard high fantasy, you probably want something roughly half the size of the U.S. (you could go the whole size of the U.S. if you want, but that would be on the large side). That gives you, at least potentially, a range of climate, terrain, culture, and language. By the way, I'm a huge fan of using the real world to take shortcuts in worldbuilding - not that you should just steal a real-world map and put fantasy labels on it, but you can definitely use the real world to help refine your sense of scale.

At this scale, you're looking at nations that are pretty large in practical terms (conveniently, the size of the states in the eastern U.S. is probably a fair approximation). Whether you're walking or riding, it takes a few weeks to cross an average-sized nation, though some would be smaller or larger. A traveling army might move a bit more slowly, though I suspect the six miles a day figure is close to a worst-case scenario (see if you can find maps of troop movements during the Revolutionary War, that's probably a good way to cheat). A single nation is big enough to have a bit of variety in climate, terrain, and culture. Crossing your map is going to take several months, maybe a bit less if you go by sea. Remember, the world is going to "feel" much larger than the eastern U.S. feels to you today, because communication and travel were slower. That area is going to contain pretty much all the variety of European history and culture, not be a single nation like it is today.

When you make your initial map, you're probably looking at 25 or 50 miles to a 1-inch square (give or take, I didn't do the math). Which means that at that point, you're not worried about the distance between settlements because there would be several within a single square. What you're really doing at that scale is marking out geography, nations, major towns and cities, and a rough approximation of what areas are settled and which ones are wilderness.

AMFV
2014-03-07, 01:18 PM
Thank you for making my point, all of the examples listed fall under the category of very specific, unusual or desperate circumstances. You absolutely cannot compare the Mongols, a nomadic people used to live on horseback, to a european army from the same time period. Their ridiculous mobility compared to everyone else was one of the things that made them such a terribly effective force.

The other examples are all cases where people absolutely had to cover long distances in short times, as I've said, that was absolutely possible, but not without huge risks and it definitely wasn't the average.

I never denied 6 miles a day is pretty slow and I'm sure a lot of armies did do better. But 20 miles a day as an average as way too high, you would not have been able to have a sizable army move that fast and keep it supplied for any significant amount of time.

20 is not a forced march pace, that's a regular pace for a modern marching army with full kit (so roughly 100+ lbs of equipment). Forced march pace is around 26 - 30+ depending on how aggressively you march. So, while training is a factor, the fact that Roman Legionare's regularly exceeded your pace is enough to suggest that 6 is not more realistic unless your army is made up of untrained peasants.

Rhynn
2014-03-07, 01:41 PM
Fitting the contents of the map to the scale is very important. Here (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-POOxuQI5ig0/TvrjHDh8CII/AAAAAAAAAig/kNUry4PYMC0/s1600/AH-E8-700.jpg) is a great example of a very detailed, realisic geographic map (at 20 km/12.5 miles to a hex) from HârnMaster. With hexes that large, there's just enough room to fit in all the 50-100 people manor villages (at approx. 2 mile intervals).

For playing in Hârn, just that map could set you up for a local campaign that could last a good while, but Hârn is a very "low fantasy"/"gritty fantasy" game with a focus on semi-realistic Medieval feel.

Here (http://blackavatar5.tripod.com/images/HARN_L1.JPG) is the island of Hârn on a very different scale. Only the largest settlements (royal castles & cities and ducal castles) are marked on the map.

Hârn was actually originally mapped on two scales, and the smaller maps (comparable to the first, above) broke up the hexes of the larger map into sub-hexes, making everything easy to match up by chess-style column-row notation (A1, etc.).

You also need to think about what map scale matters for your style of play. If I'm running HârnMaster, I need a very accurate scale, because you can bet every village on the way to anywhere will be mentioned. :smallbiggrin: But in other games, only the large cities matter... and you may not wish to map things out very accurately to begin with, going with general mapping and then adding notes about villages the PCs came across that you created on the fly (possibly using tables to make it easier and less work in the long run!).

Edit:

unless your army is made up of untrained peasants.

Yeah. Of course, sometimes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Crusade) that was the case, but it wasn't really the rule... :smallbiggrin:

1337 b4k4
2014-03-07, 01:45 PM
Something to consider:

All of this talk of armies is great, but settlements aren't built or determined by armies (though they may be rearranged by them). They're built by people. People seeking resources. A good walking pace is about 3 miles an hour. That means in a full day of walking a person can cover between 24 and 30 miles (8 - 10 hours of walking), and in general 30 miles in considered a daily traveling distance for horse and rider when not pushing things. Now, bring up google maps and break out the distance measuring tool (in the labs link) and check it out. Large cities (especially in the US but even europe too) tend to be a full days journey. Smaller towns and cities are in between, usually about a half a day.

So design your terrain and find the major source of water and resources. Place a major city there. Branch out from there, following either water or resources and place smaller villages and settlements within 5 to 10 miles. Then put the next major city at the next major water/resource site within 30 miles. And don't forget that even within the spaces between these villages and cities, there will probably be inhabitants, just not enough to qualify as a feature on a map.

Rhynn
2014-03-07, 01:48 PM
Settlements
In settled areas, there's a village about every 6-12 miles, on average. Clusters of villages are going to be centered around larger (probably fortified) towns, usually on a river (or a lake, in a pinch); say, every 24-30 miles. Large cities will be along rivers and on the coast where the river flows into the sea.

Yeah the 6-12 miles number was definitely excessive, 1-6 is probably much more accurate, although it's going to depend on the region.

Those villages will probably be in the size range of 50-150 people, maybe a bit smaller or a bit larger, depending on the terrain and region.

Aedilred
2014-03-07, 01:56 PM
20 is not a forced march pace, that's a regular pace for a modern marching army with full kit (so roughly 100+ lbs of equipment). Forced march pace is around 26 - 30+ depending on how aggressively you march. So, while training is a factor, the fact that Roman Legionare's regularly exceeded your pace is enough to suggest that 6 is not more realistic unless your army is made up of untrained peasants.
Roman legionaries moved exceptionally quickly, though. They had all those lovely roads to march on, they were full-time soldiers and they had a proper, rigorous military infrastructure and organisation, even down to their diet. Like the Mongols, they're off the charts among their contemporaries or even their successors in these terms: it's how they were able to conquer the world. For a pre-modern army, the marching pace of Roman legionaries is almost always going to be right at the upper end of the scale, and not representative of an army in the Middle Ages on the march. And (post-early) modern armies are even less comparable to Mediaeval ones.

Also, while armies comprised entirely of peasant rabble were uncommon, you don't need it to be for them to slow you down. An army is going to march at the pace of its slowest members, unless you make a conscious decision to leave them behind. If you let your units move at their own pace, they get strung out and vulnerable and you end up with a disaster like the Battle of Muret.

But as has been mentioned, the marching pace of armies is something of a tangent from what the thread's actually about, in any case.

Felhammer
2014-03-07, 02:00 PM
For the map, the size of each square of hex will say a lot about what happens to go on the map. If each cell is 25 miles large, then very little detail will be seen, other than the broad strokes that define the continent (mountain ranges, borders, cities, big rivers, seas, oceans, etc.).

If each cell is instead just 6 miles large, then far more detail can be included in the map, details that would be far more useful for a campaign (ruins, towns, villages, streams, hills, etc.).

