Managing Mileage in D&D and AD&D

I'm a huge fan of game maps, especially those made to resemble actual terrain in the real world. But everyone has their own interpretations on how movement is carried out on outdoor maps and the scales used to represent these wilderness areas. In Greyhawk, the overland movement rate for a 12" base move is 30 mile per day and, conveniently enough, the scale on the map is 10 leagues (30 miles) per hex. Therefore, along normal flat terrain, a normal person with no great load can move 1 hex/day of travel. Movement rates in BECMI D&D are calculated at move rate divided by 5 in miles per day. This means a base 120' movement rate per turn translates to 24 miles/day. Lo and behold, the large scale map hexes are suggested to be 24 miles across! The Dungeon Master's Guide has about the same scale/movement as the Greyhawk rules on movement, but this is much more generalized (using hexes of between 20 and 40 miles in width for large scale movement).

Normally, this wouldn't bother me much. I would just use whatever scale is more advantageous in each system. But I've been looking over all the maps for my Thuin/Sturmgard conversion and realized that I used some weird scale based on what "looked best" on the hex map, without consideration for daily movement. This was more or less because all the movement rates I was using at the time were for overland movement through a forest in winter (very slow, especially on foot). All my maps are drawn with the large scale hexes at 16 miles/hex, and all the small hexes at 2 miles/hex. I was only mapping a portion of a continent so I only needed a reduced scale. However, neither of these numbers jive well with the movement rates for AD&D or D&D (and no wonder since the map was drawn in the period between 1st and 2nd edition AD&D).

So now I want to convert my original map into a more manageable scale to keep with the mapping conventions of BECMI D&D - Large scale hexes = 24 miles, small scale hexes = 8 miles. This will drastically alter the feel of the map but is well within reason. I was toying with the idea of using 1st edition for the larger map scale - after all, the campaign was originally written using 1st edition rules - but I find I enjoy the simpler versions of D&D more and more with age. I'm not terribly concerned with the scales and mileage, but I have to redraw the maps.... and that's a pain in the ass!

I find it interesting that neither system clearly defines the length of a "day of travel." I always assumed that it would be 8 hours, but that may not be true. Given the movement rate of a normal human being as 3 mph, and scaling that to a 12 hour period with 2 hour-long breaks total for the day, and you get the 30 miles/day movement rate of 1st edition. The same could be said for D&D but using a roughly 2½ mph movement rate. Either way, it seems that roughly 10 hours equates to the total movement time allotted for a "day." Forced marches would increase this number as usual.

Terrain such as mountains, hills, forest, swamp, and jungle slow movement, sometimes drastically. It all depends on the rules being used; Greyhawk, DMG, or BECMI. Again, the method of map drawing really means a lot here. Some forests are flat expanses of trees, well-spaced to allow movement through at little reduction of speed. Other forests are twisted tangles of thick vegetation with lots of exposed roots, and muddy paths lined with thorn bushes or ferns. Some are thick jungles that have to be hacked through in order to move. I knew that I wanted the Sturmgard to be mountainous forest with lots of elevation changes but blanketed with old-growth trees of varying types - pines, spruce, fir, oak, birch, sycamore, beech, etc. - similar to Carpathia or southern Germany. Obviously, the line between deciduous and coniferous woodlands happens in the boundaries of my map, very close to the base town in fact. Also the higher elevations have more conifers naturally. The heart of the forest is deciduous, with some willows and cedars in the moisture rich river valleys. My concern is that a large scale map will be unable to show all the small lakes, streams, elevation changes, and other interesting aspects that could occur in an 8-mile hex.

My current map (at 2-mile hexes scale) has quite a number of interesting areas that all occur in about the same 24 mile hex, and at least 2-3 major features that would all fit within an 8 mile hex. Perhaps I can make a third scale map that represents a scale of 1 mile hexes for fine detail of specific regions. After gaming in the same world for about 10 years, we added a lot of details to the map simply by adventuring, something that is lost on the large scale maps. Well, I needed to update the world in any case, so I guess now would be the time to do that! Now I also need to come up with a scale to map communities - and I'm favoring the "Hommlet" style of planning communities.