How to make your world feel less... crowded

[Scarey Nerd]

Whenever I'm thinking about nation borders in my campaign setting, I realise that everyone's shoved up against everything, and the world looks very crowded. How do you guys get around that, if you do at all? Do you keep the borders up against each other but it's obvious that there aren't wall-to-wall settlements near those borders, so the actual land is hard to tell? Or do you separate your kingdoms clearly, with wilderness between them?

[Max_Killjoy]

Whenever I'm thinking about nation borders in my campaign setting, I realise that everyone's shoved up against everything, and the world looks very crowded. How do you guys get around that, if you do at all? Do you keep the borders up against each other but it's obvious that there aren't wall-to-wall settlements near those borders, so the actual land is hard to tell? Or do you separate your kingdoms clearly, with wilderness between them?

Trying to avoid Forgotten Realms sardine syndrome?

[Scarey Nerd]

Trying to avoid Forgotten Realms sardine syndrome?

Precisely. It just doesn't feel realistic to me.

[Max_Killjoy]

Then I'd go with the idea that "settled" areas tend to cluster -- along rivers and coastlines, where roads cross, near the best farmland or other resources, or within a day's journey of important places such as capitals, temples, etc.

Away from that, you get smaller villages, remote homesteads, etc, and then a lot of "wild" land that's home to hermits, bandits, outlaws, trappers and hunters, and so on.

Kingdom/national borders may exist on paper, but much of the land will be "wild" and held more nominally than anything. And along many borders you'll have marches.

[ThePurple]

Whenever I'm thinking about nation borders in my campaign setting, I realise that everyone's shoved up against everything, and the world looks very crowded.

A lot of what you're saying sounds like an American looking at a map of medieval Europe or Asia (which is what most campaign settings are build to resemble) and having problems understanding the scale. Europeans, whose nation-states resemble the historical (medieval) sizes of those nation-states, don't really have this problem because they're used to living in smaller, historically appropriate, states.

I was taught that national/state/etc borders of a nation-state can be determined by three factors: military, communication time, and proximity (there's also a fourth wild card factor, but I'll bring that up at the end)

To explain, your military limits the borders of a nation because you have to be able to defend your borders and maintain order within them by getting enough troops to handle the problem to the place where the problem is. If your army can only travel 20 miles per day (about what you can expect out of a marching army), you can only maintain order within a few days travel; if it takes you any longer to get there, things will be over before you can get there. If you can only field a single battalion, it doesn't matter how fast they can move if you're up against a full on army. There are other elements to this, as well, other than simply travel speed and strength, such as logistical support and food preservation.

Communication time (e.g. how long it takes for a message to get from one place to another) limits the borders of a nation because governments are defined by being supreme centers of authority for a given community. If it takes months for you to learn about your border settlements being attacked by enemy forces, it'll be over by the time you even learn about it even you are able to instantly mobilize your military to appear absolutely anywhere as soon as you learn about it.

Proximity (and strength) to other nation-states is an obvious limitation because you can't easily expand into territory that someone else claims and is able to defend (especially since they're liable to be pressing on your boundaries as well).

A good analogy for this would be a balloon. The air in the balloon represents "military"; the balloon itself represents "communication time"; and "proximity" is represented by other balloons that are nearby. If you try to pump a lot of air into a weak balloon (e.g. try to control a large area without rapid communication to support it), it'll fall apart, regardless of how much space you could theoretically fill. If you don't have a lot of air, it doesn't matter how strong your balloon is or how open the room might be, it's not going to grow. If there are a bunch of other balloons around, penning you in, it doesn't matter how strong your balloon might be or how much air you can pump into it, because you're going to be limited by the constraints of the other nations (which is something of a feedback loop, since their ability to expand/contract follows a similar paradigm using you as the boundaries and their own capabilities as their inflationary elements).

As a real world examples, the US is pretty much perfect. The main reason that the US could even break away from the much more powerful British Empire was that it was too far away for the British to maintain their authority against the growing strength of the US. The eastern states are smallest because they came around when communication was comparatively weak, so they were limited by those factors. The western states are much larger because they came around around the time that the telegraph and rail system started coming into use, which meant an improvement in military capability (through mobility) as well as vastly improved speed of communication.

The wild card factor is "inertia". While the other 3 factors determine "maximum capacity" to some extent, "inertia" determines whether or not something actually causes a modification in size based upon the current state of those factors. I call it inertia because a nation-state tends to stay the same unless there is some force (internal or external) acting upon it, even if those 3 factors change. This means that a nation-state will probably stay the same size even if they become absurdly military powerful compared to their neighbors unless something changes, like an aggressive leader coming to power, obsessed with conquering the world (I'm tempted to invoke Godwin's Law). By that same token, a nation-state will probably stay the same size if there's a sudden collapse of infrastructure that prevents communication or military action unless civil strife or invasion occurs. Historically, changes to the factors have generally been the cause or effect of a change in the aforementioned factors, but those 3 factors themselves are what generally determine what the end size will be.

Now, as this pertains to a campaign setting, you have to figure out the practical applications of various effects upon the world. If magic is rare and technology is medieval, it would probably be pretty similar to Europe: a large number of comparatively small nation states. If magic is common and applicable in many of the same ways as modern technology, you're more liable to see large states like in the western US with smaller states only really existing in the historical sense until such time as there is a major upheaval (and as long as that upheaval is interested in new borders rather than preserving existing ones).

