(long post)
The scale of the main Cauldron city map has been bothering me for quite some time. I’m not expecting everything to fit perfectly to scale (though it would be nice if it did). But things are so out of whack relative to each other that I needed to take a closer look. So I got my ruler and calculator out tonight and did some measuring.
The obvious place to start is the scale bar on the map of Cauldron at the front of the map book. Going straight from this, the city is 4,470 feet in diameter. Impressive. But at this scale, all the buildings are way, way too big. The streets are nearly 200 feet wide. Town Hall is 720 feet long! Even Keygan Ghelve’s shop is almost 200 feet long.
So I looked at the measurements of some of the buildings that are shown on other maps, and compared those measurements to their representation on the big map.
For reference, on the big map, Cauldron is 360mm across from one wall to the other.
Town Hall is 80 feet along its long axis on the Town Hall map. It is 100 feet on the Riot Scene map. It is the most out of proportion building on the big map (on the too big side). On that map it is 22mm long. At 100 feet, that would make Cauldron 1,636 feet in diameter.
(I’m rounding some numbers, but the way I got to that is 360mm divided by 22mm = 16.36 town hall units. If each unit is 100 feet, that’s 16.36 x 100 = 1,636 feet).
If town hall is only 80 feet long, then Cauldron is only 1,309 feet in diameter.
The Temple of Wee Jas is the most out of proportion building on the too small side. It’s supposed to be 150 feet across, but on the big map it is much smaller than town hall, and about the same size as both House Rhiavadi and House Vhalantru. But it consequently comes the closest to matching the scale printed on the map book. At 13mm on the big map, Cauldron is then 4,155 feet in diameter. The problem however remains that everything else is then too big.
If the map of House Rhiavadi is correct, then Cauldron is 2,355 feet across. If House Vhalantru is the one, then its 1,584 feet.
Many numbers, but no resolution. So I went at it from another direction: Looking at the size of the streets, what is a reasonable width for them? In a real medieval town, they would be pretty narrow. But here in Cauldron they look like they’re made pretty wide (maybe so that there is plenty of room to maneuver and keep things moving on its steep and curving streets). But wide streets also help in trying to find a happy middle ground for scale.
On the big map, the streets are about 5mm across. Let’s say each street is 40 feet wide, then that makes Cauldron 2,880 feet in diameter. That’s over half-a-mile, which seems about right – I think I could live with that.
So, at that scale, town hall is still over 160 feet long, but as I said, it was the worst of the bunch. Maybe I’ll add a few rooms and make it a grander building than it is in the book. At the other end, Wee Jas is 106 feet – certainly too small, but not a deal breaker. House Rhiavadi is also about 106 feet, which is only a little too big (it should be 85 feet).
Now I at least have a single scale that is somewhat believable when looking at the big city map. That done, I won’t get into the problems with the isometric-view drawing of the city….
What have others done concerning the scale issue?
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A related note on population
While doing all the scale stuff, I started wondering how accurate the map was in representing a city of 7,500 souls. I did some VERY rough calculations for that, and it isn’t too bad.
I divided off one quarter of the city and counted all the buildings – there were 189. Multiplied by 4 = 756. I rounded that up to 800 just to be generous. If one-quarter of those are used strictly for business, that leaves 600 in which people can live. 7,500 divided by 600 = 12.5 people per building. Given that many buildings house more than one family, and that families were often large, that seems completely reasonable.
(You know, usually I see a post like this by someone else, and I think, okay, I’m not the most obsessed one around here. Actually, I still don’t think I’m the most obsessed one around here, but this doesn’t help….)
Creative Director
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Yup; it's probably best to take the scale on the map of Cauldron with a grain of salt. Until the DMG II came about, there really wasn't much in the way of D&D lore that provided guidelines as to how big a city of X Population had to be, so for the most part, city maps have always been a bit of trouble.
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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Great post! I love crunching the numbers like that. It's a sick sort of obsession, and I'm glad to know that I'm not alone. A similar sort of problem crops up with the lack of bathrooms and cooking facilities in certain dungeons/structures. My party camped out in a dungeon in 3FoE recently and wanted to raid the kitchen. To my chagrin, no such kitchen existed, and yet the structure housed at least two dozen.
(Note that I'm not saying that I expect or want all dungeons to include kitchens - there's a lot to be said for excluding rooms without encounters that exist only to satisfy a personal obsession with pseudo-realism.)
This remind me of Fermi's piano tuner problem. Basically, estimate the number of piano tuners in any given city, based on it's population.
Great post, b.t.w. The numbers sort of make sense. based on these figures, how big do you think the lake is?
Mapmaker tip : I don't know if it's true on this one but mapmakers usually doublesize streets on city plans, in real life. And even more than that for roadmaps, they aren't on scale at all. Perhaps it was done on purpose so you shouldn't take road width to establish your map scale. However the map provided looks more like a satellite photograph than a real map.
My 2 cents.
Bran.
based on these figures, how big do you think the lake is?
If Cauldron is 2,880 feet in diameter, then the lake is about 920 feet across.
Great post, Findas! I started wondering about this stuff just last week, when the group staked out Orak's bathhouse and I went, "Huh?" trying to reconcile the Cauldron city map and what I'd have to draw out.
Another take on this could be that the scale on the city map is correct, but the building scale is not. Thus, many buildings that exist in Cauldron are not shown on the map, or perhaps more accurately, many buildings shown on the map actually reperesent several buildings.
This works out very well, too, if you've decided to increase the population of Cauldron as James Jacobs thought about when editing the book. Then, your group would be less dependent on going to the "big city" (i.e., Sasserine) to find the items they're looking for.