I have been pondering the area of Nordlond called The Veiddarlond (The Hunted Lands) recently.

One of the features of the current map is the 10-mile hex. While my Math Fu is more than sufficient to calculate the area of a 10- or 1-mile hex, sometimes it’s just darn convenient to have it done for you.

I found this site:

Hexagon Calculator

Which is just what I needed. Very handy.

So with 100 1-mile hexes in each 10-mile hex, and each 1-mile hex occupying 0.866 square miles of land…if one assumes a carrying capacity of 125 people (ish) per square mile of focused cultivation…basically each hex will support about 100 people. And with wilderness population density on the order of 5 to 20 folks per square mile (Nordlond itself averages 50, but a lot of that is in the breadbasket to the south)…it works out nicely. Each 10-mile hex is unlikely to concentrate so many people that it plunks down as a town (like the black dots, which are 1,500 to 5,000 people, or the white ones, at 5,000 to 20,000).

So you’re looking at a maximum of 1,500 to 2,000 people per hex, which is enough settlement to keep it interesting and more than enough wilderness to keep it scary.

Yay, hex-calculator!