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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 957669" data-attributes="member: 63">Why is this in house rules?  It almost seems like it oughta be in general discussion.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Interesting stuff, definitely.  Now we just need guidelines for how big countries should be.For instance, in my game world, over a span of land that is about the size of the continental United States (what, maybe a 2500 mile square?) I've got a huge diversity of cultures.  Three major Elf nations, Arabic-esque cultures, Native American-esque cultures, Greco-Roman cultures, and Norse-esque cultures.  Is that a reasonable spread of cultures for such a small area?  In the US that might seem kinda ridiculous, but in Europe you have all that and more, and I think Europe's fairly close in size.And I've got good explanations for it.  Elves and primitive man were native to the continent first, with lots of nomadic mantribes and several Elvish nations.  After a thousand years or so, another human group shows up from another continent and proceeds to try to conquer this new land.  Eventually the humans displace the Elves into small pockets and set up their own nations, with various mixes of native primitive man's culture, Elvish culture, and their own from their homelands.Then a few hundred years later, after the new nations have become independent of the old continent they came from, a new warlord starts to conquer and manages to create a new empire that controls the world.  But he's eventually overthrown and the world falls into various pockets of dark ages, with the lands that were closest to the huge empire's seat of power being the most laid waste to.  The further away areas continue to develop on their own and become more advanced, and each separately try to forge their way away from what the empire was.  Over the three thousand that pass since the fall of that huge empire, a lot changed.  Even some of the old primitive tribes advance to have their own nations, and in some places the Elves regain their old holdings.  I've got a good 14 different countries in that one continent, plus various city-states in remote areas.  Is that too much, do you think? Oh, and here's a good question.  How do you make PCs really feel the distance they're traveling if you don't want to have tons of random encounters that bog down storytelling?  Just describing the terrain they're passing through never enticed my players, and if I tried to drop random plot hooks for them to possibly get interested in, they tended to think every one of them was important.</blockquote>

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