Size of fantasy world

[SamYellek]

I just joined this website, and I was hoping for some tips, advice and opinions.

I've created a fantasy world for a story I'm writing. I think I've put a lot of thought into this world. I've even drawn out a map, although it isn't to scale. But there is one thing that has been bothering me lately that I can't seem to hammer out. The total square miles of my fantasy country.

Now the more I think about it, the more I realize that it isn't that important at the moment. I know it's a detail I can come back to later. But I still can't seem to get it off my mind. I've been seeing all these posts around about other fantasy worlds. "Narnia is this many miles across. Westeros is this many miles long. Middle Earth is this many miles wide." And then I'm just sitting here like "...I got nothing..."

Does anyone have any tips or words of wisdom to try to get my mind off this non-important at the moment problem that won't quit nagging me?

 

[ThinkerX]

Put yourself in the shoes of a traveler in your world. How many days travel would he or she require to cross your country from one end to the other?

 

[CupofJoe]

To continue from ThinkerX
How long and how hard will the journey be?
Two weeks walking across gentle rolling grass land might be 200-300 miles [ymmv] but in mountains or swamps and you might be happy with 10 to 20 miles as a total for the fortnight.
If the mileage doesn't need to be exact, then don't measure it.
I know roughly how big things are in the worlds I build but only to within a few days travel time.
"-ish" can become a good friend....

 

[SergeiMeranov]

I like to gain a sense based on an actual nation's size. For example, Rome around 117 AD was around 5 million square kilometers or 1.93 million miles square. It occupied around 3% of the total available land on Earth. France, at the end of World War 1, was around 212,000 square miles. Knowing that you can sort of look at a map and decide how big you want your countries and so forth, by deciding which historical nation is comparable.

After deciding which nations you want the countries or areas in your world to most closely resemble, you can put them on the map that you've made for your world and then, by simple addition, you can figure out how large the world is. This method presupposes you have a map of your world already and were just trying to figure out how far from point A to point B.

If you don't have a world map already constructed then it's a bit more tricky to come up with a general "how big is the world" idea. The ideas others have suggested would work well for that sort of measurement. Figure out how long it would take someone to ride a horse from one end of the continent to the other and then use the average miles traveled by horse per day to figure out the total distance. Alternately, if you plan on the fantasy world being vaguely Earth-like in size then you could just use the Earth's dimensions and figure out which of the continents yours is similarly sized to and then just use that figure.

I'll also make my general plug here, as someone that loves world building in excruciating detail, that you need to remember that sometimes details like this are fun to create, but add little to the story. Is it really all that important to know that the Kingdom of Aledonia is 400,000 square miles or is it fine to know that it's large? Do people need to know it takes 24 days to travel from the city of Hazeldorf to the city of Jerisdof or is it enough to know that it seems like ages to your character? My larger point being that world building is awesome, but sometimes its easy to get lost in the weeds in stuff like this, but if you're in it just to world build then more power to you because that's a fun exercise in itself.

 

[Malik]

First off, why are they using miles? They wouldn't know what a "mile" is. Also, to have the world paced off in any sort of metric is damned difficult unless the kingdoms have dedicated teams out there measuring it, and even to me that seems creepily OCD. Until very recently, maps were pretty vague.

In the world that I built, the people don't use a measurement for long distances. They have no reason to. Their maps are a representation of the amount of time it takes to travel between destinations. So, two towns that are, say, 20 miles apart over grasslands with a good road and can be traveled either by horse in a day or on foot in two days are represented as being the same distance apart as two towns that are five miles apart but have a mountain in between them and tough, rarely-used trails that need bushwhacking, so it also takes a day to travel by horse or two days on foot. As far as anyone really cares, it's the same distance.

There's an area in my world where keeps and towns change owners and names so fast that no one keeps a map at all. The MC, who's from Earth, sketches it out as best he can and to him it looks like "a Jackson Pollock painting of warlord fiefdoms."

Just a thought. You can save yourself a lot of heartache by determining at the outset what each factor of your worldbuilding brings to the world and whether it's worth it. I mean, if it's really critical to the story that you know that your kingdom is 416,234,901.4 square miles, then hey, go nuts. Make it work. If it won't impact the story, then let it go. There's a lot more to do.

 

[skip.knox]

I would come at this from two directions. One, why not start with an earth-type planet? That gives you about 25,000 miles around. Continents come in at anywhere from 3000 to a bit over 10,000 miles. You could put more land mass in, of course, or less, but that starts to affect global weather patterns in significant ways. Me, I don't really want to study climatology.

Anyway, the other direction is, how big is your story? Does it take place inside a single city? Between two cities? A city and a mountain range or ocean? How many days do your characters spend traveling? For now, that's really all you need; fill in more for Novel #2.

