Measure Your Worlds in Feet

  If you ever have an afternoon free (and I recommend freeing an afternoon for this), just go walk out your door. Preparation? Comfortable shoes, correct weight of jacket, drink a glass of water, you’re not going hiking here. Just leave your front door, hit the street, and start walking. Walk to somewhere you’re not normally travelling past, find pretty paths. Take two hours, then turn around and amble back. It’s good for you, if you can avoid looking at your phone or listening to anything it might even be good for you spiritually, but however you do it, after getting back, pull up a map and look at how far you’ve gotten. Some of you are fit and used to walking and will have gotten six miles. Some of you might have only gotten three. Look at how tiny your jaunt looks on the map. It wasn’t a long drive. But then think about how big everything looks when walking, and remember that you could have taken dozens of different paths.
  This is the perspective of most humans for most of human history, you’re walking with your own two feet. If you have horses, that’ll speed you up…briefly. Unlike in most movies, games, and books, in the real world horses aren’t going to drastically speed up your long-distance treks, although they’ll definitely increase your carry capacity. Sailing ships are faster, but they take you from one place you walk around to another place you walk around. If you’re running a campaign for D&D or something similarly medieval-inspired, you’re probably using a map that’s too big.
  I avoid RPG subreddits normally, but there is a subreddit I love to visit regularly: r/mapmaking. Large numbers of very talented amateur cartographers are spending hours and hours making their worlds, often with very detailed plate tectonics, climate models, and histories. I admire these artists’ work, but I always have to wince when I see someone say “this is my D&D world”, because if they’re asked about where they’ve actually had play…it’s “well, I just plan on this someday”. These are huge spaces, too big. A newish poster on the subreddit posted his own campaign map, something the size of Germany, as “small”. He has a pretty good post about it too on his blog…but I think you could go even smaller, for wild lands (his own is settled, with pockets of darkness).

  This is my current campaign’s region, the Skyshadow Isles (real-world geography, Franz-Josef Land). I have been running an ongoing open-table campaign here for nearly half a decade, playing an average of 4-5 times a month. Now, there’s a kilodungeon in here, as well as dozens of little sub-dungeons, but these are also ten mile hexes, 184 of them, each keyed for adventure and interest. It’s only because I’m running an islands map that the hexes are so big; six-milers are what I’d use for overland. This whole area is only a little over a hundred miles wide, but it’s going to supply adventure for another couple years as it is. My next campaign, set in the same world, will be in an area based on the Shenandoah Valley slightly smaller than West Virginia. Such is a human-scale campaign map.
  I love cartography, I love world maps, and I love worldbuilding on every single scale. But don’t expect you’ll need a continent-sized area for a fantasy campaign. Once high levels hit with flying mounts and teleportation, that’s not really going to have maps an order of magnitude larger, that becomes more like planes-hopping, a modern airport existence where the highlights get hit. There’s no place like home, and home base for your campaign is something scaled for human (or hobbit) feet.