I'm in the process of building a home-brew world. I am using the World Builder's Guidebook (pieces of it actually, it's not that great of a book). I have determined my world has a 4800 mile diameter from the book. It is spherical just like the earth (well close..it's a perfect sphere unlike the earth). Anyway I know what the continents look like. Now the question is: How do I determine how many miles are on my world? Like to see how big continents are. And for that matter how do I tell the land/water ratio? I have Campaign Cartographer 2 (i'm very inexperianced with it though). How do I get a spherical or circular template? How do I get a square (not hex, I find them easier) grid over it. And how do I change the size of my world according to what i want it too?
world size
- Thread starter redwing
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BiggusGeekus
That's Latin for "cool"
I strongly advise not to worry about it.
Start small. Start very small. Start with something the size of Keep on the Borderlands (a small fort and the surrounding area) and work out as ou need to. If you try to build an entire world at once you will end up with something very big and very vauge or you will lose 2d6 sanity points as you attempt to make every culture distinct.
Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms started this way. They got bigger.
Start small. Start very small. Start with something the size of Keep on the Borderlands (a small fort and the surrounding area) and work out as ou need to. If you try to build an entire world at once you will end up with something very big and very vauge or you will lose 2d6 sanity points as you attempt to make every culture distinct.
Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms started this way. They got bigger.
Darraketh
First Post
I started with a map of one continent and concentrated on plausible geography. I didn't worry about the exact size of the world or whether it was round or not (besides the current scientific consensus is that the world is flat and the center of the universe).
Next I zoomed in and detailed one town and the surrounding countryside. Then I zoomed out a bit and added just the names and a few notes regarding the towns, cities and other points of interest within striking distance of the base town.
That was 1989. It took me years to fill that one continent. Now, even though it is fairly complete, I am still apt to change anything unexplored and or unknown as I have done many times in the past.
Next I zoomed in and detailed one town and the surrounding countryside. Then I zoomed out a bit and added just the names and a few notes regarding the towns, cities and other points of interest within striking distance of the base town.
That was 1989. It took me years to fill that one continent. Now, even though it is fairly complete, I am still apt to change anything unexplored and or unknown as I have done many times in the past.
I start small, 800 miles by 1000. This is gives you a nice base to adventure in, you can add grids as you see fit.
toberane
First Post
I believe that most of the world-specific questions you had are addressed in the World Builder's Guidebook. In fact, I am about 99.9% sure that at least the ratio of land to water is.
You didn't care for the bok. I found it to be very useful. Using the generic random history tables, I was able to create a very interesting history for my world. I got a lot of other ideas from it, too, including ideas for the pantheon of gods and cosmology, all of which helped me shape the world a great deal.
You didn't care for the bok. I found it to be very useful. Using the generic random history tables, I was able to create a very interesting history for my world. I got a lot of other ideas from it, too, including ideas for the pantheon of gods and cosmology, all of which helped me shape the world a great deal.
Britannia 3E is 1000 by 1000 miles, or 1 million square miles including surrounding seas. That should be more than enough room for any sort of trouble I want to spring on my players (or vice versa).
At one stage I bumped it up to 2000 by 2000 miles, thus quadrupling the size of my world in one step. The power I held in my hands was so frightening I changed it back.
At one stage I bumped it up to 2000 by 2000 miles, thus quadrupling the size of my world in one step. The power I held in my hands was so frightening I changed it back.
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Desdichado
Hero
hong, that's actually quite large. Great Britain (including Northern Ireland) is less than 100,000 square miles, and as far as I'm concerned, is big enough to adventure in for years. Your second experiment, of 4 mil square miles is just a tad under the size of all of Europe. That's actually quite a lot to detail out for a homebrewer, unless he's been working on it for years.
Joshua Dyal said:
Oh, I'm not planning on detailing out ALL of it. First, about half of the 1 million square miles is actually water, since Britannia isn't a conveniently convex continent. Second, most of it will actually be along the lines of "here be dragons" -- ie locations where the map is a big zero, as far as the players are concerned.
It's interesting that there's absolutely no information at all about how big Britannia is supposed to be, as far as I can tell. The only things that are known are:
- the overland map is 256x256 squares in Ultima 4 and 5, which doesn't really help; and
- it takes roughly two game days to go from one edge of the continent to the other in U6 and 7.
The latter is probably a bit too small for my purposes
so I felt free to make something up out of thin air.Similar Threads