Which, after all, essentially re-states what Sergei just said.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

My Mythaven planet is roughly half the size of Earth, yet the continent of Incarnichant is about the size of Pangaia.

 

[Russ]

I am with Malik. Just have an idea how long it takes for you to get from point A to point B that is relevant for the story you are telling.

Then you can let your obsessive fans calculate out the distances etc from your prose down the road. I don't know for sure but I suspect JRR did not do those calculations you are talking about.

 

[Chessie]

I don't use miles either. Days in travel time instead. Anything else is kind of a headache, unless your measuring system is more modern (not even though—more like 18th century on maybe?).

The best advice I can give is to keep these sorts of things simple and focus more on story.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Hmmm, why have miles? The Romans sure did. Not only that, they had the league, which was about 1.5 roman miles. Ancient Greeks? Yup, the milion was = to the roman mile, plus the stage, which was about 18.5 modern miles (according to the wiki, my memory isn't that good, LOL.) And the Greeks have several in between those. The ancient egyptians had the schoenus (greeks adapted it into the stade) which was approximately 10.5 km.

Now that said, it isn't toally necessary. However, if you are going the world map route, you can draw a map in Fractal Terrains (or overlay one you have) and determine lat/long and distances, and other stuff, if you're going to go the full monty on distances.

 

[Penpilot]

For the most part, I'm pretty vague with distances. I do use miles occationally, but like other's have mentioned, I use time to travel to measure distance. Town A was a week's travel from Town B.

 

[TheKillerBs]

I agree with everyone that it isn't necessary to calculate all that stuff. I will, however, argue that it can be pretty useful for consistency's sake to have a scaled map, especially if you have a low-magic setting.

 

[ThinkerX]

My educated and/or upper class characters will sometimes use miles - but a lot of time, the usage is pretty vague: 'Barbaros is over a thousand miles from here.' The 'day's travel' thing is still common, especially among the lower classes, but its changing because of bicycles, of all things. Heavy, clumsy, single speed things - but still letting a determined peddler cover 50-80 miles a day on good roads. And, as the main country is very roughly patterned after the Roman Empire, good roads abound.

 

[Futhark]

I use a real atlas and compare that to the area of my fantasy map. This will give you a general idea of how far they have to travel, then based on terrain, if it's an army or a messenger on horseback, arrive at an estimate for time. Remember, consistency is more important than accuracy.

 

[ushKee]

I'd recommend for most writers to create a world smaller than the Earth. The Earth is huge, with many continents and great vast oceans and sometimes it simply isn't practical to have to world-build that much. Or if you want your characters to explore across the lands, it would be inconvenient to have a world that size. A moon sized planet might be a good place to start. The moon is 2,159 miles in diameter for reference. A large continent might be 1000 miles across, and you can base everything from that.

If you don't want to use miles, just make up your own measurement, that also has a real-life measurement so you can keep track of things. In my book, I use "lengths" as a unit.

 

[TheKillerBs]

But world does not mean planet, at least not in this context. The world of a story could be anything from a single island in a pocket dimension to an alternate version of Tuscaloosa, Alabama to a multiverse with an infinite number of planets and anything in between. And if it's the last one the writer is under no obligation to build each and every planet in it. Or even every planet that shows up in the story. You can get away with building the only relevant parts, the bits that actually matter to the plot.

 

[ushKee]

Yeah it absolutely does not have to be, I assumed things from the OP's post that weren't there for some reason . My bad. Yeah, everything depends on how "known" you want your world to be. If your world is very concrete with a lot of scholars, and you want your characters to explore many portions of it, larger map may not be ideal. While you can absolutely pull off a mystery world with only some portions of it known/explored and make the entire world very large in terms of area, but you have to give logical reasons of why the other regions aren't known. Or you can make the world known and just have the characters stick around in that small area like you said..

 

[Futhark]

In ancient times people had little to no knowledge of other countries, besides those that border them or that they trade with. My fantasy world is earth sized and, because I'm big on realism, I started with tectonic plates and the formation of the continents. However, I have only 'world built' the part that my characters live in and, to a lesser extent, their neighbours. That's how I established the scale for the part of the world I'm interested in for my WIP. Of course, it's only one way (which works for me and my story), and after some experimentation I'm sure you'll find what works for you.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

But world does not mean planet, at least not in this context. The world of a story could be anything from a single island in a pocket dimension to an alternate version of Tuscaloosa, Alabama to a multiverse with an infinite number of planets and anything in between. And if it's the last one the writer is under no obligation to build each and every planet in it. Or even every planet that shows up in the story. You can get away with building the only relevant parts, the bits that actually matter to the plot.

Now I want to read a high fantasy novel with a world based on Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Lol...

 

[SamYellek]

I would like to thank everyone that has replied and answered my question. You all have been a great help to me.