Exploration rules question

[doc the grey]

How big is 95 square miles exactly? I'm reading through the exploration rules to prep for a game I'm running and I'm having trouble visualizing the scale of that size. Does anyone know a good comparison to that size like a real world city or some other analog?

[Whale_Cancer]

Go to google maps. Pick an area you are familiar with. Imagine a square 9.746794344808964 miles on each side. That is 95 square miles.

That's more than twice the size of the city I live in: Vancouver, Canada.

[Mark Hoover]

Square miles are easy; try envisioning a 5 mile radius. I've got an adventure site in my homebrew, made up on the fly, where I threw out a "Five mile radius" of old growth forests and scattered bogs. One player said "that's MASSIVE" and another went "meh". Personally I have no concept of how big that is.

[Nawtyit]

Americans, for some reason, love comparing things to football fields. 1 square mile = 484 football fields. So, 95 square miles is almost 46,000 football fields.
(Or roughly the size of The Republic of San Marino)

[MurphysParadox]

95 square miles is about the size of Arlington, Texas. It is larger than Washington DC (only about 68 square miles) and is a fraction of NYC's 468 square miles.

Ask your favorite search engine how big near-by cities are. That should help you get a feel for a rough estimate on concept.

But, yeah, it is a large area. As Whale_Cancer said, it is a square that is almost 10 miles on a side.

As for a 5 mile radius, it isn't too bad. It is a circle which fits into a 100 square mile box. The circle itself is about 78.5 square miles of land forest and bog. No thanks.

[Mark Hoover]

So... it wouldn't be unreasonable then to say that a five mile radius contains:
- Goblins and their kin, as well as ogres and trolls (Humanoids/Monstrous Humanoids)
- Mites and giant vermin
- Undead (corporeal flood victims)
- An Old green dragon served by kobolds
- Magical Beast and Animal types, mingling with Plant creatures

Further it would be plausible for this place to have subterranean levels harboring:
- Duergar
- Drow
- Aberrations
- Oozes

See this all you young players out there? This is what happens when:
1. You're in a homegame
2. You tell your GM "I want something to explore, but close to home base"
3. Your GM possesses EPIC indecisiveness...

[Ciaran Barnes]

Whale_Cancer wrote:

That's more than twice the size of the city I live in: Vancouver, Canada.

I was on a jobsite last week (in Seattle) with a bunch of Brits, and they were planning out their weekend road trip, which was going to be to Vancouver. The way they were talking you would think they were flying to Vegas for the weekend. Or Mecca, or Rome, or Beijing. Your city is a popular destination for tourists here.

[doc the grey]

Wow that's big. Just check my hometown of Cincinnati and it's still got about 25 sq miles to go to hit the right size.

[doc the grey]

Second question, what terrain type would constitute badlands?

[MurphysParadox]

Mark - Not overmuch. The goblins, ogres, and trolls would be the primary settled intelligence in the area with probably one sizable camp and perhaps an outpost/hunting site near-by. The mites and giant vermin would be scattered about. The undead could easily inhabit a square mile of sunken town (which would be a fun little side adventure).

The dragon and kobolds might be a bit much, though fun and reasonable if made into a senile dragon that isn't really for fighting but more for interesting/humorous event. Naturally the beasts/animals/plants also works out.

Doc the grey - describe the badlands you are imagining? I'd say they are their own terrain type, but desert generally works.

[doc the grey]

Thinking something like the badlands of Roosevelt park in Montana or some of what you see in Utah or Nevada, rugged and hot in the summer and frozen and cold in the winter.

[JoeOutside]

Southern Utah would be warm desert, Roosevelt Park would be cold desert. (I'm more sure of the former than the latter as I live in the former.)

[jerrys]

I'm not sure about this ...

100 square mile city would be quite big (manhattan is 23 square miles; the whole spwaling NYC is maybe 300) ...

but 100 square miles of wilderness is not really that much. I don't think it's big enough that you could even get lost in it.
It's basically an area 10 miles wide. I am a lazy fat man and I could pretty comfortably walk across such a distance in a day (assuming it's like a medium density forest and not a jungle that you have to chop through with a machete or something, there aren't any impassable chasms, etc ... i suppose those may not be valid assumptions). You can walk 4 miles in an hour (though you would have to zig-zag a fair bit).

I'd say that a respectable size of wilderness (by which i mean, i would be afraid to go in it because i would probably die before finding my way out) would be like maybe 50 miles on a side (= 2500 square miles). Maybe 100 miles on a side (10000 square miles) for an actual adventurer who is not a lazy fat man.

Also, for mark ... square miles = pi * (radius)*(radius)
so e.g.
78 square miles = 3.14 * (5 miles)*(5 miles)

[Mark Hoover]

Old English villages, during the middle ages, were roughly about 5 square miles. 2 miles long by 3 miles wide. I don't know if this included every last field, meadow and woodlot, but that's often my starting point for thinking about size.

Now add in that often other villages' fields abutted one another and you get an idea of what the countryside looked like. Neighbors might see one another in the field at work, but by night they'd return to their own village green.

Another way to think about distance in the world is to consider predators. I know wolves, so I'll go with them. Some wolves range up to 40 miles of wilderness in order to obtain food in a day. So an area 10 miles on a side would probably house A wolf pack.