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Im creating my world right now, and i have the basic layoutVery rough first draft of how i want my continent to look

What i've been thinking about, is how large it should be, and im not sure how to do it to maximize the fun in the game.

At the moment i was thinking, about a week from the bottom left (human capitol) to the middle (trade town, where the PCs will be hanging out the most). So about two weeks all in all. Is that too much? Too little?

DM Chris
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    What exactly would your PCs be doing during all that travel time, if you don't mind me asking? Do you have anything planned for those periods? And is there any particular narrative reason why they wouldn't already be in the trade town as opposed to the capital? – Sandwich Jun 22 '15 at 18:33
  • Well, one of the PCs will have just run away from the capitol, and i dont want them to star there, mostly because i want them to travel there eventually. And for what they'd be doing, i havent really thought about, i just feel like i want to have the more open stretches to add stuff in. Maybe have them travel for a week, and have them roll and see if anything happens, otherwise just fast travel it. But keep it open so i can add stuff there eventually?

    And the continent is an island. There might be other countries further away, but so far the part i've drawn up is the only thing i've planned

     – DM Chris Jun 22 '15 at 18:39
  • Are you asking what is fun,or what is realistic? – GMNoob Jun 22 '15 at 19:21
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    My question here: http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/63763/can-you-bypass-travel-by-fast-forwarding-in-your-campaign talks about bypassing travel. – Jesse Cohoon Jun 22 '15 at 19:24
  • Bit of both i guess, i want it to be fun. But i also want it to be realistic. I guess fun trumps realistic – DM Chris Jun 22 '15 at 19:25
  • Not am answer but a good reference point. The sword coast is ~2,000 miles long. – GMNoob Jun 22 '15 at 21:08
  • Do not answer in comments. – mxyzplk Jun 23 '15 at 11:52

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For comparison, it takes about four to six months (with medieval to 18th century travel methods) to cross the United States from east to west, though seasonal weather is likely to require stopping over halfway across to start again in late spring. Your two weeks figure, traveling by horse, will be about the size of the state of Georgia (USA). Generally, you can figure hikers will cover between fifteen and twenty miles in a day on a road without excessive elevation changes; riders will do around twice that without changes of horses (with horse changes, they can do much better; Pony Express used to average 200 miles a day with horse changes every few miles) -- mountains will roughly halve those figures, or worse, depending on how good the roads are.

The biggest thing affected by the size of the land is how many people can live there -- there are many reference available for medieval population densities and carrying capacity.

Zeiss Ikon
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  • hm, ill have to look into it a bit more. But i might end up enlarging it, or just calling it and island instead of a continent – DM Chris Jun 22 '15 at 18:52
  • You might also want to throw terrain into that mix, such as dessert (both hot and cold), swamp, mountains (as pointed out by Zeiss), and the other major problem - random or railroaded encounters. – Paul Jul 15 '15 at 07:59