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to make more than one map. Make a continental map, then drill down into a map of each Kingdom, then drill down and make a map of the areas where the campaign will be located. Each time you zoom in quite a bit and pick up more and more details as you go.


An interesting thing I think gets forgotten quite a bit by world builders is the fact that Kingdoms, especially in the early and middle medieval period, was how much of a patchwork kingdoms really were. Kings would only directly rule 50% or less of their realm, the rest being divided up by the nobles. Those nobles would then divide up their territory in the same fashion. As families intermarried, lands and titles would intermingle and get passed around. After centuries of this, a noble could easily wind up with a great diversity titles spread out across a kingdom, or even the continent. The Hapsburgs were masters of this. They were originally centered in the Austria-area but eventually expanded to include the Netherlands, Spain, Bohemia, Naples, Milan and Franche-Comté (as well as a smattering of other German territories).

All too often when people make medieval-inspired worlds, they forget that this is how real-life worked and instead adopt something more akin the early modern period, where Kingdoms were countries and had precise borders and there was little overlay between different countries.

Another aspect to keep in mind is why Kingdoms expend so much effort holding onto (or conquering) territories that perhaps should belong to a different kingdom. The Aquitaine for example. The Kings of England were able to acquire the territory through marriage. The region was well developed and quite wealthy. The tax revenue generated from the export of wine alone was greater than the tax revenue generated from all the shires in England. That is a stunning amount of wealth and goes to show you why the English Monarchs fought so hard to keep hold of their French territories. Back during the early medieval period, the Holy Roman Emperors fought campaign after campaign to control northern Italy because the tax revenue from those handful of city states was greater than revenue created by all of the Emperor's German holdings combined.

Ravens_cry
2014-03-07, 02:03 PM
In the real world, settlements are spaced one mile from each other. In stereotypical fantasy, settlements are spaced three or more miles from one another.

They are? Admittedly, this is coming from the land of the ice and snow, where polar bears roar and mounties roam, but that seems incredibly dense to me. It's certainly not as regular as that, no matter the scale.

AMFV
2014-03-07, 02:16 PM
Roman legionaries moved exceptionally quickly, though. They had all those lovely roads to march on, they were full-time soldiers and they had a proper, rigorous military infrastructure and organisation, even down to their diet. Like the Mongols, they're off the charts among their contemporaries or even their successors in these terms: it's how they were able to conquer the world. For a pre-modern army, the marching pace of Roman legionaries is almost always going to be right at the upper end of the scale, and not representative of an army in the Middle Ages on the march. And (post-early) modern armies are even less comparable to Mediaeval ones.

Also, while armies comprised entirely of peasant rabble were uncommon, you don't need it to be for them to slow you down. An army is going to march at the pace of its slowest members, unless you make a conscious decision to leave them behind. If you let your units move at their own pace, they get strung out and vulnerable and you end up with a disaster like the Battle of Muret.

But as has been mentioned, the marching pace of armies is something of a tangent from what the thread's actually about, in any case.

It is a tangent...

However, if your army is trained 6 miles per day is absurdly slow. That is 2-3 hours of walking at a fast pace. If you can only manage that then you are really bad off, and you're going to get flanked and cut off and all those lovely things.

TheStranger
2014-03-07, 02:26 PM
20 is not a forced march pace, that's a regular pace for a modern marching army with full kit (so roughly 100+ lbs of equipment). Forced march pace is around 26 - 30+ depending on how aggressively you march. So, while training is a factor, the fact that Roman Legionare's regularly exceeded your pace is enough to suggest that 6 is not more realistic unless your army is made up of untrained peasants.

I'm not an expert on armies, but I've done a lot of walking in my time. My thinking is that there's a lot of variation in how much time an army (or an individual) is going to cover. An army traveling in friendly territory can carry less stuff and cover more ground because they're going somewhere they can get more supplies. The Roman legionnaires often had roads, which make everything a lot easier. An army moving through unknown or hostile territory has much more challenging supply logistics and therefore moves slower. Terrain is also a major issue, of course - very few people cover 20+ miles a day in mountains with regularity, but it's not hard at all on flat terrain.

As far as the physical capability of a fit human, I feel a lot more qualified to comment. Humans are phenomenal over long distances - among the very best in the animal kingdom. Many people, with training, can and do run over 100 miles at a time. Granted, those people are outliers, but 20-30 miles in a day, even in full kit, is very achievable for a reasonably fit person. I averaged 18 miles a day for four months when I hiked the Appalachian Trail, and that was over rugged terrain and included off-days and the time it took me to work myself into shape. Which is irrelevant, except to say that the limiting factor for a traveling army is definitely logistics, not human endurance.

Personally, I think six miles is closer to a worst-case scenario (bad weather, rough terrain, supply issues, etc.) than an average. But if I were moving an army overland on foot, I also don't doubt that there would be weeks at a time when six miles was a good day because of weather, terrain, widespread illness, etc. Other times, conditions permitting, I'm sure an army could easily cover 20-30 miles.

Ravens_cry
2014-03-07, 02:36 PM
Towns and cities will be significantly influenced by geography. A natural harbour with a navigable river will be a hub of commerce and trade, for example. Where two rivers meet will also be a natural place to put a city.

Felhammer
2014-03-07, 02:51 PM
They are? Admittedly, this is coming from the land of the ice and snow, where polar bears roar and mounties roam, but that seems incredibly dense to me. It's certainly not as regular as that, no matter the scale.

Obviously terrain and climate will change the circumstances. Settlements would be densely placed along roads and rivers but then become more and more sparse as you headed into the hinterland. Remember, a settlement is more akin to a manor and a few huts for farmers (i.e. a throp). A handful of these throps would provide the food necessary for the non-farmers in a village to live.

Morty
2014-03-07, 03:03 PM
I'm also pretty awful at understanding the scale used by most fantasy. It's partly because I'm very bad at visualizing distance and measurements, but also because I've been raised to use the metric system, which fantasy doesn't use.

Rhynn
2014-03-07, 03:20 PM
They are? Admittedly, this is coming from the land of the ice and snow, where polar bears roar and mounties roam, but that seems incredibly dense to me. It's certainly not as regular as that, no matter the scale.

The 1-3 mile distance only applies to relatively densely populated areas in the Medieval period (i.e. England, continental western/central Europe, etc.). Most of Scandinavia, for instance, has never been densely populated - quite the opposite. And by now, there's been huge concentration of population into cities - many of the old clusters of farms etc. are gone by now.

Obviously, if you're doing something more like Finland or Sweden in the 1000s, you'll probably only get that 1-3 mile distance on the coasts in heavily populated areas, and the (possibly semi-permanent) villages further inland in the forests etc. could be days apart.


Remember, a settlement is more akin to a manor and a few huts for farmers (i.e. a throp). A handful of these throps would provide the food necessary for the non-farmers in a village to live.

Yeah, there's going to be many different types of settlement construction patterns, but the basic shared trait is that there's going to be a fortification of some sort within easy reach. This could be a fortified manor or motte-and-bailey at each village (or most villages) that serves as the house of the knight who rules the village(s); it could be the larger keep or castle of a baron or duke; it could be a hillt-fort (these go way back) that's basically just an enclosure on a hill-top (preferrably against a steep drop that can't be scaled without being killed by dropped rocks) with access to water and a food-storage, especially useful against cattle-raiding (much of the enclosure would be empty space, and the animals would be herded there when raiders approach). More dispersed settlements are more likely to have heavy fences or walls or even moats with palisades, etc., because they'd need to defend themselves where they are. Really tiny settlements (1-3 extended families, 10-20 people) might not have much by the way of defense, as the people would just scatter if an attack was coming, etc.

