Skip to main content
Worldbuilding

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

19
  • 14
    $\begingroup$ Your requirements will reduce the actual speed, because in history the best rates were achieved by switching horses at government way-stations. Thus a courier could go faster than one horse of whatever quality could sustain full time, day and night. This was done from Ancient Persia to the Pony Express. $\endgroup$
    – Oldcat
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 17:40
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ Getting the baseline is a really good idea, then you can inject events (could be as mundane as a thrown horseshoe or a whole sub plot) to slow things down or speed them up as needed. $\endgroup$
    – Tim B
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 18:40
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @Oldcat I know that :-) And this is exactly why I'm asking. All the info I've managed to find so far deals with relay riding with frequent horse-changes (every 30-40 kilometers in most cases). $\endgroup$
    – Tonny
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 19:29
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ A bit tangentially, I find your "town every 4 or 5 days" bit somewhat unrealistic. In reasonably populated areas, and/or on well-travelled routes, towns and/or inns ought to be a bit less than a day's travel apart, simply because that's the longest one can reasonably go without stopping; if they're further apart than that, some enterprising person will set up a guesthouse at the halfway point, and eventually there'll be a new town there. Conversely, if they're trekking across unsettled wilderness, there might not be any towns at all, and if there are, they're unlikely to be regularly spaced. $\endgroup$
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 20:06
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ @Tonny That's unlikely. Towns grow up where there is a reason for them (a natural resource, a river crossing, etc). They may be on average every 4 days but sometimes you would find two 1 day apart, sometimes you might go a week without one. $\endgroup$
    – Tim B
    Commented Dec 13, 2014 at 11:26