Comment on “Worldbuilding 1b: Systems”

"Ten degrees of latitude equals about 690 miles. If we decide what the central latitude on our map is, and then what we'd like both the most northern and the most southern parts to feel like, we can get a scale on our map.

... This makes our map about 1400 miles from bottom to top ... and no matter where we stick a pin, we can measure in degrees from the bottom to the top, look up a place on earth that corresponds to that latitude and ..."

Aha! AHA!

This is sooo useful as a guide to designing because it tells me where to go look for more once I've decided "OK, point A is like Hawaii, and point B for my purposes should be so many miles away...". I do some measuring with right-click -> "measure points" on Google Maps (just found out about that) and see that point B is like, say, Baja California -- and then -- all I need are books and the web, which, combined, can overload me with info on Baja.

Learning moment: I'm working an island for my starting area for my new players. Old rules, new campaign, new revitalized D&D. I knew abstractly Hawaii and Taiwan had different climates - lived in Fukien, very close to Taiwan, for six months, and have visited HI - but my head was lumping them together as just "islands." A quick check of their latitudes inspired by your post led me to precipitation and heat figures, which disabused me of that notion...