Map scale in fantasy maps bothers me. Even my own maps bother me a little since most where drawn before I drove a truck for three years and had to come to terms with how big the United States, and by extension a continent, really is. Each hour a truck doing 60 MPH covers 2 DAYS travel for a horse ridden hard, 3 days for one ridden at a more reasonable pace and around 6 days for comfortable walking pace.

And with that knowledge in mind I see fantasy maps where cities average 200 miles apart or maps span three and four thousand miles. So it bothered me.

So as part of redoing the maps of my setting I want to seriously pay attention to scale. I like the shapes of things and their positions, but I want to do an accurate topographical map. The setting of the campaign is a volcanic island most similar to Japan's northern island Hokkaido in climate and topography, so I've spent my spare time studying this area.

I took an old map that had the most detailed version of the coastline - that much I'll keep and worked out that the main campaign area island is roughly 500 miles. This keeps the cities I've detailed in the literature of the setting at proper distances by walking times.

I chose a resolution for the map of 10px to the mile, 8000w x 5320h total and have ported it into the 64 bit version of Wilbur (I'm pretty sure the 32 bit version would crash and die with a map that size). This means a square mile is 100 pixels. That works out to 6.4 acres to the pixel. A football field is about 1.1 acres not including endzones. A typical medieval village of 10 structures has an acre footprint, the largest of medieval cities were still under a square mile in size.

What this does mean that though not ostensibly a city map the outlines of the largest cities and manorial estates will be visible at scale.

The setting has a lowish mean population density of 40 per square mile, about 1 person per 16 acres. To make the math easier, I'll presume one farmed acre can support 1 person. A village of 600 people can occur in each square mile - not necessarily will occur. A city of 6000 needs roughly a 12 square mile footprint of support farms.

Just thoughts. Anyone else have thoughts on scale?