Original Post — Direct link
17 days ago - /u/JagexJack - Direct link

Originally posted by _Manks

I've thought about that an unhealthy amount, and from my best guess roughly 4x the size of the current world map.

Basing that off the temperate regions of the map, with the North being very cold and our southernmost points being the hottest point, so that'd be the equator. Double it for Poll to Poll, then double that for both sides of the globe.

Also the map may be tilted slightly to account for Anachronia not being frozen.

I know scale theory will heavily influence it, but it seems to fit the best for a rough guide.

One of the most pervasive and fundamental, yet unanswered, lore questions we have is the rough scale of the main continent.

The early game is set up some what like the heptarchy (dark ages england, think Game of Thrones in scope) which suggests a size around the same order of magnitude as the UK. That would make a kingdom like Misthalin or Asgarnia something of the order of 20-50 thousand square kilometers, about the size of Wales or Vermont.

As the scope of the backstory expanded though and we understood the expansion and scope of the Zarosian empire, that starts to feel a bit small, and something more the size of Europe makes more sense. That would make the kingdoms something like ten times the size, each closer to France or Texas.

17 days ago - /u/JagexJack - Direct link

Originally posted by _Manks

That scale seems to work just about perfectly with a line from the Betrayal of Falador book series, it was something along the lines of a trip on horseback from Falador to Taverly taking 2 days on horseback.

I overlayed a map of France with the map of Asgarnia and tried to roughly measure the distance from Falador to Taverly. It's just about the same distance from Blois to Alençon, 84 miles. 30-40 miles per day is manageable for horses.

I know the books are only as canon as they need to be until the game goes in a different direction, but it's still nice to see them match.

That does throw my map out of the window, it'd put Gielinor around the size of our Moon rather than the Earth. I'm assuming it needs to be that large unless the planet's Anima is keeping things similar on a smaller scale.

Yeah it's tricky. The two main factors for me are that at a European scale, the existing world is actually massive - we're talking hundreds of small towns and villages in each kingdom. It really radically changes the scale of the world and how you think about it.

On the other hand under the Heptarchy scale, the Zarosian empire (and the god wars in general) really seem like a bit of a provincial matter which gets a lot of press.

In either case we can always do a bit of a "reveal" (retcon) that there are other continents and the god wars were also taking place there, but that would be inconsistent with all existing ingame material on the subject.