D&D 5E Mapping a fantasy kingdom - sizes and scale

[Oofta]

Seems like many of these kingdoms will be overrun by zombies because there's thread necromancy going on here.

 

[Emerikol]

Traditionally the most high scale maps have been 30 miles per hex but anything 20+ is likely okay for a continental map. At the next level down some say 6 miles per hex is good. As you can see that fits nicely with the 6mph movement. If you want a mapper lower scale than that, just do 100 meters which means about 16 to a mile. Make movement across one of those hexes take a turn if you are searching and exploring. Make movement about 3 of those hexes per turn if you are just walking along.

 

[Bluenose]

Don’t ask yourself to be too accurate.
You can build a “relative” map, build around travelling days rather than distance.

Rather than think in population, think in term of organisation, service, culture.
Town ZZZ is a important link for travelling and commercial trade. You don’t have to state how many ships, cart, travelers pass by.

One option I've used for players is Underground/Metro-style maps. The positions on the map aren't really a close match to how a modern cartographic map would have them, but it would show which direction a settlement/point of interest is, what places you'd pass through on your way to getting there, and importantly how long each stretch of the journey would take. So a "Trail Map" of Waterdeep and the North might have Waterdeep in the bottom left, a line going up to (eventually) Ten Towns/Icewind Dale with spots for Neverwinter and Luskan and other places and indications of how long it would take to travel between them by foot or horse, another going up and right that would go to Silverymoon, and other routes on the map showing the route and time you'd use to get to another place. If you want to go cross-country, well, get yourself a Ranger of someone knowledgeable about the region, but don't rely on that sort of map for going across a landscape. That's for adventurers, bandits, and other ne'er-do-wells.

Edited to add:
In my post on pae one I mention Medieval Demographics Made Easy. It's moved to here.

 

[S'mon]

Traditionally the most high scale maps have been 30 miles per hex but anything 20+ is likely okay for a continental map. At the next level down some say 6 miles per hex is good. As you can see that fits nicely with the 6mph movement. If you want a mapper lower scale than that, just do 100 meters which means about 16 to a mile. Make movement across one of those hexes take a turn if you are searching and exploring. Make movement about 3 of those hexes per turn if you are just walking along.

I've been using 10 mile, 2 mile, and 100 yard hex maps, so the last is close to your recommendation. It's a nice semi-tactical scale for the local area around a village, or for a large city. Most play though is on the 2 miles/hex operational map or on 5' grid square tactical maps.

 

[Emerikol]

I've been using 10 mile, 2 mile, and 100 yard hex maps, so the last is close to your recommendation. It's a nice semi-tactical scale for the local area around a village, or for a large city. Most play though is on the 2 miles/hex operational map or on 5' grid square tactical maps.

Seems reasonable to me. Especially if you are doing bottom up world design but even if not you can definitely run a campaign within those bounds.

 

[turnip_farmer]

One thing that has started to irk me lately: when people design a world, they start modeling it as if it were another planet, so there are oceans, continents, etc. My problem with this is: how many people in your world think of it as a planet?

Related to this, I'm bothered by the trend that worldbuilding advice for fantasy worlds seems to be the same as if you were building a world for a hard sci-fi game. People start thinking about things like plate tectonics and realistic climate distributions. Now, aside from the fact that all of this is pointless anyway, as you're players will never notice, does no one think that some of the mythology in a fantasy world should be real? The stars are not distant suns; they are scales that broke off the Rainbow Dragon in it's battle against the Old Ones of the Eternal Void. The continents did not drift to their positions due to convection in the planetary mantle; they were torn apart by the cataclysmic forces unleashed in the War Against the Heavens.

Edit: Ah crap. Didn't even notice I was replying to something from when Obama was President.

 

[Emerikol]

Related to this, I'm bothered by the trend that worldbuilding advice for fantasy worlds seems to be the same as if you were building a world for a hard sci-fi game. People start thinking about things like plate tectonics and realistic climate distributions. Now, aside from the fact that all of this is pointless anyway, as you're players will never notice, does no one think that some of the mythology in a fantasy world should be real? The stars are not distant suns; they are scales that broke off the Rainbow Dragon in it's battle against the Old Ones of the Eternal Void. The continents did not drift to their positions due to convection in the planetary mantle; they were torn apart by the cataclysmic forces unleashed in the War Against the Heavens.

Edit: Ah crap. Didn't even notice I was replying to something from when Obama was President.

I think either approach is valid. In my current world I've went away from "semi-realistic" and tried something truly fantastical. But I don't think there is any reason to be "against" a realistic design sometimes. If I don't have an agenda to use the fact my world is alien in nature, I tend to default back to realistic. I don't do planets but I do do continents. In the far off places though it may just be a map of some sort.