Quote Originally Posted by Azélor View Post
I think the sheer size and complexity (infrastructures) of futuristic cities is the main reason why there aren't that many maps.

Think about it. A 10 000 people city is quite big for a classic medieval fantasy setting but that's about 1000 building (give or take).
For a modern of futuristic setting, 10 000 people just a common town/outpost.
Imagine you wanted to map a modern city like Paris or New York, we're talking about millions of people, thousand and thousand of buildings...
At this point most people would rather have an abstract representation of the city than individual buildings.

You could still map only portion of the city if that counts.
If you're mapping a place with high population density you're right. But most sci-fi stuff don't usually happens in this kind of place.

If you look at Star Trek, Star Wars and so on, the average population of most planets is on the range from a few hundred thousand to a few million inhabitants on average for the whole planet, most planet capitals don't go over 10,000-100,000 inhabitants.

For example in Star Wars galaxy, most planets' populations would fall between Tatooine (Population:80,000) in the backwater nearly untamed frontier planet and Naboo (Population: 4.5 billion) the average affluent higher population density planet.

Only about 5% of the galaxy's planets have with population of over 1 billion inhabitants with most planets' population ranging between 2 million to 200 million inhabitants. In this kind of low population density environment each planet would have only handful of cities with population over 100,000 inhabitants.

Certainly in SW Galaxy there are a few off the charts planets like Coruscant with its trillions of inhabitants and the whole surface covered with skyscrapers thousands of stories high that are actually so tall that it's star's light never touches its surface, but they are the exception among the exceptions.

Most RPG adventures would take place on these ultra densely populated places, so mapping them isn't really an issue. And in the few occasions where mapping this kind of place is necessary, you would just map the area of interest, not the whole planet.

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