The size of Dragon Pass (2009)

29 October 2009

Those who are familiar with Greg Stafford’s Glorantha are likely familiar with the problem of scale in previously published maps. One map might say it is 50 miles from Clearwine Fort to Duck Point, another says it is only 30 miles. One map might display the continent of Genertela as being 3000 miles from west to east, but using the scale on another one gets the distance of only 1600 miles.

It is enough to drive a poor cartographer mad.

Fortunately, Colin Driver (our cartographer) is not a poor cartographer and was already mad to begin with. And so after much hard work he has resolved the scale of Glorantha issue once and for all. Genertela is approximately 3000 miles from west to east (which is comparable to the distance from the eastern seaboard of the United States to the western seaboard). It is approximately 50 miles from Clearwine Fort to Duck Point (as the Orlanthi holy man flies) and precisely 68 miles from Jonstown to AldaChur.

Here is a map of England superimposed over a map of Dragon Pass and the Holy Country to give a more local sense of scale:

As you can see, the Kingdom of Sartar is roughly the distance from Nottingham to Durham and is comparable in size to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumberia. In this comparison projection, Whitewall is approximately where Leicester would be, Duck Point near Manchester, Runegate outside of Leeds, and central Tarsh is in the Lake District. Boldhome would be somewhere near Hull. AldaChur would be somewhere in North Yorkshire.

Thus compared to England, the Kingdom of Sartar stretches from the Midlands to North East England. This is the canonical scale of Glorantha.

The Sartar book will contain many maps designed to give GMs and players a much better feel for the exact size of things in Dragon Pass, including:

  • A map of Dragon Pass and the Holy Country
  • A map of Sartar
  • A map showing the boundaries of all the tribes of Sartar
  • A map showing the major holy places of the Sartarites
  • A detailed map of the lands of the Colymar tribe
  • A map showing the boundaries of all the clans of Colymar tribe and their neighboring tribes.

And much more! Last I counted we had more than 20 maps in the Sartar ;Book.

Related Pages