Building a World: More Maps and Such

  Earlier entries in this series are here, here, here, and here.

  We recently saw the regional map, or map of the primary play area. But I wanted to place it in a larger world, so I sketched out a 'mercator-style' world map that looks like this:

  You can juuuust see where the Patchwork Lands are on the map. Again, I want a BIG world, so each square is (at the equator, etc.) 1,250 miles wide/high. The equator is marked with a dashed line  placing the Patchwork Lands in roughly the same latitudes as France, so I have a weather/crops/etc. comparison.

  Here is a bit of a zoom in on the world near to the Patchwork lands.

  To discuss scale - the Sea of Grass, a vast grassland (obviously) penciled in there that covers the majority of the continent of the Patchwork Lands, covers about, oh, 18 to 19 million square miles. That is larger than all of Asia, or three times larger than Russia, or 5-6 times larger than the US, or 200 times larger than the UK. That means the lake in the Sea of Grass is larger than the Caspian Sea. That also means that the largest lake on the big map is larger than India.
  Big world? Mission accomplished!

  So my focus when I get to conveying the world to the players is to allow them to discover that while the Patchwork Lands are going to have a 'look and feel' very much like Medieval Europe plus magic the larger world, and it is very large, is vast and full of mystery. I will need to have fantastic things far away, legends of distant lands, and merchants, etc., discussing just how far away things are.

  If done well, it will want them want to travel. If done poorly they will feel like underpowered yokels.

  I also need to think about how these huge distances will affect trade, travel, and politics. Hmmmm.