# Tips for determing world size



## Swordfry (Jul 6, 2015)

I have my story, plot, done and ready. But one last bit of worldbuilding is still confusing me: the exact size of this fictional world of mine.

I started off small. The first story set in this world is small, only taking place along the coast of one part of a continent, and the large forest set directly inland from it.

ButI am still having trouble figuring even the size of the forest. I just feel so dumb, not being able to figure any of this out.

Does anyone have any tips?


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## thecoldembrace (Jul 6, 2015)

What people will generally recommend is make it as big as it needs to be. If you do not feature other parts of your world in your story, then why even bother thinking about them? Create as needed, that way you can concentrate on the story.


-Cold


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## ThinkerX (Jul 6, 2015)

Just what is in the forest?  A few tribes of savages?  A kingdom. complete with cities, roads, knights, and merchants?  Several kingdoms?

Woodland tribes need hunting grounds - and the bigger the tribes, the bigger those hunting areas have to be.  A great big old boar, for example, works out to one or two meals for a tribe of a thousand.  


Do any of the characters cross the forest from side to side (in any direction) during the course of the story?  If so, is their travel time a significant issue?   Real rough rule of thumb:

Assuming the characters are on a actual road or very good quality trail, and in reasonable shape, then 20 miles a day on foot is a reasonable distance for them to travel.  If they are in really good shape, maybe 25 miles.

If they are following animal trails through dense shrubbery, then cut those distances in half - at a minimum.  

Apply those rules of thumb to the forest traveling your characters do in the course of the story.  It'll give you a starting point.


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## AkamaruGames (Jul 12, 2015)

Is there a particular reason to state the exact size of the forest? If it is only for a story you are writing (as opposed to an rpg where you plan on players actually exploring it or actually drawing a map for whatever reason) then just saying it is "a large forest" is probably sufficient. The reader will fill in their imagination as to how big a big forest should be in their minds. 

If on the other hand you really need details, about 1000 acres would be a fairly large forest. The world's largest forest, the Boreal Forest (also known as Taiga or Snowforest), stretches through Canada, Russia and Scandinavia and is somewhere in the park of 2 or 3 billion acres. The Amazon Rainforest is around 1.3 billion acres. Use real world examples, and you can probably figure out something on the scale that you need.


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## DeathtoTrite (Jul 14, 2015)

Measure Distance on a Map 

I find this a surprisingly useful tool; it lets you measure distance between two points in the real world. This is handy to appreciate the size of different countries and how quickly armies are able to move.


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## Bruce McKnight (Jul 14, 2015)

This is another of the many things I use Google Maps for. I zoom in by an area I'm familiar with and then approximate how big my fictional area is in relation to real area I can compare it to. 

Google Maps also has a great feature to tell you how long it takes to walk a distance. You can put the directions between two points up and then click the icon of the walking person and it will tell you the distance and walking time between the points. It's been great for me to be able to tell if someone could walk a certain distance in a day.

When I made the map of my continent, I overlaid the map of the US (probably easiest to use whatever your home country is) to help me better approximate distances as well as climate.


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## Vandor (Jul 29, 2015)

I bounced some map and world ideas off of my brother. He doesn't write per se, but he's read enough and seen enough maps to give me some solid feedback. 

I showed him some variations I had, and he came up with this:

Why cut off the edges of the map? Why put a huge desert, an ocean, or impenetrable mountains on a map and restrict it to the left/right-alligned setup?

I could only think: laziness. I didn't feel like filling in the rest of the world. I didn't think I needed to deal with the rest of the world. In the past, I put logical boundaries; how far have the people of the world explored? what stopped them from making a larger map? I've seen whole world maps and maps that expand as the story and universe grow in subsequent books, but sometimes its nice to have those areas already planned out. Personally, I world build a little excessively, so I had to then map my entire world to satisfy the question he posed.

Long story short, it might be worth the time to draw beyond the regular square of the map, but by no means should you feel the need to fill in every gap with a name or place. Its more for your own reference than the readers.


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## CupofJoe (Jul 30, 2015)

Vandor said:


> Long story short, it might be worth the time to draw beyond the regular square of the map, but by no means should you feel the need to fill in every gap with a name or place. Its more for your own reference than the readers.


I usually start small, a village or a small region, when my characters and story start. 
If the story gets to me I go wider. My characters will know what is just over the hill or across the bay, so I need to know as well.
Beyond that it gets a little more fuzzy. They know there are towns and cities or if there are major features a week's travel away but they don't really know much about them, or only anecdotally [and maybe inaccurately?].
Eventually I usually end up with a world map that kind of reflects how they view the world [Big islands over there, huge mountains just to the left of the plain, a land of dragons to the north, or what ever]. I start to fill in the blanks if and only when I find the story needs them. About half the time I find my world is wrong [there is no big islands "over there" but a lot of small ones etc.] as the story changes and twists and I have to re-jig my world.


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