Most fantasy tabletop games eventually produce a map that details hundreds of miles of mountains, oceans, and illogically-diverging rivers, oftentimes far beyond actual in-game events and regions. Rarely do they convey the sense of scale obvious to us in a non-Mercator map of the real world. I’ve seen the map of Faerun, the Forgotten Realms setting, many times, but I have no idea how big that world is.
A good exercise is to take your campaign region – whether that’s a city, country, continent, or world – and scale it against a roughly geographically equivalent part of the real world.
The D&D 5E campaign I have run for years takes place around an ocean dotted with volcanic islands and city-states. Without much consideration, I had been thinking of it as almost an entire hemisphere on a roughly earth-sized planet. But I did the math, and the whole area is roughly equivalent to the Gulf of Thailand plus the Java Sea. A big region in the real world by any measure, but much smaller than I was thinking.
This exercise can be useful for answering a number of questions, like how many nations might compete for control of a region; how far trading partners might reasonably travel; where populations would be heavily concentrated; and so on.
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