Hi Nero,

I love hexcrawls being a big fan of the original JG Wilderlands, Nod, and just about anything that Rob Conley does.

I don't mean to get all simulationist, but I tend to think that for me a 10 x 10 mile hex, approximately 100 square miles, is too big for relevant gaming.  I mean it is a minor quibble, but the enormity of the space makes the world hard to detail unless you are doing broad brush strokes for a political map with kingdoms and empires.   Even if you are only doing 100 x 100 hexes or 1000 miles x 1000 miles that is still an area the size of western Europe, India or China - which to an ancient observer traveling by foot or horse might as well be the whole planet. For me, this kind of scale is better hand-drawn.

Hex paper is better for detail and a more localized setting.  5 mile hexes cuts the total area by 75% so the characters aren't lost in empty space.  Its a better scale, I think, for dungeons, ruins, temples, towns, local warlords, a number of  warring city states (ancient Greece was even smaller), etc. The kinds of things that adventurers interact with. For big geographic features like oceans and steppes, you don't need a lot of it, just a dozen or so hexes on a corner and a label "the endless wastes of Zord" or whatever.

Of course, this is all a very nit-picky and fiddly argument.  In some regards, you don't even need a scale just a concept and some cool locations so take it with a grain of salt, but for me, map scale implies a lot about a setting.

madprofessor