the size of Cerilia

Dungeons & Dragons The Royal Library
1

I’ve been messing around with maps lately, and realized something. There is a map out there that compares Aebrynis to Earth (the Aebrynis-v5 file download, posted on the website), and from that it suggests that Cerilia is essentially the size of Europe, all the way to the Urals.

However, the milage scale of the core maps belie this. Per the map of Cerilia from the boxed set, from the City of Anuire to the northeast coast of the IceMarch (as the crow flies), one finds a distance of about 1200 miles.

To compare this to real-world Europe, if one put the City of Anuire on the southwest corner of Portugal, that means the IceMarch would be in southwest Germany (around Frankfurt). The eastern edge of Khinasi would be on Sicily, and the northern reaches of Rjurik would be in Normandy France.

Overall, the entire surface area of Cerilia would only be the equivalent to France and Iberia, and maybe northern Italy. Cerilia, by the book, is only about one-quarter the area of real-world Europe.

Now, i also did some calculations from a couple of the Player’s Secrets addons. Using Medoere and Ilien, the scales on those maps are larger by almost exactly a third. For example, if one measures the distance between cities on the core continental map, and then the distance between the same cities on the PSo Medoere or Ilien map, the PSo distance is a third larger. (I don’t know if this holds for other [i]PSo]/i] products.)

The default scale seems awfully small to me, especially given the vast differences in climate. Has anyone modified the scale of Cerilia for these or any other reason?

Thoughts?

-Fizz

2

Yes, you are correct, and I have found the same correlation.

The problem, I believe, can be corrected (slightly), and here is what I have done for myself:

These geographical areas called provinces are, essentially, political divisions of land that, for various reasons, have their shape (i.e. tradition, topography, etc).

A county (essentially, a province) is an area of land that, in feudal terms, is the amount of land that a lord can control and protect easily with his soldiers. Generally speaking, when an enemy invades, you want to be able to send out riders to alert all of your vassals so that they can come to your defense and defend your land. In principle, you want this to be a half day, so that a vassal knight can gather their arms and men-at-arms and come riding back post haste. Longer than that, of course, risks the raiders getting away with stealing your food and other stuff and getting away with it.

Therefore, you don’t want the size of your fief to be larger than a day’s ride.

In game terms, a heavy warhorse can travel about 40 miles a day (a light horse 48 miles/day). Therefore, you want your fief to be around that size. Your major settlement, and your seat of government, will be in roughly the center of that area, usually; 20 miles to the border in each direction from there, in other words.

Thus, I propose you double the mileage scale on the maps. This would make it about 50 miles per 1 inch (and a bit) on the large-scale maps. This then makes provinces sort of about 40 miles wide, for roundish ones.

Granted, this still makes Cerilia incredibly small. But I found if you try to make it bigger than that, you run in to some other problems. You still have to look the other direction, so to speak, when talking about climates, and stuff, for example… :slight_smile:

3

This is a very interesting take on it. I like it. Doubling the mileage means there is 4x as much area. I don’t think i would call it small at that scale. That means the distance from the City of Anuire to the large island in the middle of The Leviathan’s Reach is about 2300 miles. On Earth, that’s the distance from Gibraltar to Moscow.

Another comparison, from the city of Aaldvika in Hogunmark to the city of Masetiele in Suiriene would be nearly 2800 miles. That’s the equivalent of Belfast to Baghdad.

So at your doubled scale, Cerilia would be roughly the size of Europe from the Atlantic Ocean as far east as the Caspian. That’s a good size i think.

There is certainly plenty of climatological differences through Europe, so you might not have to look the other way on climate as much as you think. :slight_smile:

-Fizz

1 Like
4

That’s what I thought too, which is why I eventually went with it.

Plus, it’s a little more historically comparable.

5

On a side note, Fizz, looking at the generally accepted Aduria map on this site, I would suggest halving the size of that map.

Right now, each square is equated to 100 miles. But if you reduce it to 50 miles, then each one of those squares then equates to the Cerilia landmass on that same map, plus it has the added benefit for those who would want to tackle creating realm information for Aduria being easily able to construct realms out of it - since one square would be roughly one province.

Just a thought… :smiley:

(I’ve been mulling that task over lately…)