Morty: Oh, rough conversion is easy: 1.6 km to a mile, 0.3 m to a foot, 0.9 m to a yard, 0.45 kg to a pound (2.2 pounds to a kg).

SiuiS
2014-03-07, 06:27 PM
For the map, the size of each square of hex will say a lot about what happens to go on the map. If each cell is 25 miles large, then very little detail will be seen, other than the broad strokes that define the continent (mountain ranges, borders, cities, big rivers, seas, oceans, etc.).

If each cell is instead just 6 miles large, then far more detail can be included in the map, details that would be far more useful for a campaign (ruins, towns, villages, streams, hills, etc.).

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to make more than one map. Make a continental map, then drill down into a map of each Kingdom, then drill down and make a map of the areas where the campaign will be located. Each time you zoom in quite a bit and pick up more and more details as you go.


An interesting thing I think gets forgotten quite a bit by world builders is the fact that Kingdoms, especially in the early and middle medieval period, was how much of a patchwork kingdoms really were. Kings would only directly rule 50% or less of their realm, the rest being divided up by the nobles. Those nobles would then divide up their territory in the same fashion. As families intermarried, lands and titles would intermingle and get passed around. After centuries of this, a noble could easily wind up with a great diversity titles spread out across a kingdom, or even the continent. The Hapsburgs were masters of this. They were originally centered in the Austria-area but eventually expanded to include the Netherlands, Spain, Bohemia, Naples, Milan and Franche-Comté (as well as a smattering of other German territories).

All too often when people make medieval-inspired worlds, they forget that this is how real-life worked and instead adopt something more akin the early modern period, where Kingdoms were countries and had precise borders and there was little overlay between different countries.

Another aspect to keep in mind is why Kingdoms expend so much effort holding onto (or conquering) territories that perhaps should belong to a different kingdom. The Aquitaine for example. The Kings of England were able to acquire the territory through marriage. The region was well developed and quite wealthy. The tax revenue generated from the export of wine alone was greater than the tax revenue generated from all the shires in England. That is a stunning amount of wealth and goes to show you why the English Monarchs fought so hard to keep hold of their French territories. Back during the early medieval period, the Holy Roman Emperors fought campaign after campaign to control northern Italy because the tax revenue from those handful of city states was greater than revenue created by all of the Emperor's German holdings combined.



Adventurer, Conquerer, King covers a lot of that actually. The reason I'm not using it wholesale is because it's not a mapping tool, it's a kingdom divisor! That's why all my prior attempts at using it failed. I was misapplying the tool. :smallsmile:

My plan is to go back and forth between systems based on the needs of any particular campaign. Tribes in a region who are the first to discover clericism (D&D 3.5), preclassical small city states founding on the frontier and solidifying alliances (ACKS), mythic heroes prevailing throughout the known world (mazes & minotaurs), the collapsed world being plunder and looted by the survivors (OD&D), dark ages grit in a dangerous and nasty world full of murder and betrayal on the personal scale (nWoD), etc.

This will inform my final decision a bit, but I did (and do!) still need numbers to percolate over so I know what each choice means. I am currently leaning towards a Romance of the Three Kingdoms / All of the classical world size, because from there I can zoom in as much as needed, but will likely never have to zoom out. If my players decide to head (figuratively) from Rome to the Mongol steppes, I'll just pull out a new map.


They are? Admittedly, this is coming from the land of the ice and snow, where polar bears roar and mounties roam, but that seems incredibly dense to me. It's certainly not as regular as that, no matter the scale.

Somewhat. Maybe not center to center; but from border to border I could see it. At least in America.


I'm also pretty awful at understanding the scale used by most fantasy. It's partly because I'm very bad at visualizing distance and measurements, but also because I've been raised to use the metric system, which fantasy doesn't use.

Key factor is relational. At a walk with others I can cover four miles or about 6.5km an hour, geared up and with a purpose I hit 5mph/8km. Ten feet is about the size of two parking spaces. A hundred feet is 20 seconds away. Twenty feet is the furthest limit of my ability to throw most things. Three stone is my comfort limit with arm carrying something. A torch lasts as long as a lord of the rings movie. Most spell durations are two or three songs.

Relate hear weird figures to how you yourself handle them and they get easier. :smallsmile:

Aedilred
2014-03-07, 07:39 PM
Somewhat. Maybe not center to center; but from border to border I could see it. At least in America.
Bear in mind, of course, that America is a far from ideal model of Mediaeval population distribution; far worse than England or France, because the settlement has been almost entirely modern, with the exception only of native settlements, and they didn't follow a European model of proto-statehood anyway.

That said, the spacing of settlements even in Europe might be more uniform than one might initially assume. Before the industrial and agricultural revolutions, the limit to the number of people a given amount of land could support stayed pretty flat, and people would naturally have distributed in a relatively regular fashion to maximise productivity (of course, pre-enclosure the idea of the land's productivity being maximised is a joke, but still, the principle is good).

But European settlements still tend to have a much more haphazard feel to them, since they tended to arise organically rather than being planned. That goes to both location and street plan - pretty much the only towns and cities in Europe that have anything like a grid pattern of streets were either built or extensively rebuilt in the modern period. Check out, for instance, a street plan of the City of London. Believe it or not, that's actually the improved version. (Wren wanted to rebuild it in a grid pattern after the fire; the people wouldn't wear it. By contrast, Paris was extensively cleared and rebuilt with attractive wide boulevardes and a sane street pattern in the 1860s by Boney the Third and Hausmann).

Arbane
2014-03-07, 08:02 PM
I'm also pretty awful at understanding the scale used by most fantasy. It's partly because I'm very bad at visualizing distance and measurements, but also because I've been raised to use the metric system, which fantasy doesn't use.

Try RuneQuest - it uses the metric system.

SiuiS
2014-03-07, 08:08 PM
Och. I may have to put this on the back burner. Turns out those cheap-o pads aren't so cheap anymore; I can only find an easel pad at $30+, easily six times what I got the first pad for years ago. I'll have to hope for a walmart trip in the future. But until then, map making plans are canned...

Morty
2014-03-08, 07:34 AM
Morty: Oh, rough conversion is easy: 1.6 km to a mile, 0.3 m to a foot, 0.9 m to a yard, 0.45 kg to a pound (2.2 pounds to a kg).

Well, yeah, conversion is easy enough when I stop and do it. But, nonetheless, I have to stop and do it. I can't really visualize it as I go along while reading.



Key factor is relational. At a walk with others I can cover four miles or about 6.5km an hour, geared up and with a purpose I hit 5mph/8km. Ten feet is about the size of two parking spaces. A hundred feet is 20 seconds away. Twenty feet is the furthest limit of my ability to throw most things. Three stone is my comfort limit with arm carrying something. A torch lasts as long as a lord of the rings movie. Most spell durations are two or three songs.

Relate hear weird figures to how you yourself handle them and they get easier. :smallsmile:

That does sound like a good way to do it.

Yora
2014-03-08, 07:52 AM
The scale of a map depends on the scale of the setting.

