How long/travel by horse or foot should it have taken to get from city to city?


Riverwood to nearby cities. Anyone figured out

Travel distance

Well, according to a game book, the Ritual Stone is a few hours from Whiterun, so I'd say you could be looking at a day or more depending on which city your going to.

http://www.imperial-library.info/content/explorers-guide-skyrim

When fast-travelling in Arena, the game explicitly states how long it will take, and shows an image of the player riding a (really fast) horse. According to this, Whiterun is just over three days from Riverwood.

But then Alvor (or was it his wife?) tells the player that Riverwood is half a day from Whiterun.

Outside of broad-strokes stuff, I wouldn't consider Arena a dependable source for canon, so Skyrim'a ingo is probably correct.


Otherwise, we have to accept that, lore-wise, every quest giver for the main quest just so happens to not only have an Elder Scroll that is linked to a prophecy regarding the Staff of Chaos (which requires 8 scrolls total) but they ALSO all have had the Moth Priest training so as to read the scroll without going blind.

Yeah, Arena's a pretty terrible source. It was just the only one I could think of.

Alvor's statement of half a day (which I don't remember; I'm just taking Anglo's word for it) corresponds with what is seen in game, assuming you walk, and we know Skyrim is scaled-down in game, so how accurate is that?

Except Skyrim the game is heavily scaled down. Even with the 30:1 timescale the game uses, you traverse the province much faster than its "real" size would allow. The dialog was made to fit the game, as it would be odd for Alvor to say "a couple days" when you can run there in about a half-hour to an hour. Since Arena doesn't let you travel between towns on foot, its travel times can be considered a better representation of distance in lore.

20:1.

Why is Arena a terrible source? It's the only game where it explicitly attempts to show how long it takes from city to city for each province. There are some lore books and some dialogue here and there that refer to distances between places, but not on a widespread scale like Arena. Not to say it is perfect or automatically the best source--and it was a long time ago so there could be changes (there have been a bunch of retcons, after all)--but it is still the only one that gives distances between all the cities/towns/villages (well, at least those that appear in Skyrim). I think it is reasonable to use Arena as a source, just not the end-all-be-all.

I don't consider Arena to be a great source because so much lore had not been written at the time, and more has been contradicted by later games. I suppose where retcons are concerned, it's up to the individual player to decide if the original or the most recent version is more valid.

Oh, and Arena isn't the only game that explicitly states travel time: Daggerfall does so as well. Personally, I consider Daggerfall's version to be more accurate, as it's a newer game. I actually just checked to see how Daggerfall compares to Arena, specifically on the journey from Daggerfall City to Glenpoint. In Arena, the trip takes 3 days. In Daggerfall, it can take anywhere from 2 to 5 days depending of travel settings. Thus it can be concluded that the distance is approximately the same in both games.

So Arena gave us a scale, and Daggerfall basically confirms it. Perhaps I was a bit hasty in dismissing Arena. Seems like Alvor's "half-a-day" line is outvoted here.

From the fast travel point at Riverwood to the fast travel point in Whiterun, 2.5 hours travel time (no encounters - fast travel). Multiply 2.5 by the walking speed and that will give the distance.

If we assume a walking speed of 4 miles per hour, then we get a distance of 10 miles.

If we assume a walking speed of 3 miles per hour, then we get a distance of 7.5 miles, and so on.