[Max_Killjoy]

And those limits on the speed of military communication and movement is also why those "marcher lords" were given their border realms, leave to raise larger personal forces, and some autonomy.

[quinron]

Relationships between friendly nations can also play a role in their nearness. If one nation's development was fostered by a relationship with another nation, the "parent" nation is going to want to make sure that they're able to move to/through their "child" nation easily and defend their interests (probably trade). Of course, depending on how brutal and imperialistic your world is, the parent nation may just decide to seize the child nation by force if they see a benefit there.

Once you start approaching these things organically, they get easier; the reason the Realms are so cramped is that those nations' development was more focused on filling a literary/gaming niche than on being an element of a living, growing fantasy world.

[Mechalich]

It's important to remember that, in an actual medieval scenario, huge portions of landscape well within nominal national boundaries will be wilderness. Meaning large chunks of territory will be, if not entirely unsettled, occupied only by smaller isolated groups that don't acknowledge the overall authority of the ruling power. A good real world example is the Southeast Asian Massif. In SE Asia, the national boundaries don't have really any relationship to the actual areas controlled by the ethnic groups and political entities consistent with those nations. Vietnam, for example, is basically two alluvial plains and a long strip of coastline. The rest of the country is occupied by people who, historically, did not consider themselves Vietnamese (and often still don't) and who acknowledged the lowland power only when forced to pay tribute at swordpoint. These upland groups traditionally lived at very low density and huge chunks of the territory were unoccupied.

In other regions, like temperate plains, it will be impossible for a medieval civilization to sustain a recognizable nation state at all. Most of central Asia spent pretty much its entire history 'ruled' by various nomad khanates which in no way resembled actual nations. And this has a parallel to the Forgotten Realms, which are bordered by the vast unsettled Hordelands, it's just that no one ever talks about the Hordelands.

One of the issues in fantasy related to filling up the map is that various fantasy races are often considered to be pre-adapted to traditionally marginal environments and therefore better able to fill in the map in ways a humans-only setting could not. Dwarves are probably the best example. Traditionally humans do poorly in mountainous habitats and while they may establish empires on high plateaus as in Tibet or Tiwanaku this is relatively rare. If you fill every mountain range with dwarven kingdoms, however, then you've suddenly removed a lot of wilderness from your world. The same thing happens when you put elves in deep forest habitats or lizardfolk in large marshlands.

So one way to keep the map from being too dense it to make it difficult for such marginal terrain civilizations to exist. For example, if dwarves have to grow above-group crops in poor soil in their mountain homelands, their mountain kingdom might actually be very small and concentrated on a small number of relatively fertile settlements in an otherwise vast wilderness.

[Knaight]

One method would be to ignore national borders completely, particularly if they tend to shift. Instead, you just put the names of big political organizations (countries and the like) in an area that is their approximate center, put indicators for things like cities, actual systems of walls, etc. and leave the rest of the political map blank. I usually reserve actual borders for places where there actually are clean borders, and in the absence of genuine nation states, empires that can and do maintain strong borders with actual border infrastructure, and similar things they can be comparatively rare.

[MrZJunior]

You could have a few sort of super states, like the Holy Roman Empire, with large tracts of wilderness and a few petty Lords inside them.

[Yora]

I agree with Knaight. In many situations it's better to think of countries as organizations, not as territories. Germany and Italy remained loose alliances of noble lords that regularly got into fights with each other long after the middle ages, and after the fall of Rome you had the same situation in Britain and France.

[Max_Killjoy]

Even if you draw borders for all the realms / states, you can do a couple of things to make the situation more clear.

1) borders don't have to touch -- you can leave space behind them.

2) you can use different line formats to indicate borders that are well-controlled and concrete, those that are open or loose, those that are contested between two realms, etc.

[Yora]

Once I started worldbuilding for writing fiction, my whole approach to mapping changed a lot. Now I almost entirely describe nations by their culture and maybe the capital city if they have one, but don't bother with all the cities, major towns, roads, and borders anymore.

In an actual campaign, you usually have only a small handful of settlements which you need to have in much more detail than you get from a big master list with 300 entries. In that light I find it much simpler to just create settlements as the current campaign demands it.
Knowing the names and general background of the most important and famous big cities is a good idea, since that allows you to mention them in passing while staying consistent. But population numbers and the like are not really important, and I find that they actually distract much more than they help. If the players are never going to see it, you don't need to prepare it. And you can be very certain that the player's wont get accurate numbers of inhabitants for all settlements in the land and calculate that the population density is too high to support all these people with the given amount of farmland.

[341gerbig]

Well, the boarders of different countries/territories in my world's do touch, but that doesn't mean they are inhabited.

Kings, concurers, tyrants, they love to have their cartographers draw boarders of their great kingdoms, they love to lay claim to lands and fight over them, but that doesn't mean settlements are stretched across the country.

They settle around rivers, areas with fertile soil, areas that are easy to thrive in, while most of the territory the king has supposedly laid claim to is largely unexplored, unsettled. Etc.