If you play a bunch of people from Norway raiding north England, you need a world map as large as the North Sea. If you play a bunch of people from Norway just a relatively short time later, exploring the farthest reaches of their trade network, you need a map that includes all of Europe, all of the Mediterranean, western Russia, North Africa, parts of the Middle East, and parts of northeast America. And it wouldn't even be ludicrously unrealistic to get from one side of the world map to the other in a single campaign with the same characters.

To make a world map, it's best to start out by thinking what parts of the world characters in the campaign will actually be likely to visit. In many cases, you can even have foreigners from far away places, who have a somewhat defined culture, but whose homelands lie beyond the edge of the map. It's pointless to create a whole continent for a game that is really just about rivalries between counts and barons of a single small country like England. And while it's true that for the medieval history of England, you have characters coming or going to France, Scotland, and Ireland all the time, the whole Arthurian legend stuff takes place only in the tiny country of England, and not even anywhere close to all of it.

SiuiS
2014-03-08, 08:36 AM
That is complicated by the idea of a campaign map, Yora. Ideally, this should carry me through many games for the next twenty years or so.

Yora
2014-03-08, 09:26 AM
You can still make a decent estimate. For example, if you want to make a historic game about european knights, your map still won't have to include America, China, or Australia. You could of course also have games set in 11th century America or China, but that would effectively a completely different setting with almost no visible overlap.

Forgotten Realms is a big setting, but it's totally big enough just as the continent Faerűn. Most people probably don't even know that there are also the continents Zakara, Maztica, and Kara-Tur, which in theory pretty much all characters could decide to visit.
How much you need can be very small or very big. But in either case, it makes a lot of sense to think through how large you will really need it.

Specifically about distances, you should consider how fast characters would usually expected to travel and how long you want them to be on the road.
For my homebrew setting, I only need to have a very small number of settlements and urban centers, but traveling between them is a long and major undertaking worth of a full adventure in it's own right, so the scale of the map ends up quite large, even though content-wise, the setting is actually quite small-scale.

Gnoman
2014-03-08, 10:30 AM
Well, yeah, conversion is easy enough when I stop and do it. But, nonetheless, I have to stop and do it. I can't really visualize it as I go along while reading.


Rough estimates help. Halve pounds to get kilograms, treat 3 feet as one meter, etc. It isn't quite accurate, but it's close enough to give the sense of proportion you need without using too much effort. If you can internalize a few direct comparisons (for a modern comparison, a 155mm gun is the same as a 6-inch one, and a 203mm is an 8-inch (these I found useful to memorize due to reading military fiction set prior to NATO standardization, when the US military still used standard, most countries used metric, and the British used their own incomprehensible system)).

Jay R
2014-03-08, 12:13 PM
I think one of the facts keeping us from agreeing is that we aren't all talking about the same situation.

Are you following a Roman road, a goat track, undeveloped fields, or cutting your way through jungle brush?

Is is flat, rolling, hilly, or mountainous?

How many streams do you have to cross? How many crevasses? How many rivers? Are there bridges?

Do you know the road and have a map, or do you just know which general way you're going, or are you exploring?

Are there enemies or potential enemies you have to hide from? How about wild animals? Do you have to avoid all roads and clear country?

How far out of the way do you have to go to avoid lakes, cliffs, swamps, quicksand, uncrossable rivers, impenetrable jungle, etc.?

Are you walking, or riding? Are there any carts or wagons? (Carts and wagons often make you turn around to avoid a simple 10 foot drop. And they slow down incredible on bump terrain.)

How far afield do you have to go to find water? Do you have to hunt for food? If a wagon wheel breaks or a horse throws a shoe or a packstrap breaks, how long will it take to fix it? Can you fix it? (As Gallagher once said, all over the America there are farms with two broken wagon wheels at the front gate.)

Do you stop for rain, snow, high winds, winter, monsoon?

20 miles a day with no wagons on good roads with inns for food seems pretty easy.

6 miles a day seems reasonable for exploring wilderness.

But I suspect that 6 miles a day is generous with wagons in undiscovered broken country with no roads and potential enemies.

To put it in perspective, the Lewis and Clark expedition traveled at about 6 1/2 miles per day From St. Louis to the Pacific. but close to 18 miles per day from the Pacific back to St. Louis.

So probably everybody is right. (And what fun is that on the internet?)

SiuiS
2014-03-09, 10:04 AM
After deliberation to the point of fatigue, I think I am happiest with the ACKS triple scale map (http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/hexomancy-making-the-perfect-maps-for-adventurer-conqueror-king/), and with the ability of the middle range map to function as a hex crawl map set-up. Abstracting back and forth through time, and system, this way covers my backside the most when I want to run a prehistoric game, and none of the post-apocalyptic trappings of ruined civilizations exist, and then switch forward to when they would exist, etc.

Want to figure out scale of conflict for Three Kingdoms china, and mythical Greece, before putting anything down on paper. But the intention is there! It's more starting point than I had, certainly.

Rhynn
2014-03-09, 04:23 PM
That is complicated by the idea of a campaign map, Yora. Ideally, this should carry me through many games for the next twenty years or so.

You're getting the cart ahead of the horse, there. :smallwink: Start with a map of the area the first campaign will start in. The ACKS numbers (40x30 24-mile hexes, and a more accurate map of 40x30 6-mile hexes) are great for a start, generally speaking.

Frankly, that 40x30 24-mile hex map should be plenty of many, many, many campaigns, but eventually, you might need to expand. That's when you create more maps.

Hey, you've got 20 years to make those maps. Start small and simple. :smallwink:

There's a great temptation to start at the largest possible scale, and it goes along with a style of GMing that's always been relatively popular, and is even occasionally supported - the AD&D 2E World Builder's Guidebook seriously starts you out mapping the entire planet, figuring out the prevailing winds, etc. That's great if you need all of that, but otherwise, it's just unnecessary work. I'd much rather start by mapping a dungeon, then mapping the area around the dungeon for maybe 100 miles, and mapping the town the PCs go back to between trips to the dungeon, and then mapping the kingdom and its neighbors, and then mapping the continent or part of the world they're all in, and maybe eventually mapping neighboring continents, etc., according to the demands of the campaign.

You can make rough maps early on, to serve as reminders ("There's a great sea here, and another continent behind it, and an archipelago over here"), but don't put a lot of work into those.

How often does anyone get any use out of the map of Toril (http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120607163505/forgottenrealms/images/2/23/Toril.jpg), anyway? (What the heck is that continent in the East? Never heard of it, and I can place Kara-Tur, Zakhara, and Maztica on that map...)

Berenger
2014-03-09, 04:36 PM
Six miles is still ungodly slow, even for a supply train though. I would expect them to be able to cover 10 or 12 at the least, although training may have a lot to do with it as well. And that's considering that a modern troop movement can move (marching) 26+ miles in a day.

Yeah, but modern troops won't bring along sick comrades or a bunch of civilians including children. They don't need to forage for food and don't need a lot of time to prepare food. I don't know how much "maintenance work" modern soldiers have to do to keep their equipment in good order (I imagine quite a lot), but I'd guess that medieval equipment needs even more maintenance.

Yora
2014-03-09, 04:44 PM
There is a difference if you make a certain distance in one day, or an average disance per day over a longer period.

SiuiS
2014-03-09, 06:24 PM
You're getting the cart ahead of the horse, there. :smallwink:

Hey, you've got 20 years to make those maps. Start small and simple.

Well, uh... Hmm. That's a good point.

