Estate Scale

Some of you will remember this post from last year, in which I discussed the dimensions and contents of village blocks:

To quickly recap, each hex above is 145 yards in diameter (133 m), which makes a convenient scale for the location of houses, streets, and various other details, if we need to orient ourselves.

I thought this map would be of use in expressing the size of a "build hex," of which I spoke Friday.  Here is the above map in the scale of a build hex:

As you can see, the build hex provides plenty of space, but not so much that it dwarfs the much smaller block.  The build hex is, as I said, 1,304 yards (1,192 m) across ... and the "sub-build" hex is 435 yards (398 m) across.  Incidentally, the sub-build hex corresponds to the size of the fortification improvement that was part of Friday's list.

From this, it's easy to see how the player can begin with a simple cottage in a very large empty, and yet properly affect the surrounding hexes in a steady, growing manner, by clearing or preparing land for farming, setting the location of a mill upon a river, building up a hill or levelling one off to establish a fortification, and yet see these changes in a scale that will still allow the player to draw lines, sketch houses, build roads and streets, define what areas have been searched for valuable materials and so on.

And because the size of the sub-build hex is only 494 steps on your Fitbit, it's easy to see that the party is in no way limited to the size of the build hex where it comes to exploration.  In fact, if the party were to find an outcropping of stone only two build hexes away (2,963 steps) in one direction, and a source for fish in another, both could be exploited by hacking a path (at 4-8 times the speed of a rutted road) to either.  The party could, therefore, build a series of tendrils outwards, ignoring the immediate hexes for specific hexes to be exploited as needed.  The manner in which this is done, and where the roads are built (along with depots, perhaps, and who knows what other improvements the players would care to make) entirely fits with the players' agenda as they expand their territory and interests.