I’m taking a scheduled break from the New Beginnings series before the big push to conclude it. It will be back next week, all going according to plan.

This article is a sequel of sorts to one I published a few weeks ago, The Gradated Diminishing Of Reality – Travel in FRPG. I recommend that you refresh your recollection of that article before you start in order to get the most out of this one. It’s not necessary per se, but it would be beneficial.

At least in theory, a League is defined as “the average distance a man can normally walk in an hour”. Because this is a relative measurement, subject more than a bit to circumstances, converting a League to a more rigorous measurement – whether it be miles or meters – is neither precise nor very satisfactory.

And yet, for RPGs, a league is an astonishingly useful measurement, and one that is all too often overlooked because we are so used to the precision of modern measurements (something I’ll come back to, before I’m done).

In this article, my goal is to awaken the reader to this usefulness and bring the League back into focus as the first measurement of choice for GMs. I think they are that handy!

7-league Boots

Seven Leagues in one step. Now that you know what a “League” is supposed to represent, you can interpret that. Seven leagues is fairly close to the maximum distance that can be covered by an army in a day – it takes longer to break camp, get into formation, pause for meals, and set up camp than would be the case for a small group or an individual. An individual wearing these mythic boots does that in ONE STEP.

Even if that “One Step” is all that the boots can do for the day, that’s an enormous amount of ground covered, but the tradition has no such restriction. In a piece of fiction, you might be able to get away with magic this powerful, but not in an RPG – not without imposing some additional limitations, anyway. “They only move you in a straight line”, for example – so that a small error in direction means that they only get you somewhere in the vicinity of where you want to go. Limited numbers of “Big Steps” per day. I have seen one variation that cost the wearer 2 points of temporary CON loss, and 1 HD of hit points, per stride, leaving it to the player to determine just how urgent his travels were.

I’ll revisit the meaning of “7-League Boots” from time-to-time in the course of the article, and not just because I’ve referred to them in the title, but the text is really all about Leagues as a useful concept.

Hex-Grid Scales

Let’s think about the meaning of a League as defining the scales of maps for a while.

1 League Per Hex

If your map is drawn at the scale of 1 hex=1 League, then simply counting hexes tells you how many hours the PCs will need to travel in order to reach their destination, at a reasonable pace of travel. The same technique tells you how far they will get before lunch, where their evening campsite will be, and so on. No thought required, the scale itself makes the map more useful in game administration terms. How useful is that?

Of course, drawing anything at this scale makes them fairly big and detailed. I wouldn’t want to have to map a continent that way. Instead, I am more likely to employ this scale for a 24-hex radius around a site of particular interest – that’s a full day’s travel, hour by hour, in any direction from that site of interest.

A standard sheet of A4 paper is 20cm across, plus margin, then 50 hexes (24 plus 24 plus 1 for the site itself, and round up to get an easy number to work with) then each hex is going to be about 4mm across.

I haven’t seen any hex-grid that size, though it would not be all that difficult to create with modern graphics software. But 5mm hex-grid is quite common-place, and if it doesn’t quite give you a full day’s travel to each side, it comes close enough.

3 Leagues per Hex

This is an even more useful scale. Why? Because you can walk 2 hexes in a morning, and 2 hexes in an afternoon. Four hexes is one day’s travel. And six hexes is a day’s forced march, and 5 hexes is a day’s riding without pushing the mounts, and 7 hexes is a day’s hard riding, rising to 8, 9, or even 10 if you can change mounts frequently along the way. And three hexes is about right for a carriage over rough roads, rising to 4 on a good road – though carriages often push on into the twilight for an extra hex if it carries them to a refuge.

Four is such an easy number to work with when converting usual modes of transport, as well – if you have a normal movement of 30′, which is the case for most humanoids in Pathfinder, and you are dealing with a creature that flies at say 90′, all you have to do is multiply by the ratio of three to get the equivalent – ie, 12 hexes in a day for normal travel, 18 hexes for the flying equivalent of a day’s forced march, and so on.

It’s such a useful scale, because it’s so darned versatile.

Here’s a different perspective on this scale: 28 hexes is a week’s travel on foot. So if your maps are done 28 hexes wide at this scale, you have lots of space around the edges for labels and map keys, and each map can be called “one week” – a nice mnemonic scale. If you have three maps that are side-by-side at this scale, and the destination is on the third map, you can say “It will take 2-3 weeks” just by counting the number of pages.