I don't want to start at the largest possible scale. There's always larger; especially when you include fuzzy mythic details like walking at enough to the east moving to the element plane of earth or something. That's why the questions about real world data points on kingdom size and town distance and stuff, so I could make an educated stab!



How often does anyone get any use out of the map of Toril (http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120607163505/forgottenrealms/images/2/23/Toril.jpg), anyway? (What the heck is that continent in the East? Never heard of it, and I can place Kara-Tur, Zakhara, and Maztica on that map...)

I think that eastern continent is that weird abeir-thing that they wedged back into canonicity with the whole 4e sundering thing.

That said, if I knew here was an entire continent in Faerun that easy saddled with all that needless continuity? I'd sail for that immediately. I'm far more interested in exploration, discovery, frontiersmanship and settling than in the politics of fiat wizards.

AMFV
2014-03-10, 05:36 AM
Yeah, but modern troops won't bring along sick comrades or a bunch of civilians including children. They don't need to forage for food and don't need a lot of time to prepare food. I don't know how much "maintenance work" modern soldiers have to do to keep their equipment in good order (I imagine quite a lot), but I'd guess that medieval equipment needs even more maintenance.

As people have stated Roman Legions on foot frequently made distances of 30+ miles a day, so it's not a matter of era, just a matter of discipline. 26 is not unusual, that's given bad terrain, having to rest, and only being able to march eight or so hours a day. And that's with modern gear, which is frankly much much heavier than anything foot soldiers have ever carried previously, 100+ lbs of gear would have been unheard of in the past, but it's a fact of life now. There's actually a really good book on the "The Soldier's Load", which talks about this sort of thing. Also modern military units don't have horses, (which are better than vehicles in that they can traverse rough terrain.) Meaning that everything you have has to be carried. Generally you wouldn't hunt for an army, that'd be absurd. You'd depopulate any area too fast, and the troop movements would drive off almost all of the game, what you eat you'd bring with you, it'd probably be hard bread, like hard tack which will keep for months and is (relatively) light.


There is a difference if you make a certain distance in one day, or an average disance per day over a longer period.

24-26 miles a day, is an average, that's normal, that's not unusual or absurd, less than that would suggest that something went wrong.

SiuiS
2014-03-10, 05:46 AM
As people have stated Roman Legions on foot frequently made distances of 30+ miles a day, so it's not a matter of era, just a matter of discipline. 26 is not unusual, that's given bad terrain, having to rest, and only being able to march eight or so hours a day. And that's with modern gear, which is frankly much much heavier than anything foot soldiers have ever carried previously, 100+ lbs of gear would have been unheard of in the past, but it's a fact of life now. There's actually a really good book on the "The Soldier's Load", which talks about this sort of thing. Also modern military units don't have horses, (which are better than vehicles in that they can traverse rough terrain.) Meaning that everything you have has to be carried. Generally you wouldn't hunt for an army, that'd be absurd. You'd depopulate any area too fast, and the troop movements would drive off almost all of the game, what you eat you'd bring with you, it'd probably be hard bread, like hard tack which will keep for months and is (relatively) light.

Romans carried sickles to harvest as they marched. There was a reason wars were seasonal. Of course they depopulated places as they went – this is why scorched earth on retreat worked at all. I think you're drastically undervaluing the basic maxim of "an army marches on it's stomach".

AMFV
2014-03-10, 05:54 AM
Romans carried sickles to harvest as they marched. There was a reason wars were seasonal. Of course they depopulated places as they went – this is why scorched earth on retreat worked at all. I think you're drastically undervaluing the basic maxim of "an army marches on it's stomach".

I was saying that hunting was impossible, and I don't know how much gathering you could do, soldiers aren't trained farmers. I suspect that they did less gathering and more seizing. Also if you're stopping to harvest, you'd have to know where the fields were, and you'd have to be willing to slow down your movement, which would allow the enemies to gather intelligence and dig in, all of which are bad things. I can't imagine that you'd be able to conduct a harvest with a marching army, I suspect that the sickles were not used for that purpose, actually I'd bet money that the sickles were used for trailblazing, which makes sense for an army, over harvesting, which doesn't.

Edit: I'm not saying that you wouldn't need a supply train, but if you could harvest your own food, you wouldn't. And armies definitely, definitely, definitely had supply trains.

SiuiS
2014-03-10, 06:40 AM
The problem, AMFV, is you're saying one thing and historical facts are saying quite the opposite. Yes, you're incredulous – but this actually happened.

I think we are having some Backfire Effect here. (http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/)

AMFV
2014-03-10, 06:46 AM
The problem, AMFV, is you're saying one thing and historical facts are saying quite the opposite. Yes, you're incredulous – but this actually happened.

I think we are having some Backfire Effect here. (http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/)

Edit: I'm actually mistaken here. Sorry.

However, I can't imagine that it was a regular practice, if only because it's not exactly as efficient as a supply train might have been and despite this fact, we know that the Romans moved much faster than the 6 mile per day, that was discussed earlier. I suspect that lengthy campaigns probably involved long periods of waiting where you'd forage, and then sharp periods of movement where you would use the supplies you had gathered, since to my mind that would be the most efficient use of time, although I don't really have time to do that research, that would be my suspicion.

Edit 2: It does appear that it was not a regular practice. "They went to the towns not the fields." was a direct quote from a Roman source, I suspect that that confiscating or requisitioning was vastly preferred for the reasons that I outlined earlier.

Waar
2014-03-10, 06:48 AM
soldiers aren't trained farmers.

In some time periods (and places), that is exactly what most "soldiers" were.

AMFV
2014-03-10, 06:50 AM
In some time periods (and places), that is exactly what most "soldiers" were.

But not in the time period and place that we were discussing.

Edit: Also it appears to have been unpopular and not as effective as simply confiscating stuff, and was apparently mostly done by civilian followers and not the actual fighting forces, although the book seems to be not terribly clear with regards to that, representing some dissension in historical sources apparently.

Delta
2014-03-10, 07:10 AM
As people have stated Roman Legions on foot frequently made distances of 30+ miles a day, so it's not a matter of era, just a matter of discipline.

Again we're in a completely different ballpark here. The Roman Legions were obviously not a medieval army, and for the whole period, not one military force in Europe matched the logistics and professionalism of Rome at the peak of its power. Medieval Europe was quite literally built on the ruins of the Roman Empire and for most of the period, people tried to pick up the pieces trying to emulate its lost glory.

You always focus on the soldiers themselves, but they are by far not the most important factor. It's support and logistics that slowed medieval armies down. Rome was a hugely advanced, centralized state that built a network of streets and support for a professional army of such size and discipline that Europe wouldn't see again for over a millenium afterwards. Roman armies could afford to move rididculously fast by later standards because they had a logistics network in place to support them basically everywhere they went within their Empire, which spanned the majority of the known world back then.

A medieval army, on the other hand, had to support itself, professional soldiers were very rare in that period, so of course discipline was much lower, again, those armies were like small moving cities, with families, merchants, prostitutes and a lot of other people following the armies around, it's not hard to see how this slowed those armies down to a crawl. And there simply was no centralized military, support, there really was no centralized anything compared to Roman times, even when there was a "Holy Roman Emperor" the medieval Empire was basically a bunch of mostly independent rules paying lip service to a chosen Emperor, you cannot compare this to Rome, that's not even the same ballgame anymore.

Only during the last years of the medieval era did we see the rise of the mercenary as a professional soldier and only in the 30 Years War did it reach its "Golden Era" which of course massively increased mobility.


