How fast can the canals of a city be traversed in a rowboat? How long would it take to travel to the next kingdom while riding on the back of a dragon? How long did it take the party to ride the ceremonial elephants from the city gates to the royal palace?
Now includes both the D&D 5e map units version and the English Units version!
Dec 12, 2014 Dec 15 – Added io9 Review Dec 12 – Added Clever Move DMG Review Dec 11 – Added Kill Screen DMG Review Dec 5 – Added Geek Dad’s Rolling an Adventure Using the Dungeon Master’s Guide Part I and 2 new reviews from Tower of the Archmage and The Cool Ship. Here is an updated list of the reviews as they come in for the D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide.
I received the official Wizards DM screen for 5e and although I was pleased with the quality of the materials and art, I had the same sentiment that a lot of users have had that it is very light on the crunchy content. I had already been compiling a custom DM lookup chart with info and tables that I find useful from both the PHB and DMG. Sometimes though, I felt a need to create a custom chart that compiles certain information and extrapolates it.
One such chart was the travel pace chart on page 182 of the PHB. The DMG expanded the information on page 242. What I wanted, though, is a chart that would could be referenced to track the movement of the players when they are on mounts or other types of vessels. Using sources such as base speed for creatures and listed mph speed listed for various vessels I created a spreadsheet to lookup travel times across the 3 main scales that 5e uses to track movement: city, province and kingdom.
Here is the chart I came up with. It tries to adhere to the rule of easy math calculations so a lot of the figures are rounded to compute faster approximations.
Fantasy World Travel Movement, D&D 5e Map Units
I hope it’s self-explanatory but here’s a quick example:
Time to distance: (multiply your time by the listed entry) Anna, the Gnome Bard, hops on the back of a friendly manticore and flies due West for 3 hours at normal pace. How far did she get in my hex-based world map? If each hex is 1 mile, look up the row that lists a Manticore and find the number under Province Units per Hour at a Normal pace (in this case, this is 5 units) and multiply this by the hours traveled. Anna has traveled 15 hex spaces, i.e. 15 miles (5 units x 3 hours) to the left of where she started.
One more example:
Distance to time: (divide your distance by the listed entry) The party is riding elephants and travel from the city gates, at a slow pace, up to the center of town (25 spaces) and then east to the steps of the royal palace (15 spaces). How long did the ride take? If each map unit is 100 ft, find the row containing an elephant and get the number under City units per Minute at a Slow pace (in this case this is 3). For each 3 spaces the party traveled, count one minute. The ride took a little over 13 minutes (40 total spaces / 3).
I’ve double-checked the accuracy but if you see something wildly off, have any questions, or would like to see anything added, please comment below.
HERE is a PDF version of the 5e Units version of the chart.
Update: I created a second version that is just in english units, so hopefully easier to read and use if you do not want to use the 5e map units:
Fantasy World Travel Movement, English Units
HERE is a PDF version of the English Units version of the chart.