Low fantasy TTRPG settings have their own considerations when it comes to players frequently joining and leaving your game. As their Player Characters enter and leave the story, the question of travel arises, and how long it takes to get from some safe starting base to where the party is. The larger the world, the longer this will take without adding in some means of fantastic travel such as teleportation or flying.
If the party is traveling through endless tracks of dead marshes 1000 miles from their home, introducing the PC of a player who has just heard about your game can be jarring without ret-conning the idea that their character had been there all along or justifying why they would have access to a powerful mode of near instantaneous transportation.
By keeping your world not only relatively small but fairly densely developed, you can have safe harbors spread throughout the world, with the party never more than a few day's travel by foot or horseback from a logical launching point for new PCs.
In my own setting, the central region of Calumbria is only around 300 miles across. This is about the size of Germany. It takes about two weeks to travel from one end to the other traveling by road and avoiding rugged terrain. Villages are only a few miles from cities, and farms and homesteads are spread across the fertile land. Castles - both ruins and occupied strongholds - dot the landscape and are seldom more than a day's distant from one another.
It is what I call a Points of Darkness setting, where the world is generally safe and life peaceful on a day to day basis, but dark and dangerous things dwell in the remote wilds of the deep forests and mountain heights. Even a dark house on a lonely lane might prove to be a place where evil lurks in the shadows.
Your fantasy world need not sprawl for thousands or tens of thousands of miles in order to have enough interesting places to explore. You don't have to mimic impressive published fantasy worlds, and certainly don't have to use real geography as your model. You just have to set your stage, frame your shot, and concentrate on revealing to your players a world that feels complete enough that they can enjoy engaging in the adventure at hand.
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| The Land of Calumbria |
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