24-26 miles a day, is an average, that's normal, that's not unusual or absurd, less than that would suggest that something went wrong.

Where do you get this number from? I'd really like to see a couple sources of this being a "normal, average" speed of a medieval army. Most, really all examples given so far of fast moving armies have been Mongols, Roman Legions and desparation marches, which for the reasons given have really nothing to do with the question.

AMFV
2014-03-10, 07:23 AM
Again we're in a completely different ballpark here. The Roman Legions were obviously not a medieval army, and for the whole period, not one military force in Europe matched the logistics and professionalism of Rome at the peak of its power. Medieval Europe was quite literally built on the ruins of the Roman Empire and for most of the period, people tried to pick up the pieces trying to emulate its lost glory.

You always focus on the soldiers themselves, but they are by far not the most important factor. It's support and logistics that slowed medieval armies down. Rome was a hugely advanced, centralized state that built a network of streets and support for a professional army of such size and discipline that Europe wouldn't see again for over a millenium afterwards. Roman armies could afford to move rididculously fast by later standards because they had a logistics network in place to support them basically everywhere they went within their Empire, which spanned the majority of the known world back then.

A medieval army, on the other hand, had to support itself, professional soldiers were very rare in that period, so of course discipline was much lower, again, those armies were like small moving cities, with families, merchants, prostitutes and a lot of other people following the armies around, it's not hard to see how this slowed those armies down to a crawl. And there simply was no centralized military, support, there really was no centralized anything compared to Roman times, even when there was a "Holy Roman Emperor" the medieval Empire was basically a bunch of mostly independent rules paying lip service to a chosen Emperor, you cannot compare this to Rome, that's not even the same ballgame anymore.

Only during the last years of the medieval era did we see the rise of the mercenary as a professional soldier and only in the 30 Years War did it reach its "Golden Era" which of course massively increased mobility.



Where do you get this number from? I'd really like to see a couple sources of this being a "normal, average" speed of a medieval army. Most, really all examples given so far of fast moving armies have been Mongols, Roman Legions and desparation marches, which for the reasons given have really nothing to do with the question.

Well to be honest the speed of a marching army has very little to do with the question in any case. The general reason that might be useful is to determine the distance that people could travel and carry things from one place to another, and for that 10 or so miles a day is fairly leisurely.

Waar
2014-03-10, 07:24 AM
But not in the time period and place that we were discussing.

Edit: Also it appears to have been unpopular and not as effective as simply confiscating stuff, and was apparently mostly done by civilian followers and not the actual fighting forces, although the book seems to be not terribly clear with regards to that, representing some dissension in historical sources apparently.

Hey, just because most soldiers in (insert other time or place here) were framers doesn't mean they actually did any farming while at war :smalltongue:

SiuiS
2014-03-10, 07:25 AM
What about armies if the three kingdoms period in China?

Or soldiers of Greek city-states?

AMFV
2014-03-10, 07:29 AM
What about armies if the three kingdoms period in China?

Or soldiers of Greek city-states?

I really don't have the knowledge to answer that particular question in regard to the former.

For the latter it would depend on your city state, the Greeks didn't really have an offensive army in the same way that we would class it today, they didn't have as many large scale offensive campaigns (before the Macedonians of course) and were less focused on the logistical aspects than other forces because they didn't have as many large extended supply chains. As to the farming thing, it would depend too heavily on your city state, most of the Greek city states had a serf-type system, or a slave system (like the Helots in Sparta) and would frown on having the peasantry be armed because it could be politically destabilizing.

However the Greeks are an interesting example for this, because they existed in a fairly small scale environment as compared to other regional powers (The Persians for example), while there was expansion it was more of a cultural expansion than an active military expansion in most circumstances. However the Spartans did have some offensive campaigns (and they were most certainly not farmers).

Edit: And to be fair most of that was done from memory of reading about Punic wars, over ten years ago, so I can't make too much claim to it's factual accuracy, with the exception of the spartans using slave agriculture (that bit I remember).

SiuiS
2014-03-10, 07:47 AM
Well to be honest the speed of a marching army has very little to do with the question in any case. The general reason that might be useful is to determine the distance that people could travel and carry things from one place to another, and for that 10 or so miles a day is fairly leisurely.

Aye. For laying foundational layers of a map, you'd want to know the reasons things are where they are. Some outliers would need explanation; "these guys could move eight miles through the woods at night in full kit, so they had a small garrison out here in the thick forest" for example. Little weirdnessss like that. If all the fortified towns are exactly one day's march in ridiculously heavy kit apart along roads, that's a neat little fact that can improve atmosphere.

The problem is, assuming every iteration of civilization was identical. They all moved at optimal speed with optimal tech and used optimal tactics because that's what abstracting the game rules tells us. I want weirdness like history being off due toa. Lunar calendar, one society having used metric instead of imperial but just leaving numbers, another havig a strong sense of feng shui and designing it's roads to operate across perceived ley lines.

If we say no army ever did anything stupid, we lose that. Yes, the crusaders marched six miles through the desert, oasis to oasis, with a small village followif them, wearing full regalia (the better to seem splendid) and setting up churches and breweries and small villages and bringing smiths and maids and chefs for no raisin. But that's still six miles, it's still interesting even if it is dumb, and it's worth noting how that affected their war machine and how their war machine affected their society. Because stupid quirks matter.

AMFV
2014-03-10, 07:51 AM
Aye. For laying foundational layers of a map, you'd want to know the reasons things are where they are. Some outliers would need explanation; "these guys could move eight miles through the woods at night in full kit, so they had a small garrison out here in the thick forest" for example. Little weirdnessss like that. If all the fortified towns are exactly one day's march in ridiculously heavy kit apart along roads, that's a neat little fact that can improve atmosphere.

The problem is, assuming every iteration of civilization was identical. They all moved at optimal speed with optimal tech and used optimal tactics because that's what abstracting the game rules tells us. I want weirdness like history being off due toa. Lunar calendar, one society having used metric instead of imperial but just leaving numbers, another havig a strong sense of feng shui and designing it's roads to operate across perceived ley lines.

If we say no army ever did anything stupid, we lose that. Yes, the crusaders marched six miles through the desert, oasis to oasis, with a small village followif them, wearing full regalia (the better to seem splendid) and setting up churches and breweries and small villages and bringing smiths and maids and chefs for no raisin. But that's still six miles, it's still interesting even if it is dumb, and it's worth noting how that affected their war machine and how their war machine affected their society. Because stupid quirks matter.

I'm not arguing that the crusades marched faster than that, or that such a thing couldn't happen. Only that it would be a significant of problems. I'm not sure which Crusade that was, but if it was anything after the first, it was probably not very well managed, and not all that successful. Certainly there wasn't a strong trained body of regular soldiers at that time in Europe, with the possible exception of Swiss Mercenaries (who certainly trained) or you could argue, certain parts of Viking culture. There certainly was a culture that fostered certain warlike elements, but not a disciplined fighting force in general.

Brother Oni
2014-03-10, 07:55 AM
What about armies if the three kingdoms period in China?

It's complicated. The Han used a centralised volunteer force, while the later Wei primarily relied on the Buqu, military households where soldiering was a hereditary profession.
They were expected to serve for life and if the oldest male was unable to serve then another male relative would take up the position.

That said, during most of the Three Kingdoms, soldiers would be raised from the peasantry so they often had other professions.

