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I have hit a small (literally!) problem in writing my ongoing Dark Sun story. According to the map of Nibenay in the 4e DSCS, the city is considerably less than a mile across. If the scale on that map is accurate, then Nibenay, a city with an urban population of around 24,000, has about the same area as the small town of Sedgefield, near where I live, which has a population less than a fifth of that. I realise Nibenay ought to be somewhat more densely inhabited than a 21st century English small town, but this just seems ridiculous. So, I'm wondering if the scale on that map is simply wrong. Are there any maps of Nibenay in older publications, or any other indications of the city's correct size? Note that I'm not questioning the population figures, just the city's physical size.

Hopefully, someone can resolve this fairly quickly. I really want to get on with writing the damn story, but I'm right at the point where I'm describing the route from the Mekillot Gate to the Naggaramakam, and having the road be only 500 yards long (and the city's biggest market square - explicitly described as "enormous" in the DSCS - being less than 50 yards across!) is blowing the crap out of my suspension of disbelief.

All the city maps in the DSCS are similarly tiny, so it seems this is intentional. My issue is not just with the population density (after some calculations, Nibenay's works out about the same as the city of Chennai in India, which actually seems almost reasonable), but with the size of individual features in the city. For example, Sages' Square, the biggest market square in Nibenay, described in the text as being "enormous" is only 140 feet across according to the map. The Slave Market is even smaller, at around 60 feet across. The "city within a city", the Naggaramakam, is about 700 feet across (although I can live with this, since probably only a couple of hundred templars at most actually live there). The main market square in the town where I live could comfortably accomodate two Sages' Squares (or 12 Slave Markets), and it's certainly not a place anybody would describe as "enormous". My house would barely fit inside Nibenay's Slave Market. The Palm Court (which is too small to even really show up on the map) is probably about the size of my bedroom.

Anyway, I can work with this. I'll just assume individual features on the map, such as Sages' Square, are not meant to be exactly to scale. In the case of the Palm Court, that pretty much has to be the case. It was just a bit of a shock, really looking at the maps for the first time, to see how physically tiny the Athasian city-states are meant to be, since the descriptive text in the DSCS doesn't really give that impression.

Thanks, everyone.