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 The Size of a Territory

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Fate
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Fate


Posts : 254
Join date : 2007-11-19
Age : 51

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Name: Fate
Title: Steward of the Cosmos
Primary Domain: Destiny

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PostSubject: The Size of a Territory   The Size of a Territory I_icon_minitimeMon Mar 31, 2008 10:09 am

Hello everyone,

Right now I am working on a standardization for maps made for adventures in NGoM. There is not much to go by and the definitions vary on how many tokens can fit into a territory (Lush, Ample, Harsh etc.).

My idea is to keep this simple and state a territory is the distance a human adult can walk in one full day (12 hours). I have done some research and the number that keeps popping up with 3.5 MPH for an average person walking. This would make it 42 miles in a day. Of course terrain would affect this and that needs to be determined as well.

Why 12 hours and 1 day of walking. Well if you look at it, your warriors, scouts and other guardians would probably go out for 6 hours and come back 6 hours later. A day trip as they want to be close to the tribe in case something happens. If it was a hunter band they would probably venture out further into neutral territory.

I want some ideas as I want to address this issue for the next book.
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tygerr
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Name: Saya
Title: The Guardian
Primary Domain: Protection

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PostSubject: Re: The Size of a Territory   The Size of a Territory I_icon_minitimeMon Mar 31, 2008 6:14 pm

It happens I just did some research germane to this very topic.

It turns out that a medieval "rule of thumb" was that one acre was the amount of land required to feed one adult for one year. In reality, it wasn't really quite enough if one accounted for poor harvests, fields left fallow as part of crop rotations, forest land, surplus crops required for payment of taxes/tithes/rents, etc. And medieval agricultural techniques were notably superior to those of the Bronze Age world of NGoMK.

Also, large livestock (especially horses or equivalent, which are picky eaters with finicky digestive tracts requiring high-grade fodder) need grazing land and/or cropland dedicated to feed.

So a starting point to consider might be that an acre of Lush farmland will support one adult, one large grazing animal, or two smaller children/foals. Something more than that would be required to support an adult in Ample, and substantially more for Harsh, land. More land (*much* more land) would be required for pastoral rather than agricultural tribes, or for hunter/gatherers (there are reasons those kinds of people are nomadic, after all).

For reference, there are 640 acres in one square mile.

I'm sure you can take it from there. ;-)
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Varchild_Marquee
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Name: Valdjag'r
Title: Devil in the Boughs
Primary Domain: Forests

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PostSubject: Re: The Size of a Territory   The Size of a Territory I_icon_minitimeMon Mar 31, 2008 10:20 pm

Well, I have been going by the rule of thumb that a single hex is a village scale area and can contain enough space for 10 household units. And my overland maps are based on a half mile radius (corner to corner, don't remember what that's called on a hex). Then for a Territory I expand out to an area of ten hexes. The six hexes surrounding the village and any other four that make sense. If for some reason any of the adjacent six hexes are uninhabitable by the tribe, that many other hexes are selected. But tygerr and I have had discussions about this repeatedly. He has the best figures on actual measurements and research on the subject. If you want reality, then his figures would probably make more sense.
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Fate
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Posts : 254
Join date : 2007-11-19
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Name: Fate
Title: Steward of the Cosmos
Primary Domain: Destiny

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PostSubject: Re: The Size of a Territory   The Size of a Territory I_icon_minitimeTue Apr 01, 2008 11:05 am

Hmm,

Both are interesting thoughts.

Tell me, do you guys use any programs to do your maps in?

Tygerr, do you use hex maps? If you did how would your figures fit in?

Right now I do like Varchild's rule of thumb. It is elegant and simple.

Varchild, a single hex village scale area is 10 household units. Is each hex 1 full mile in diameter? 1/2 mile radius? Or is that the full size of the map?
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Varchild_Marquee
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Name: Valdjag'r
Title: Devil in the Boughs
Primary Domain: Forests

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PostSubject: Re: The Size of a Territory   The Size of a Territory I_icon_minitimeTue Apr 01, 2008 8:47 pm

Fate wrote:
Hmm,

Both are interesting thoughts.

Tell me, do you guys use any programs to do your maps in?

Tygerr, do you use hex maps? If you did how would your figures fit in?

Right now I do like Varchild's rule of thumb. It is elegant and simple.

Varchild, a single hex village scale area is 10 household units. Is each hex 1 full mile in diameter? 1/2 mile radius? Or is that the full size of the map?

Programs: I've used Paint Shop Pro 7.0 by JASC (the 9.0 version is Corel, but does the same job) to make a blank hex grid which I handed out to all my players to map their villages (as they haven't needed to expand yet). Those hexes I left them to determine the measurements of the diameters. I used the same to make my overland map (which sadly is huge or I would post it online somewhere... I need a cable connection before I can do that though... even email takes forever unless I suffer it to a gif format and reduce the colors to sixteen). I am presently playing with Dundjinni (which recently has changed its EULA to allow some, not much but some, commercial publishing of maps made with it, and its art packs, in exchange for proper credit as defined, of course, in its EULA) to make a larger overland map. I hope to eventually do the same for my players' village maps also. Some players, however, are more artistically inclined and precise in their design and have planned out ahead of time that his people's yurts will be mobile around the village and will change position as time goes on and as the village's population fluctuates. Wink

As for the scale of my hexes on the overland map, I've been debating, since talking with tygerr, whether to use the half mile diameter I had been using or a 1 mile diameter. I'll probably go with 1 mile to guarantee enough space for the village and farm land around it without pressing into the surrounding hexes before the village expands. So as a rule of thumb I guess from now on I'm going to be mapping overland maps on a scale of 1 hex = 1 mile (diameter). What a Face
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tygerr
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Name: Saya
Title: The Guardian
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PostSubject: Re: The Size of a Territory   The Size of a Territory I_icon_minitimeThu Apr 10, 2008 9:29 pm

Sorry, I dropped out for a while.

We were working with hex maps with Village-scale hexes of 1/2 mile 'diameter'. A circle of that diameter is 125 acres, so fits fairly well with the "1 person per acre" rule of thumb. Which, as pointed out earlier, is rather optimistic regarding crop yields.

Bumping it up to a mile diameter would thus be 500 acres (double the diameter gives 4 times the area) and would provide *plenty* of room to grow food for 100 adults, a similar number of children (who aren't counted as "worshippers" who generate Belief, but they still eat), and a reasonable number of large livestock animals (farmer-types would probably have notably fewer big animals than they had adults; herder-types would likely have more large animals than adult humans).
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PostSubject: Re: The Size of a Territory   The Size of a Territory I_icon_minitime

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