Scale

After much faffing about, this is a Pathfinder fantasy map, overlaid with a map of Canberra to scale. The grid is 1000ft divided into 100ft smaller squares.

I just cant help feeling that they haven’t gotten it exactly right. Maybe it’s just that we modern people live in enormous, truly gigantic cities. Or maybe the scale is perfectly reasonable. After all, the lake is about as big as one of the basins of Lake Burley-Griffin. Perhaps the real problem is that the parliamentary triangle of Canberra is actually laid out on a cyclopean scale. This is plenty big for a fantasy city.

Meh. It means that getting from one end of the city to the other is half an hour’s walk in game. Assuming no, ahem, eventualities.

I suppose that there’s a mesoscale between tactical map with 5′ squares and overland travel with mile-wide hexes. Computer games have spoiled us with the notion that maps should include everything, and the nature of fiction is that everything that happens is somehow about the protagonists. I lack the storyteller’s instinct, the ability to pull off the artist’s illusion of suggesting that there is more detail than there really is.

At the end of the day, a DM cannot really simulate an entire world for the benefit of the players.