I'm still digging with regard to Shu and Wu, but I would think a mixture of the old Han system and whatever conscripts they could raise (or whoever was willing to follow Liu Bei in Shu's case).


However the Spartans did have some offensive campaigns (and they were most certainly not farmers).

As amply demonstrated (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI6sARmxEuc). :smalltongue:

SiuiS
2014-03-10, 08:00 AM
And?

By arguing solely about a well-trained and logistically sound professional military force that upholds discipline over honor or other selfish concepts, in order to explain why you brought your modern military info in, you're making it look like you advocate all militaries being judged by that measure. It's a simple conversational misunderstanding. This applies to me as well though. So I am half talking to you, half reasoning something out that hopefully I will remember in the future.

Sure, the crusades were terribly managed. That's the point! They still have more traction amongst the lay folk than the more efficient but homogenous armies. I already said I have no problems with anachronisms; D&D already has ridiculous weapon weights, why not ridiculously slow processions? Why not ridiculously heavy and useless kit?

Aedilred
2014-03-10, 11:35 AM
Or soldiers of Greek city-states?
As with the Mediaeval period, it depends. There's a big difference between Greece in the Mycenaean period and classical antiquity. If you're looking to take inspiration from Greek myth, that's the former period - the Age of Heroes basically covers the ***-end of the Mycenaean and Minoan civilisations (but I can't go into too much detail because of board rules...) It's also poorly documented compared to the later period and it's difficult to work out details of logistics.

In classical Greece, the makeup of soldiery varied between citizen militias and professional soldiers, although the quality of the citizen militias was (arguably) relatively higher than that term might lead you to expect. The professional soldiers were of a high standard, and Greek mercenaries were in demand across the known world, especially later in the period. For examples of what they were capable of, check out Alexander's campaigns in Persia, or Xenophon's Anabasis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_%28Xenophon%29).

Composition of armies will have made a difference too, of course. Earlier (classical) Greek armies were mostly infantry; later armies added both light and heavy cavalry, and by the time Pyrrhus came to Italy to fight Rome, his army included elephants. The logistics and infrastructure of the Greek era doesn't really compare to Rome, though: while the Greeks made a lot of advancement, the lack of centralisation meant there was never the same level of support for its armies as Rome was to have in its heyday.



I want weirdness like history being off due toa. Lunar calendar, one society having used metric instead of imperial but just leaving numbers,
Fun fact (which never ceases to amaze me): during the war of the Third Coalition, the allied powers of Austria and Russia failed to account for the difference in their calendar while organising the Ulm campaign. So the Austrian general Mack (Gregorian calendar) was awaiting imminent Russian reinforcements (Julian calendar) at Ulm before they'd even crossed the border into Austrian territory.

In 1805. Needless to say, the campaign was a total disaster, and its failure ultimately led to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire the following year.

AMFV
2014-03-10, 12:38 PM
And?

By arguing solely about a well-trained and logistically sound professional military force that upholds discipline over honor or other selfish concepts, in order to explain why you brought your modern military info in, you're making it look like you advocate all militaries being judged by that measure. It's a simple conversational misunderstanding. This applies to me as well though. So I am half talking to you, half reasoning something out that hopefully I will remember in the future.

Sure, the crusades were terribly managed. That's the point! They still have more traction amongst the lay folk than the more efficient but homogenous armies. I already said I have no problems with anachronisms; D&D already has ridiculous weapon weights, why not ridiculously slow processions? Why not ridiculously heavy and useless kit?

Because then you're losing detail the other way. Which in my opinion is worse for a system that already has it out for professional sword swingers. You can't include only the one side if you're going for verisimilitude. You have to have the professional forces, the ones that can cross those kind of distances as well as the Crusade style disasters.

Aedilred
2014-03-10, 01:26 PM
Because then you're losing detail the other way. Which in my opinion is worse for a system that already has it out for professional sword swingers. You can't include only the one side if you're going for verisimilitude. You have to have the professional forces, the ones that can cross those kind of distances as well as the Crusade style disasters.
As has been pointed out, though, and you have acknowledged, in Europe during the Middle Ages, such militaries basically didn't exist, and certainly didn't exist in the sort of numbers to make them statistically significant. Assuming a Mediaeval basis for a world, data from Roman or modern militaries is just anachronistic and obfuscating.

AMFV
2014-03-10, 03:53 PM
As has been pointed out, though, and you have acknowledged, in Europe during the Middle Ages, such militaries basically didn't exist, and certainly didn't exist in the sort of numbers to make them statistically significant. Assuming a Mediaeval basis for a world, data from Roman or modern militaries is just anachronistic and obfuscating.

True, but so is D&D, anachronistic and obfuscating that is. Also D&D tends to explicitly have more organized military forces, and they certainly existed in that time period, the Mongols for example. The point I was making is that if somebody says "six miles a day" I think, because of my experience, "Good lord, did they only march two hours a day". So it is detracting from verisimilitude if it is made without an explanation.

Additionally an individual could make much better time.

Kiero
2014-03-10, 05:33 PM
10 miles a day was deemed a reasonable pace for a Napoleonic army, which included guns and baggage. Obviously the cavalry elements and infantry if marching alone could travel faster. Infantry were much more durable as far as repeated forced marching went; your horses and beasts of burden would die long before the men would if put through that day after day.

As an example of just how far men could march (without baggage), in attempting to reach the Battle of Talevera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Talavera) in 1809, Bob Craufurd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Craufurd) had his light troops march 42 miles in something like 28 hours. They missed the battle, but it was still an impressive feat. Not that they were in the best condition by the time they arrived, mind, but it sets a benchmark.

Antiquity I feel has many better examples of professional armies than the medieval era. The Hellenistic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_period)and Roman ages were ones characterised by warfare on a huge scale over centuries, where an army of 25,000 was a pretty ordinary occurrence, and for short periods armies as large as 100,000 men might gather to do battle.

Alexander the Great (and indeed his father Phillip) was renowned for the speed with which his armies moved. The big innovation besides lots of drilling was banning attendants and other hangers-on. Along with loading up the men, rather than relying entirely on mules/oxen to carry stuff. It wasn't unusual for them to cover 13 miles a day (40 miles per day for cavalry elements*), though he could also go much faster. Bear in mind, though, Alexander was unstable and more than willing to kill his armies in a fit of pique if he felt they'd slighted him.

The Romans were famed fast-marchers, not least because they also built a fortified camp at the end of every day, then broke it down and packed it up again at the start of the next. There are numerous examples of rebellious provinces pacified by a governor mobilising a couple of legions within days and charging straight for the source before the rebellion could really get under way.

Like Alexander, they scorned the use of attendants and other impediments, expecting men to carry most of their own stuff. This significantly reduces the number of pack animals you need, and thus the logistical footprint they create. Not to mention people can be marched harder than animals.

Alexander and his successors, along with the Romans had much more sophisticated logistical setups than later medieval armies. Not least because they were often drawing upon the resources of much bigger, more sophisticated political units.



*Something fantasy games often seem to overlook with cavalry is remounts. One man with one horse isn't a cavalryman, that's a dead horse waiting to happen. You need at least one spare mount, better yet two, so you can rotate them and keep them all relatively fresh. You can cover serious distances if you have both the remounts and water/fodder for them. That was the secret of horse peoples like the Scythians and Sauromatae.

