09-26-2019, 06:46 PM
Blackmoor map scales are all over the place. Dave L. summed up some of this before:
The "original" 1971 Blackmoor map that Arneson sent to Rob Kuntz doesn't have a scale on it, but it is drawn on a US standard sized 8.5 x 11" piece of paper.
A year later when he sent the "Facts About Blackmoor" article to the Domesday Book, he wrote that Blackmoor was "4346 square miles", so thinking he might possibly have meant the whole of the original map I tried to roughly calculate the length and width using the paper size.
Long story short, 52 x 83 gets you pretty close at 4316. (one wonders if a 1 were mistaken for a 4, but the extra 15 x 15 miles isn't much to quibble at.)
Now I want to point out that if Arneson intended his original map to only be about 83 miles across, that would make it by far the smallest Blackmoor yet at only around, lets call it 7 miles per inch - that puts the Egg of Coot only about 15 miles from Blackmoor.
The "Facts" piece though seems to only be talking about the Barony of Blackmoor itself. If you look at the "population", there's only one dragon, 100 elves, and 1000 peasants.
So I think the 4346 square miles must just be the area around castle Blackmoor - basically what is inside the dotted lines on that original map.
Because those lines are all wobbly and half missing there's probably no way to get anything approaching an accurate scale, but it seems to roughly go E/W from the middle of the swamp to the far side of Southlake and roughly N/S from Blackmoor bay down to Rat lake - so roughly 1/3 to 1/4 of the map area. Multiplying everything by three puts us at something like 18 - 24 miles to the inch whereas four would be in the ballpark of 24-30 miles to the inch. That suggest that the FFC figure of 22 miles per inch/10miles per hex is probably close to what Arneson had in mind at the start.
Not that any of it really maters, but at least it gives an idea of what was intended.
moving on to another scale issue
Zeitgeist games released a beautifully done map of Blackmoor at the time of the switchover to 4e. It's in the 4e sourcebook, and Havard hosts a seperate file of this same map you can look at here https://blackmoor.mystara.net/img/BlackmoorSmall.jpg
Thing is, the map printed in the sourcebook and the online map have different scales! The size of the scale bar is identical but one is numbered in 10's and the other in 20's. I guess one of these was meant to correct the other. Not sure which. Anybody know?
Dave L Wrote:The FFC and the DA1 and DA4 maps use exactly the same outline.
FFC says it is 10 miles/hex, DA1 says 24 miles/hex and DA4 (as well as DA3, showing the area to the south) say 12 miles/hex.
As for the ZG map - that's a completely different animal.
....
The "original" 1971 Blackmoor map that Arneson sent to Rob Kuntz doesn't have a scale on it, but it is drawn on a US standard sized 8.5 x 11" piece of paper.
A year later when he sent the "Facts About Blackmoor" article to the Domesday Book, he wrote that Blackmoor was "4346 square miles", so thinking he might possibly have meant the whole of the original map I tried to roughly calculate the length and width using the paper size.
Long story short, 52 x 83 gets you pretty close at 4316. (one wonders if a 1 were mistaken for a 4, but the extra 15 x 15 miles isn't much to quibble at.)
Now I want to point out that if Arneson intended his original map to only be about 83 miles across, that would make it by far the smallest Blackmoor yet at only around, lets call it 7 miles per inch - that puts the Egg of Coot only about 15 miles from Blackmoor.
The "Facts" piece though seems to only be talking about the Barony of Blackmoor itself. If you look at the "population", there's only one dragon, 100 elves, and 1000 peasants.
So I think the 4346 square miles must just be the area around castle Blackmoor - basically what is inside the dotted lines on that original map.
Because those lines are all wobbly and half missing there's probably no way to get anything approaching an accurate scale, but it seems to roughly go E/W from the middle of the swamp to the far side of Southlake and roughly N/S from Blackmoor bay down to Rat lake - so roughly 1/3 to 1/4 of the map area. Multiplying everything by three puts us at something like 18 - 24 miles to the inch whereas four would be in the ballpark of 24-30 miles to the inch. That suggest that the FFC figure of 22 miles per inch/10miles per hex is probably close to what Arneson had in mind at the start.
Not that any of it really maters, but at least it gives an idea of what was intended.
moving on to another scale issue
Zeitgeist games released a beautifully done map of Blackmoor at the time of the switchover to 4e. It's in the 4e sourcebook, and Havard hosts a seperate file of this same map you can look at here https://blackmoor.mystara.net/img/BlackmoorSmall.jpg
Thing is, the map printed in the sourcebook and the online map have different scales! The size of the scale bar is identical but one is numbered in 10's and the other in 20's. I guess one of these was meant to correct the other. Not sure which. Anybody know?