Three adjoining map hexes at the three-league scale. Side “A” on the first is also side “A” on the second, Side “B” on the second is also side “B” on the second. Lots of room for a key!

12 Leagues per Hex

The final scale worth contemplating turns each day’s travel into a single hex, and that’s another very useful scale. Along a major road, that means that there will be an inn or settlement in every hex.

That in turn makes it possible to grade every road by the number of vacant hexes between such landmarks. A class-2 road has a community or accommodation in every second hex, class three roads have two empty hexes to each occupied one, and so on. Four nights of roadside camping is “country lane” standard; anything more qualifies as a backwater track.

Aside from these rather useful values, every 30 or so hexes represents a full month’s travel, so each map can be considered to “one month” in size. This makes relative distances easy to work with, and (at the same time), can impress on the players the real magnitude of the distances.

It also makes some aspects of military logistics much easier to work with. Unless arrangements can be made to garrison an army, they will have to return from whence they started before the onset of winter. An army can exert power no more than about four “map pages” away under these circumstances – and every one of those closer to home base increases the number of months that they can do so by two, starting at one for the 4-map mark. Some leeway may be possible if the campaign is in the direction of more tropical climates, of course.

Keeping Things In Perspective

For many years, the goal in cartography has been accuracy in placement of every detail shown. As a consequence, there are debates about the psychological impact of maps and the consequences – unintended or deliberate – of classic attempts to preserve the clarity of what the mapmaker found relevant, such as the Mercator-projection map that has become one of the standard ways to view the world, instantly recognizable. Discoveries in this field are still being made; for example, it was found in 2009 that people believe that it will take longer to travel north than south, that it will cost more to ship to a northern than to a southern location, and that a moving company will charge more for northward than for southward movement, simply because it is harder going up than down (Journal of Marketing Research, Vol 46(6), Dec 2009, p715-724).

With the arrival of Aerial Photography, and later, GPS systems, true accuracy became possible down to incredibly fine resolutions. I remember reading at the time of initial deployment of the GPS satellites that one town had been relocated on maps by 30 miles (!) as a result. (I looked for a link, but couldn’t find one – it has most likely been drowned out by more modern references). These days, the focus seems to be on correcting errors in Google maps – the presumption being, I suppose, that everything else has been fixed already. and, If this claim is to be believed, those errors can have serious repercussions.

We have become accustomed to maps being treatable as literal references to where things actually are. Yet, this has never been the case completely – reference the Cartographic Errors section of Wikipedia’s page on Cartography (while you’re there, read the whole page, it contains lots of fascinating tidbits) and this page at “The Map Room” that lists Cartographic errors reported on other websites.

Stepping away from that ideal for our fantasy RPG maps is not only truer to the accuracy possible in the eras most such games are set, but permits us to make them more useful for both GMs and players.

7-league boots in perspective

Six hexes at the three-league scale is a day’s forced march. It’s twelve strides with 7-league boots – at about 1.5 seconds per stride, that’s eighteen seconds travel.

Sixty hexes – more than will physically fit on a printed page at any reasonable resolution – at this scale is 10 days forced march, and for most human armies, that’s pushing close to the limits of physical endurance. With 7-league boots, you can reach that army in 120 strides, which takes about three minutes.

In fact, a reasonable number of hexes across a page at this scale would be about twenty. So that’s basically one map sheet a minute.

With such boots, the commander of an army can leave weeks after his troops and junior officers and join them at the front – then retreat back to the capital to consult intelligence reports – and be back at the front minutes later.

The Cartographic Twist

If you base the position of locations not on geographically-precise measurements (the 20th century standard) but on how long it takes to reach them, you deliberately distort the geography to make the map more functionally useful. In essence, you are following the travels of a cartographer, and employing his measurements of travel time.

