Hey folks! I just noticed PathfinderWiki now lists land-area figures for regions—e.g., Ustalav — 135,965 mi² and Tian Xia — 25,439,938 mi².
Does anyone know where these numbers come from and whether they’re canon?
Are they derived from official map scales (Lost Omens / Inner Sea maps), a dev post, or another Paizo source? If there’s a citation or methodology write-up somewhere, I’d love a pointer.
Sorry if this has been asked before—couldn’t find a definitive thread. Thanks!
TL;DR: PathfinderWiki lists specific land areas for places like Ustalav and Tian Xia. Are those values canon, and what’s the primary source/calc method?
Creative Director
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They're not canon (nothing on the Pathfinder Wiki is, since it's not officially updated and curated by us at Paizo... but just like Wikipedia, it's a GREAT resource to check out for information; just make sure to follow citations to published books if you want to make sure that the information has been cited correctly, and even then, we often retcon or change lore from older books in the same way we errata rules, and those updates and lore fixes don't always get into the wiki...), but my guess is they're pretty accurate if someone took our maps of those regions and did the calculations. I have no idea how they went about arriving at those calculations, though.
Land area for regions doesn't really impact gameplay at all, so even if those figures aren't accurate, as long as you and your group like them and want to use them, then they're good!
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Hi, member of the wiki team and contributor to the mapping project here, though I'm only speaking for myself in this post.
In our efforts to create the interactive global map of Golarion, we've done our best, given all published maps and other information, to make it as accurate as possible. Though, it is a fictional world that can and has been updated sometimes. This means that it's never going to be as scientific and static as the real world.
As far as those land-area figures, what you're seeing is that the mapping software we use is able calculate the amount of land within certain polygons, such as nation borders, for us. Would I necessarily trust it down the the single digits? Given that it's a fictional world where borders can always slightly be in flux depending on the artist creating the next map, no.
However, it's a fun bit of trivia to still get a rough idea of the sizes of places as currently laid out, and their relative sizes to each other.
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I love the Wiki map!
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Thematically, we can consider that the area and distance imprecisions due to the different maps authors are like normal cartographic inaccuracy due to the lack of modern tools to do the measurements like theodolites and GPS system was in real world.
I made a small research and looks like that basically almost all old maps made before the XVIII century are almost all imprecise, specially those who maps very large areas like political borders and continental sizes, also the fact that the countries and realms borders are also frequently disputed didn't help too.
Even in high fantasy scenario like Golarion that we can have the help of magic, it doesn't provide a good precision (like approximate spell counts or teleport spell imprecisions) so make sense that the things like maps are imprecise at all.
So I'm very fine with currently work of the Pathfinder Wiki team. In the end of the day they do a very good work calculating the distances and sizes from the currently available content and even their imprecisions would be a problem due to the same reasons that I said above like old cartographers had to deal in our past are fine too it just adds more salt to the game.
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We don't want Golarion mapmakers to have mastered precision yet, mid-level adventurers need adventuresome tasks...some might even say paths to find.
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I feel like RPG settings are like comic book universes in that you want to avoid too much specificity in terms of the map in case you need to insert another city or whatever somewhere.
Like the planet Earth that DC Comics takes place in is slightly larger than the planet Earth we live on, in order to have both a "Metropolis" and a "New York City."
Like there could be *anything* in the vast Qadiran desert- we'll find out when we get there.