Knowing that the distance between two given cities is 800 miles generally isn’t very helpful in regards to really getting some degree of intuitive understand how big the area on a fantasy map really is. So to get a better impression, I overlaid the map of the Savage Frontier with the outlines of Northern Europe.
I think to have the best match for the environment and climate conditions, the map should probably be placed further north in Europe, but there’s not a lot of well known cities up there that would make for good reference points. Also, the large body of water of the relatively shallow Baltic Sea greatly moderates winter temperatures by storing a lot of energy during the summer. So when winter comes to the Savage Frontier, imagine it to be way colder than southern Sweden and Finland.
I used Hamburg as a reference point to place Waterdeep, and there’s a number of big European cities that line up quite nicely with various important towns in the North.
- Waterdeep – Hamburg
- Secomber – Szcecin
- Llork – Kaliningrad
- Yartar – Göteborg
- Silverymoon – Stockholm
- Citadel Adbar – Tallinn
- Grunwald – Oslo
- Luskan – Bergen
- Gundbarg – Aberdeen
- Ruathym – Liverpool
As said, climate-wise none of these would be good matches, but it gives some reference regarding the distances between places in the Savage Frontier.
The land area is about 420,000 square miles. That’s very close to Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark combined, or three Germanys. Or roughly comparable to either Ontario, Quebeck, or British Columbia in Canada.
Also, the Evermoors are gigantic.
So the evermoors are basically the size of jutland and the high forest the size of sweden. Being basically similar in size to scandinavia (and similar in longitudinal length the isle of Great Britain) is a good baseline.
As far as I understand it, the Savage Frontier is (partly) inspired by the Pacific coast of North America, with Waterdeep broadly corresponding to Seattle or Vancouver.
That would probably line up very well. But I found that to not make for much of an interesting map to overlay. You’d basically have all the land marked as land, and one or two red dots to compare city distances. ;)
Ed Greenwood has said that Waterdeep sits “slightly above the 45 degrees North latitude line on Toril”, for what that’s worth.
Which is Great Lakes and Vancouver in North America.
(And southern France and northern Italy, so Europe is clearly not applicable as a reference here.)