Consider the following situation: A Cartographer travels south-east from point A to point B, then north to point C, then west back to point A. These trips take 1.5 days, 2 days, and 1 day, respectively. If you had some sort of counting device, you might map the number of turns of a wagon wheel in order to get a precise distance, but since you don’t, you have two choices: you can accept the exact time measurement as a distance analogue, or you can attempt to arbitrarily correct the travels times to account for the terrain. Either way, your map is going to be inaccurate, but which is the greater inaccuracy? (NB: Even with an accurate measure of distance traveled, roads and paths are rarely straight, introducing distortions – you either take a very great deal of trouble getting exact measurements of directions traveled, so that the construction of a single map is the work of a decade or more, or you tolerate an inherent level of error).

If all available techniques lead to error, you would almost certainly choose the option that delivers the most useful information. Forget about arbitrary adjustments laced with doubt and confusion; draw your maps assuming a constant movement rate and straight lines between landmarks, with occasional corrections relative to some visible surface feature.

So you draw a circle around point A with radius 1.5 days, and assume that point B lies somewhere on that curve. You draw another circle around A with radius 1 day, and assume that point C lies somewhere on that circle. You then look for points on these circles that are 2 days apart in a north-south direction. Because the circles are different sizes, there will be a limited number of these; the closer to the same size, the longer the arcs on which B and C can lie. The more such distances to each point that you can compile, the smaller the error becomes, but it can never be eliminated.

The net result is that anything shown on the map is more-or-less correct, but never exactly so. As a rough guesstimate, my instinct is that the margin of error would probably be 5 or 10%, but could be as high as 20% – so at five hexes away, things could be 1 hex removed from where the map says it is. At 10 hexes, it’s almost certainly one hex removed, and could even be two hexes.

And at 60 hexes, your position would be off by plus-or-minus 6 hexes, and could be off by as much as twelve.

That’s assuming that you don’t make adjustments as you go, and that is a very fair assumption to make, on reflection. You take one stride, the world blurring around you, and you find yourself in wilderness – are you north, south, east, or west of where you want to be, of where the map says you (theoretically) are? How can you tell?

You might get lucky, and have some visible landmark that you can use to orient yourself, or at least reduce the error. But the fact is that 7-league-boots can only get you somewhere in the vicinity of where you want to be, and the rest of the trip would have to be made by conventional means.

In The Gradated Diminishing Of Reality – Travel in FRPG, I suggested that at higher levels, the best approach is to hand-wave the travel in between ‘events of interest’, and that’s exactly what this interpretation of mapping delivers in conjunction with seven-league boots.

Remember that military field commander I was using as an example? There’s a 50-50 chance that he would end up on the wrong side of the front-lines if that’s where he’s going…

Teleport

Teleport spells are less useful than 7-league boots because they don’t permit even those occasional adjustments. The full scale of the error lies before you. You end up with a greater amount of “traditional” travel at the end. In all other respects, they are effectively the same as the seven-league boots.

Creating The Maps

Here’s the fun part: What’s involved in creating maps in which distance on the map actually corresponds with travel time instead of physical distance? Answer: absolutely nothing extra. It’s all about interpretation of the map you create anyway. But, if you want to at least take the effects into account, you can do in reverse what our hypothetical cartographer was contemplating: consider the terrain and extend the distances between places if the terrain is less than optimal. Things in the mountains are closer together than they appear to be on the map, and mountain ranges are bigger, with this effect reduced where there are mountain passes. The result is that mountain ranges a are more of a series of “bulges” with the narrow necks being where the passes are. Ditto swamps, and deserts. Good roads shrink distances in the direction along the road, and toward the road.

But that’s really all there is to it. Make your difficult terrain bigger and spread things out a bit more within such regions and remember that the error means that you don’t have to be that accurate. Easy!

Errors In Travel Time

The errors that come with the mapping techniques mean that even the “league scale” maps aren’t all that accurate, even assuming that the cartographer did his best to maintain a consistent speed when surveying the map. Again, we’re talking about 5% certainly, 10% probably, and 20% possibly. If the map indicates three days’ travel to from X to Y, that’s about 30 hours travel (10 hours per day) – so certainly plus-or-minus 6 hours, probably plus-or-minus 12 hours, and possibly as much as 18 hours difference, one way or the other.

“Are we there yet?” assumes a whole new significance.

The final step

With all the advantages that a relative scale provides – one measured in travel time, and not in true geographic distance – I can see no good reason for not implementing such a technique everywhere that it is relevant and appropriate. There will be a period of mental adjustment on the part of the GM, but that’s a minor hurdle. The benefits seem well worth that price.