OK, so D&D demographics match a) 650 AD, one of the worst post-apocalyptic times in world history and b) Western Sahara, a current nearly-uninhabited strip of desert. Apparently this matches the demographics of Europe in 650, right after the Plague of Justinian wiped out 50% of the world population. That’d give you a population of 30 million people if the entire continent were settled, but probably it’s half wild. If your continent fills the map, it has the same area as 3000 province maps, and it takes three months to traverse at 25 miles per day.
#5E PAGE 6 DMG PLUS#
At 60 miles to the hex, you could fit Europe on one sheet of hex paper, plus about a third of Russia. Considering that a kingdom map contains 30 province maps, each of which is likely to contain a town, it’s probable that small towns aren’t shown on the map either.Ĭontinent scale is huge. A kingdom map of a settled area will have 10 notable cities or towns villages are not shown at this scale. The kingdom scale of 6 miles per hex is just about standard for D&D outdoor hex scales (5 to 8 miles per hex, depending on edition). On a province-scale 8 1/2 x 11 map, which takes about two days of travel to traverse, the DMG says that you’d expect to find one town (population generally around 4000, based on settlement size ranges) and 10 villages (population around 500 each), which works out to about 5 people per square mile in settled lands, about the same population density as the Western Sahara. Still, that will confuse some poor saps when they get around to making new campaign maps. It looks like this was simply an error of saying “area” when they meant “length”, and, with that substitution, the rest of the math on the page works out fine. Similarly, a kingdom hex is the area of 30 province hexes, not 6 as claimed. This time it’s Province (1 mile hex), Kingdom (6 mile hex) and Continent scale (60 mile hex).įirst of all, there’s a major error in the section about combining scales: it says that at continent scale, “1 hex represents the same area as 10 kingdom scale hexes.” Wrong. recommends getting hex paper with five hexes to the inch (so about 2000 hexes per sheet, more or less.) Following in the footsteps of BECMI, the DMG recommends maps at three different scales.
From this page, what can we learn about the D&D world? Is it more like a medieval dark age, or the early Renaissance, or is it totally ahistorical? This contains the outdoor campaign mapping rules, into which is encoded a lot of world demographics information.
In the 3e DMG we got, like, a chapter on worldbuilding, demographics, and settlement generation. Today I’ll be talking about page 14 of the DMG. I’ll probably find things to unpack in this DMG for a few weeks. Of the core books, the DMG benefits the most from close readings: things that were explained fully in previous DMGs are often presented in complete but compressed form. In fact, since I saw early drafts of DMG sections, a third or more of the book is completely new to me. It’s notable that I didn’t review the acknowledgements section, or that particular spelling error would have never gotten through. OK, first of all: as was the case with the Monster Manual, Rory and my names are in the Dungeon Masters Guide! We’re credited as “Additional feedback provied by”.
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