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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8040567" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Agreed. I'd further add that if we're going for a medieval setting, travel times and known distances might be one and the same. The best measure to use for a fantasy rpg is the "league", a unit that historically varied from country to country but was fundamentally defined as approximately the distance a person could walk in an hour. Usually it's about 3 or 3.5 miles when actually legally defined, and in some instances actual measurements on that scale may be undertaken, but more often than not it was used for distances where nobody was doing any exact measurements. Rough terrain leagues might actually be a lot shorter than nice well maintained road leagues. A unit that is sometimes an exact distance and sometimes a measure of average travel time is probably both the most "authentically medieval" unit we can hope for for travel distances and the most helpful in a fantasy rpg context.If we take a look at a famous late medieval map of England (the Gough Map) we see why giving things in miles isn't really more exact than hours:[ATTACH=full]123903[/ATTACH]This map seems to be created based on arranging towns relative to one another based on what were considered the travel distances between them, then drawing the coast at it's reported distance from each, etc, which in most instances was probably more or less based on reported travel times. It is roughly England shaped, but I wouldn't consider distances someone gave me in miles based on it or the underlying information to be more accurate than distances given in travel time. The purported number of miles (or leagues, or whatever) between two places was more likely based on travel times than any sort of accurate surveying.Now, if the whole adventure is taking place in some advanced, bureaucratic empire with a corp of cartographers surveying the realm then perhaps it makes sense to have everyone talk about distances in precise units.</blockquote>

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