I’ve been using the 4E distances. I also use the 4E versions of the verdant belts around the city-states. Can someone sell me on June’s version?
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25 miles – a day’s travel – feels way too short, and 75 miles from Tyr to Skonz extrapolates well for travel further afield, such as Altaruk, and even Urik.
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What’s the 4e version of Vedant Belts?
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The 4E verdant belts surrounding the city-states are substantially larger than the 2E verdant belts, even when considering the difference in scale. @IAmGiff can elaborate.
Oh…never noticed that. Interesting. I apparently use 4e versions as well.
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One of the innovations of the 4E setting that I can get behind. All things considered, the 4E Dark Sun designers were very respectful of the Dark Sun fans. The Forgotten Realms fans were quite unhappy with what they got.
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I feel like the big reason the 4e map is used more is because it
addresses some of the distance issues with 2e
Kept most of the stuff the same
Is prettier
Feels more current.
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I use the 2e 25 mile scale and have for decades. I use it in my current game. It’s never been a problem and I see no reason to change it.
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Yeah, this was something I noticed when trying to calculate the acreage of the verdant belts. I guess the 4E map has a scale that’s 2.25 or 2.5 times larger roughly, but in addition to that, they drew larger verdant belts. So like if you look at Urik’s verdant belt it’s only around 10 miles across on the 2E map but depicted as close to 50 miles across on the 4E map. The Verdant part of Balic’s peninsula is about 10 miles on the 2E map, about 40 miles on the 4E map.
And since I was calculating area, the differences end up being quite significant. I’d guesstimate Draj’s verdant belt at like 240 square miles (60,000 hectares) on the 2E map. But on the 4E map it’d be more like 1200 square miles (310,000 hectares).
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Which did you end up using for your populations book?
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I actually did it based off my physical 2E cloth map (which has slightly larger verdant belts than some of the 2E paper maps)… just because it’s my favorite of all the maps. (Although I’m constantly watching ebay hoping a 4E cloth map comes up). I haven’t thought through how I’d adjust it if I was using the 4E scale AND the 4E depiction.
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x3.125 scale increase from 2E, about 1.25x more than 4E.
As others have noted, the 2E scale puts everything within a few days of each other, and gives little to no room for life to breathe in the desert. I find the new scale keeps things close enough for interaction, but allows me to fill the space between cities with villages, nomads, and generally a “living” (for a given value of life) world.
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51 miles (50 for simplicity). I set my hexcrawl to be 3m per hex because that’s the distance to the horizon, assuming Athas = Earth. I don’t remember exactly why I chose that size, I think basically I wanted it bigger than 2e, and I think the limitations of Foundry maps along with my 3m per hex gave me this size that felt “big enough”.
Means from Tyr (assuming 24m per day):
- 2 day to Fort Skonz
- 3 days to Fort Amber
- 6 days to Altaruk
- 6 days to Silver springs
- 12 days to Urik
In college, I used to go on weekend geology/Paleontology-digs; one of the professors said, “In the desert, everything’s further than it looks”.
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I stretch the distance between City-States by 2x (except Glug/Nibenay; they’re a binary system) then flat convert from miles to km. I figure that Athas is largely no man’s land outside the immediate reach of the City-States.
I am also of the opinion that populations should be increased by approximately an order of magnitude (hundreds of thousands to a City-State rather than tens of thousands).
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Yes. You can’t have the complex societies without scale.
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I always wondered what “the benefits” are that you now see. What caused that? And what are they?
I’ve always wondered about people not using 2E distances and then giving the reason 25 miles is a day’s travel and that puts everything close have ever opened up a DM’s Guide. There’s rules for travel there, and most particularly about desert terrain and all kinds of obstacles that impact your daily movement.
I’ve had my players walk around and suffer inhospitable terrain and do a full day about 2 miles simply because there’s no clear route through that badland.
Sure they’re not gonna have that be such a problem anymore the minute they go up a few levels, but by then there’s all other kinds of worries they should have.
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We had a talk about it a while ago on the Pristine Tower dev group Discord (in the Map Discussion).
I don’t remember the full argument, but here is a bit of it:
With the 2e scales, some landmarks/cities/villages are in visual range of each other even from the ground, and that didn’t quite seem right. And a modest bump up in scale doesn’t necessarily defeat my own personal bias towards making the whole map more explorable for PCs and DMs.
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In present day, we can produce about 4.48 metric tons or just shy of 5 US tons per Hectare. (Corn is approx. double the output in the same space) so if we assume 40 square miles of Draj’ green space is taken up by city, roads, estates, etc. that leaves about 50k hectares meaning a production of approx. 246,917 US tons of wheat per annum, the average person needs approx. one ton of food per year and so Draj could hypothetically support a population of 200k without too much concern