Overland Travel around Crowfield

I’ve been thinking about how to handle overland travel in and around Crowfield. By narrowing down the basic assumptions, it saves time worrying about things that won’t matter.

Here’s what I’ve decided so far.

The wilderness map will be a square grid, not hexes

Mapping on hex paper is kind of the default for outdoor maps in D&D. The main benefit of a hex map is that traveling from one hex to any adjacent hex is the same distance. On a square grid if orthogonal squares are 10 miles apart, then diagonal square are just over 14 miles apart.

That makes hexes easier to deal with for that measurement. But there’s a trade-off, and that trade off is everything else.

For example, let’s say we have an x-mile grid and an x-mile hex, and we want to know…

	Square	Hex	Advantage
Area	x^2	(x/2)^2×3.464	Square
Maximal Diameter (Corner-to-Corner distance)	1.414x	1.155x	Tie
Perimeter	4x	13.856x	Square

On top of that, my mapping software of choice is GIMP, and it’s very easy to overlay a grid on top of another image. Overlaying a hex is much more difficult.

I can go to any store and buy a notebook of graph paper. Hex paper has to be ordered through a specialty store.

Each square is 5 miles across

There’s a huge debate amongst OSR gamers whether a hex should be five miles across or six miles across. Seriously.

I’m splitting the difference, but in the name of “realism” rather than diplomacy.

In Crowfield a square is 5 miles across, but it counts as 6 miles when calculating travel time.

I think that this is more realistic because roads are almost never a straight line between two points.¹ Rather they wind and weave around obstacles like inclines and bad terrain, so it makes sense to add extra distance.²

It takes 2 hours to travel to an (orthogonally) adjacent square

I walk at just about three miles an hour. A little faster unencumbered over short distances, and a little slower carrying a pack over a 500-mile trek. If a square counts as 6 miles, simple math tells me that it takes 2 hours.

It takes 3 hours to travel to a diagonally adjacent square

As we stated above, the problem with squares is that the diagonals are longer than the horizontals and verticals.

My friend Pythagoras tells us that it’s 1.414 times longer. So if it takes two hours to travel orthogonally, it will take 2.828 hours to travel diagonally. 2.828 hours is 0.172 hours less that 3 hours. 0.172 hours is about 10 minutes and 18 seconds.

Close enough to 3 hours for a game.

The starting map will be 32 × 32 squares, centered on Crowfield

32 squares at 5 miles per square is 160 miles across. That may sound small, but it isn’t. In modern terms, it’s big enough to hold New York City; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; and the entire states of New Jersey and Delaware:

I think that people are used to using large distances in fantasy gaming either to make it sound more epic, or because they’re used to modern travel times. At modern driving speeds, you could cross the entire 160 miles in less than 3 hours. At medieval traveling speeds, however, that same trip is about 10 days of walking.

A character can travel 3 – 4 squares a day

The thought is that 4 orthogonal squares = 20 miles,³ and that three diagonal squares = 21.2.

I had a conversation with Steve Jackson once where he tried to convince me that 50 miles a day was perfectly normal and that “Boy Scouts do 50-mile hikes all the time.” My experience with the Camino and talking to a lot of other “peregrinos” tells me that even a constant 20 miles a day is aggressive⁴ but achievable, so that’s the number I’m going with.

If a player wants to do more, it will cause Constitution damage. Constitution damage can be healed with rest.

Likewise, difficult terrain won’t be slower, but will also do Constitution damage. Of course that might lead the characters to rest, causing them to travel slower.

Settlements will be about 2 days apart. I think.

I’m kinda unsure about this one.

I talked before about how isolated settlements make no sense in the real world. As we see from the map above, the 160 × 160 mile square holds a lot of settlements. I read somewhere⁵ that medieval life was such that one village was pretty much only an hour’s walk away from the next, and no village was more than 4 hour’s walk from a market town. Clearly we’re ignoring all that. I think it’s justified though, as more players care about a fun game than historical accuracy.

I also talked about how I was trying to emulate the feel of Traveller. In that game it takes a week to travel from one star system to another. If I mirror that the map would have to be huge in order to have a decent number of settlements. Also, in Traveller, the time between systems is often “dead time”–the way faster-than-light travel works in that universe makes it impossible to encounter another ship during that time. In Crowfield, there will be encounter rolls every day. So taking a week exposes the characters to 7 encounter rolls.

I want the journey between settlements to be arduous and dangerous; this is what keeps them separated. By placing settlements about 2 days apart, it means that travelers leave Village 1 in the morning, travel the full day, make camp in the untamed wilderness during the night, travel a second day and (hopefully) reach the next town before the second night fall. I think would have preferred 2 nights of camping, but (if my math is right) that would mean only around 9 settlements on the map instead of 16.

Though maybe 9 is enough? What do you think?

Conclusion

That’s it for this week. I still have to decide for sure how far apart settlements should be. I also need to come up with good Constitution damage rules for terrain and excess travel.

Anyone have any ideas?

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Footnotes:

1. I’ve traveled in 38 states and 8 other countries, and the only road that I’ve ever seen that was so straight that it disappeared into the horizon was a section of I-40 between Amarillo, Texas and Albuquerque, New Mexico. ↩

2. Unless the party is traveling “as the dragon flies.”↩

3. That’s 20 “map miles,” which means 24 miles of actual travel.↩

4. The most common itinerary for the Camino averages about 16 miles per day, though some people do more and some do less.↩

5. I’m not certain, but I think it was in Medieval Demographics Made Easy by the brilliant S. John Ross.↩

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Edited 18 Aug 2020: Fixed typos caught by ZomusPrime.  Thanks!