NichG
2014-03-10, 08:25 PM
One thing to keep in mind is that there has been a lot of technological advancement in the history of warfare, and 'technological advancement' is not necessarily just physical objects to help make moving better, but also organizational and command techniques.

For modern armies, I would expect most of the speed difference to be based on gear - are they mounted, using vehicles, etc? For ancient armies, I would expect large variations in speed based on training - is it a veteran force or conscripts? Are the commanders experienced with the terrain? Things like that.

Someone who doesn't know how to keep a gaggle of freshly conscripted commoners together and move them across unfamiliar terrain may well only manage a third or a quarter of the pace that a modern, organized military trained to move on that terrain could do even without the aid of technologies like modern clothing and packs.

SiuiS
2014-03-10, 10:54 PM
Because then you're losing detail the other way. Which in my opinion is worse for a system that already has it out for professional sword swingers.

ACKS, Mazes & Minotaurs, and OD&D have it out for melee fighters? :smallconfused:



*Something fantasy games often seem to overlook with cavalry is remounts. One man with one horse isn't a cavalryman, that's a dead horse waiting to happen. You need at least one spare mount, better yet two, so you can rotate them and keep them all relatively fresh. You can cover serious distances if you have both the remounts and water/fodder for them. That was the secret of horse peoples like the Scythians and Sauromatae.

I've heard that before, but how does it work? The unburdened horse recuperates while running? Or do horses walk faster than people do at a large enoug he are to make triple time of a marching man?

Aedilred
2014-03-10, 11:08 PM
I've heard that before, but how does it work? The unburdened horse recuperates while running?
Basically, yes, horses can survive longer when they don't have to carry around two hundred pounds of man-meat on their backs. And if you switch between horses regularly they get less fatigued in the first place. It's hypothesised that destriers (knights' warhorses) were so short on stamina that they were only ridden in battle and tournaments - on the march they couldn't cope with the burden and injured very easily (not to mention they were expensive and not worth taking a risk with).

Also note that most horses in a marching column won't be travelling at any more than human marching pace; they're not being flogged along at pace (although even if they are, moving the burdens around will help quite a lot). Horses are great at covering short to medium distances at pace but they tire quickly over longer ones (over long distances they can be outpaced by a running human, in a sort of tortoise/hare echo). An army will include scouts ranging ahead of it, of course, but again they will change horses as their existing ones tire out.

That doesn't mean that you can't cover longer distances quickly on horseback, of course, especially if the bulk of your troops are mounted (steppe horse archers). But even then it's not as radical a difference as you might think, and long forced marches over a period of several days will probably kill a lot of your horses.

Knaight
2014-03-11, 03:03 AM
That said, during most of the Three Kingdoms, soldiers would be raised from the peasantry so they often had other professions.

Frequently relatively desperately, on relatively short notice, after the bulk of the existing military had been killed. That period was a bloodbath, the population dropped to about 35% of what it was at the beginning of it, and as such it's really not representative of most other conflicts - even in China, which has a pretty ideal geography for lots of large armies clashing.

SiuiS
2014-03-11, 03:13 AM
Frequently relatively desperately, on relatively short notice, after the bulk of the existing military had been killed. That period was a bloodbath, the population dropped to about 35% of what it was at the beginning of it, and as such it's really not representative of most other conflicts - even in China, which has a pretty ideal geography for lots of large armies clashing.

What makes the geography ideal?

I'm looking at geography now, but mostly for an eye to weather. I would like actual weather in a game, instead of pretending everywhere in middle earth is sunny California. That said, geography that affects weather, affects movement and settlement. If I bring up maps of the period, what am I looking for and at?

Knaight
2014-03-11, 03:31 AM
What makes the geography ideal?

You've got the rich mineral resources to support armies, and then you have a (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Plain_%28China%29) huge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_China_Plain) plain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Plain)* with a bunch of rivers which can keep them fed, along with making the logistics simpler by removing the constraints created by rougher, less fertile, or downright mountainous terrain.

The Three Kingdoms period exacerbated this. Once things settled into three kingdoms what basically happened was all of them had a core territory that was seriously entrenched by the edge of the plains, none of them were well able to commit to an attack against any of the others because of the third one, and the plains thus ended up an area between them in which most of the fighting happened - which tended to feature the sort of armies that the plains facilitate. Add the extent to which the conflict dragged on (a good 60 years using really conservative start and end dates), and you get the bloodbath that ensued.

*Which gets divided into separate plains as regards terminology, but which are all connected.

Kiero
2014-03-11, 04:41 AM
One thing to keep in mind is that there has been a lot of technological advancement in the history of warfare, and 'technological advancement' is not necessarily just physical objects to help make moving better, but also organizational and command techniques.

It's also worth bearing in mind progress was not in a straight line, chronologically. Roman logistical organisation (and in many respects, industrial scale) was vastly superior to anything that appeared again before the 19th century. There's lots on the organisational side that went backwards after the height of the Roman empire, and had to work to recover where it once was.

AMFV
2014-03-11, 06:45 AM
ACKS, Mazes & Minotaurs, and OD&D have it out for melee fighters? :smallconfused:


Eh... a little, although not as much as other D&D related culprits.

Jay R
2014-03-11, 11:28 AM
Soldiers know exactly where they are going, and there's usually a road going there. That has not been my experience for D&D characters on an outdoors adventure.

Felhammer
2014-03-11, 11:55 AM
What makes the geography ideal?

I'm looking at geography now, but mostly for an eye to weather. I would like actual weather in a game, instead of pretending everywhere in middle earth is sunny California. That said, geography that affects weather, affects movement and settlement. If I bring up maps of the period, what am I looking for and at?

If your land is betwixt 23.5S and 23.5N, you will be in the tropics where it is hot, and muggy. Between 23.5N to 66.5N (and 23.5S and 66.5S) is the temperate zone, which is where most fantasy settings take place. There are four clear seasons in this zone. Between 66.5N to the North Pole (and 66.5S to the South Pole) is arctic.

At 30 degrees north and south latitudes, deserts form due to the way water vapor and temperature interact. Deserts also form in the middle of a massive continent (like central Asia) or when a rain shadow occurs. The latter happens when a tall north-south mountain range forms (rain is dumped on the far side of the range, then all water vapor is absorbed by the air rushing down the mountain). A good example of this is the Great Basin Desert.

East-west mountains are generally preferred because they do not cause large rain shadows to form and serve as natural barriers to separate people/cultures.

Empires love large flat plains and despise rugged mountainous regions. Plains can be dominated with ease, mountains require large amounts of investment to control.

Frozen_Feet
2014-03-11, 03:54 PM
This brings back fond memories. My maritime campaign few years ago started on an island. The island was roughly 50 km x 50 km, fitted on a single A4 grid paper where each square of the grid was two kilometers across.

Then the PCs left that island, I moved to primarily using a continental map. It, too, was A4 grid paper. Each square was 50 km across, so their whole home island fit in just one!

As they insisted on sailing further and further away from known lands, I had to expand the world map by 4 more A4 sheets. Overall, I think the map covered something like 2000 km x 3000 km.

Travel got faster and faster as the campaign progressed, as the PCs upgraded from walking on foot (4 km/h or 32 km/day) to a small ship (100 km/day in good weather, average 50) to a frigate build for speed (200 km/day in good weather, average 100) to teleporting (300 km/day) to a flying dragon (500 km/day in good weather, 250 average) .