D&D General Toril must be a Super Earth.

[Charlaquin]

I know, but when the creator picks a rotation and revolution exactly the same as Earth's, its not really likely he also intended the planet to be twice Earth's size. The setting is fairly obviously intended to be a parallel Earth, which is fairly common for fantasy settings.

It’s definitely supposed to be a parallel to earth, but I don’t imagine a ton of thought was put into the planet’s size. It has days, years, seasons, and tides like Earth’s because it’s convenient. But for that same reason (convenience), I would expect its size to be “as big as it needs to be to fit all the stuff we wrote.”

 

[TwoSix]

It’s definitely supposed to be a parallel to earth, but I don’t imagine a ton of thought was put into the planet’s size. It has days, years, seasons, and tides like Earth’s because it’s convenient. But for that same reason (convenience), I would expect its size to be “as big as it needs to be to fit all the stuff we wrote.”

Oh sure, that's exactly what I think too. I would just need to see a lot more evidence to support the "super-Earth" contention when I think the current evidence points towards it being a regular old Earth.

 

[Zardnaar]

Doesn't look that big. Superimpose Faerun onto Western USA.

 

[Lanefan]

Earth would be bigger too if we had to have at least one day of wilderness journey between every two towns.

When foot is the main means of transport, one day's journey might not be all that far - depending on trail/road/weather conditions, of course, and on how straight a line the trail/road takes.

Horse-and-carriage or horse-and-wagon isn't much faster if any. Horse alone can be, but not by as much as you might think over the long haul.

In good conditions on reasonably flat terrain, making 20 miles a day is probably the best you can hope for without exhausting yourselves or your mounts. In less-than-good conditions you won't even get that far.

 

[Lanefan]

As for Toril itself, yes the continents are big compared to Earth but that seems to be cancelled off by there being less ocean*, so the end result is probably about the same size.

* -which of course they almost certainly haven't factored into their weather/climate patterns, but that's a different issue.

 

[Oofta]

When foot is the main means of transport, one day's journey might not be all that far - depending on trail/road/weather conditions, of course, and on how straight a line the trail/road takes.

Horse-and-carriage or horse-and-wagon isn't much faster if any. Horse alone can be, but not by as much as you might think over the long haul.

In good conditions on reasonably flat terrain, making 20 miles a day is probably the best you can hope for without exhausting yourselves or your mounts. In less-than-good conditions you won't even get that far.

As someone who's backpacked, 20 miles is a good hike. If you have wagons and/or difficult terrain I will cut that in half unless there are well maintained roads. It's easy to take long distances for granted when we can travel ten times faster on our daily commutes than our ancestors were capable of. Historically, many people never traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born.

 

[aco175]

Not sure how accurate this is:

 

[Zardnaar]

Not sure how accurate this is:
View attachment 116552

Looks good, I once compared Faerun to Western Europe and they're not radically different in size.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

When foot is the main means of transport, one day's journey might not be all that far - depending on trail/road/weather conditions, of course, and on how straight a line the trail/road takes.

Horse-and-carriage or horse-and-wagon isn't much faster if any. Horse alone can be, but not by as much as you might think over the long haul.

In good conditions on reasonably flat terrain, making 20 miles a day is probably the best you can hope for without exhausting yourselves or your mounts. In less-than-good conditions you won't even get that far.

Totally true. I'm mostly just poking fun at these settings mostly being fantasy European medieval, which means that a lot of that wilderness should be miles upon miles of farmlands with several little villages (albeit not all necessarily anything we would recognize as such today) coming by every few miles. It should take days to get anywhere, but there should be a lot more people and civilization along the way than I usually see presented. All usable land should basically be claimed and settled to the extent that threats of magical evil allow.

 

[Zardnaar]

Totally true. I'm mostly just poking fun at these settings mostly being fantasy European medieval, which means that a lot of that wilderness should be miles upon miles of farmlands with several little villages (albeit not all necessarily anything we would recognize as such today) coming by every few miles. It should take days to get anywhere, but there should be a lot more people and civilization along the way than I usually see presented. All usable land should basically be claimed and settled to the extent that threats of magical evil allow.

There's a lot of stuff that doesn't show up on the larger scale maps.

The old Sword Coast 2E maps has lots of towns that don't appear on the maps.

Small villages of under 1000 people won't be on most maps.