How big are the Pathfinder kingdoms?

[Senko]

I was looking over the kingmaker maps and working a few things out only to realize if you claimed every single hex of every single map in that campaign at the end your kingdom would be 308 hexes and (if I calculate the size right it is 12 miles from one corner to the other) and a total area of 74 thousand square kilometers. That's barely more than half the size of England and less than 10% of Japan much less a country like Russia or America. On top of which most of the rules examples are less than that 300 hexes.

So what I'm wondering is whether that's a normal size for the kingdoms in pathfinder i.e the established ones like Chelax or Ustalav or are they much bigger?

[Deadmanwalking]

Check the maps.

The River Kingdoms, which is the area that Kingmaker occurs in, is infamous for being filled with tiny little feuding kingdoms, many of which last only a single lifetime or less, so that's a decent sized kingdom for that area.

Ustalav is about 1/2 the size of the entire River Kingdoms region, call it 300 miles by 300 miles or so. Cheliax is almost three times Ustalav's size (and larger than the entire River Kingdoms region).

So, to put it briefly, the established kingdoms are mostly way bigger than that.

[Senko]

Thanks.

[Ravingdork]

I remember a few years ago, a poster took the measurements on one of the game's world maps (specifically of the Inner Sea Region) and the population numbers of all the various nations therein, and determined that there were something like an estimated 50 people per 15 square feet*.

Or something weird like that.

EDIT: I think this was it. I was WAY misremembering it.

[Senko]

Ravingdork wrote:

I remember a few years ago, a poster took the measurements on one of the game's world maps (specifically of the Inner Sea Region) and the population numbers of all the various nations therein, and determined that there were something like an estimated 50 people per 15 square feet*.

Or something weird like that.

EDIT: I think this was it. I was WAY misremembering it.

Hmmm interesting. Our little kingmaker kingdom is tiny compared to a lot of the countries in our world we need to park it somewhere on a russian border inland.

[avr]

You might also find this thread interesting - a map of Golarion as complete as they could make it.

[Senko]

avr wrote:

You might also find this thread interesting - a map of Golarion as complete as they could make it.

I do thanks, so entire continents we don't know . . .

[Daw]

OK, huge countries are going to be rare. The US, the Former Soviet Union, and China are Empires, not countries using Golarian conventions, Huge countries without technological or complex cultural methods to support internal cohesion, fall apart unless most of their area is empty and/or unattractive. Even going back to the various early British kingdoms, you had a ton of tiny kingdoms, each with a King, and a few High Kings, of various levels of power over their ostensibly subordinate kings. Our modern European countries are the end result of centuries of consolidation of smaller kingdoms/countries. Many, if not most, counties or equivalents were effectively kingdoms when you go far enough back.

[FormerFiend]

That being said, one also has to factor in magical and fantastical methods of transportation, as alleviating some of that. Along with magical methods of irrigating & tending crops, processing sanitation, and treating disease as alleviating various other real world historical limitations on growth.

The technology level also varies wildly in Golarion from stone age classical to middle ages to renaissance to early victorian in some places.

[Senko]

That's what I'm thinking you could easily have a "British Empire" equivilent spanning a huge area when you consider teleportation, magical messaging, magical crop growing, etc and that's in the dark ages tech level if you run it up to early victorian especially with elements of supertech from the iron gods AP having a larger kingdom isn't that uneblievable.

Now I'm not looking for a North American sized kingdom but Japan was unified and run with largely similar tech levels as was England and they're both bigger than the kingmaker kingdom. I'd just like our little kingdom to be a bit bigger is all. 130 - 330 thousand square kilometers.

[Mark Hoover 330]

"kingdom" is a relative term. Are we talking the Kingdom of England just prior to the age of empires, or are we talking a petty kingdom from the barbarian ages of Norway or France here?

My own homegame contains a country called the Rukenval. Essentially I took hundreds of petty kingdoms, some no bigger than a single village, and figured that at some point they got tired of fighting one another constantly and created a league or council to rule over them.

Now in the Rukenval for example you have the Kingdom of Sothrynsvar which is nothing but a Small City on a lake port and several hundred sq miles of surrounding hinterlands containing a scattering of villages and a couple small towns. Beyond that there will be borderlands between the next kingdoms, respected (hopefully) by the petty kings, as well as a healthy amount of wilderness within these borders for things adventurers like to beat on.

[blashimov]

The Inner sea region is somewhat Mediterranean / European analogue with no large countries. Coming from a US centric background, it was super weird to me too that most of the countries can be crossed on foot in a few days.

Golarion / the inner sea is designed to have everything in a small area.

[sunbeam]

Neither here nor there, but game designers don't seem to start out with something like a globe and fill it in.

Back in the days when Forgotten Realms was new and fresh, there was a wonky realization that based on game materials...

That the United States would fit inside the Western Heartlands. And that is just one small section of Faerun, itself just one continent on Toril.

Of course my Golarion setting feature that irks me is Irrisen, a land covered in eternal winter that somehow supports a reasonably large population by... imports I guess. Though considering who their neighbors are I don't really see how that one works.

[Quark Blast]

sunbeam wrote:

Neither here nor there, but game designers don't seem to start out with something like a globe and fill it in.

Back in the days when Forgotten Realms was new and fresh, there was a wonky realization that based on game materials...

That the United States would fit inside the Western Heartlands. And that is just one small section of Faerun, itself just one continent on Toril.

Of course my Golarion setting feature that irks me is Irrisen, a land covered in eternal winter that somehow supports a reasonably large population by... imports I guess. Though considering who their neighbors are I don't really see how that one works.

Easy. The rest of the world likes cold beer and Irrisen has a lock on ice trading.