Note that I've added a new page on the wiki, which estimates some of the mundane travel times between covenant. I am using those as a basis for the discussions in the new in-character thread.
How are you arriving at 11 miles per day? Averaging out weather conditions? I think it is lowish and should probably be between 15 and 20...
We aren't used to walking, but I daresay that in the middle ages people were quite capable to walk 20 miles in a day (~6 hours). I've done it a couple of times, I don't care to do it again, but back then, few had a choice. And when I did it I wasn't particularly fit... 
For the most part, I am using the numbers provided in City &Guild p.89 (the text below the insert specifies 12 miles/day using the roads, 8 miles/day moving downriver and 6 miles/day moving upriver). Take the distance, divide by that speed, and round the number of days up.
This may seem low, but it actually makes sense to me. These distances are as the bird flies, while both the roads and the rivers twist, turn, and force you to take detours. So while the on-the-ground distance is much longer, the as-the-bird-flies distance is much less so. Ground (or river) conditions also constrain how fast you can travel. And you have to stop every so often to buy more food, repair or replace gear, etc.
So a 12 miles/day on the roads on the map is probably the equivalent of twice that. A sustained pace of 3 miles per hour is though to maintain for days and weeks. And you will tend to loose some time by stopping at villages whenever possible, so if you reach one 2 hours before darkness, you stop for the day. If not, then you need to make camp, cook dinner, etc. And leaving the road to cut across the country actually means loosing more time. Travelling through a forest is slow, particularly if you don't know the paths. I've done it before.
River travel is slow, but that's because it is done using barges also carrying cargo. They stop at towns and cities, they slow down to navigate around rocks and rapids, they tie down for the night, etc. And rivers don't move in a straight line either.
Now, if all of the characters were experienced riders (or had a dedicated swift boat with a dedicated crew) and were unconcerned about throwing money away, travel may be faster. Swifter mundane travel is possible (and also indicated in C&G), but requires resources and skills we don't currently have.
EDIT: If the troupe want faster mundane travel, I don't have a problem with that. We can simply change to numbers in general, or for magi in particular to reflect the resources available to them.
Personally I like the slower estimates.
Medieval roads barely deserve the name except where the old roman roads have survived, and cross-country is slow.
Yes, you probably could move much faster than 12 miles per hour, but not comfortably - and then there would be an issue of fatigue.
Slow travel also encourages the use of magic for travelling purposes, which leads to the eternal dilemma of slow'nsafe (with grogs) or fast'n'alone.
I think 12 miles per day for an unladen or lightly laden party is a bit low. But, I've always gone with the rule of thumb of 20 miles per day. Of course, this presumes good weather. Consider that it wasn't out of the ordinary for peasants to walk miles to market, with pack animals, collect the items that they needed over the course of a day's trading and walk back home. Yeah, roads were horrible, but roads are only really necessary for bulk transport. If we're driving wagons over horrible roads and with delicate goods in good weather, then yes, 12 miles per day seems reasonable. If you have lightly laden pack animals and are walking, 20 miles in 8 hours is 2.5 miles per hour. If we presume a 3 mph pace (which is by no means fast) it can be done in 6.6 hours, allowing 1.4 hours for rest. Add in an hour for midday meal/siesta, we're up to 9 hours.
So, if we're moving ourselves with spare clothes, a small amount of food (buying food at inns) I think we need to go closer to 20. If we're taking carts and transporting books, our own food, etc, I think we need to go closer to 12.
As I wrote, that 20 miles of ground distance is fine. But you need to consider that over long distances, that road is not leading you straight to your destination. So you end up traveling much longer than the as-the-bird-flies distance between two point shown by a map.
It's simply the difference between walking 20 miles and actually traveling 12 miles towards your destination. Just MHO, and my experience also.
Well, 12 mpd or 20 mpd...
My fudge factor for increasing distances based on google maps is 20%. So a 100 miles becomes 120 miles, which means it gets covered in 6 days. You put your fudge factor on the distance traveled per day which makes it 10 days.
Have you looked at this at all?
orbis.stanford.edu/
My thoughts:
Keep the estimates.
Add a note that it assumes farly heavy transport (the numbers are from the 'trade' section of C&G IIRC).
Add the note that unladen travel could probably go up to 50% faster (that's 18 miles/day, or 20 with a 10% fudge factor) - though I'd suggest this incur a long term fatigue level.
Add estimate using Wings of Soaring Wind, which we have as a labtext. <- I could even do this myself, in theory. 
Nice tool. 
But City & Guild specifically mentions that:
If you want to use 20 miles per day for road travel, I'm fine with it.
We probably need to adjust river travel as well. C&G states downriver at 8 miles per day and upriver at 6 miles per day. Using the Moselle between Metz and Koblenz, Orbis uses 40 miles per day downriver and 9 miles per day upriver.
C & G has a trade focus...Orbis has a military focus, well, Roman, which is military..but you get my drift.
12 miles per day for a heavily laden party, sure, no problem. Some people walking with all of their stuff on a mule. Inns were typically 8 miles apart on well traveled roads, suggesting 16 or 24 as a reasonable daily limit. If you have a large camp to setup, meals to cook, etc, I think you can reduce travel times.
Oh, and here it is in C & G, I was looking for it...
I don't disagree that measuring distances between towns needs to be adjusted from modern as the bird flies or direct modern road distances. Some of the major Roman roads will still exist, and roads along rivers, while winding, will tend to be good roads.
Ok, let's get down to numbers then. Here's what I propose.
Calculating distances:
- Start from the direct line between the 2 points on the map (as the bird flies)
- Adjust that distance to reflect the actual roads/rivers on the ground, based on the relationship between those points
[list][*]For major centers within a reasonable distance (within 200 miles or so), add 20% to reflect a well-travelled and fairly direct trade route - For secondary centers within a reasonable distance, add 40% to reflect a more roundabout route
- For secondary centers within a short distance (less than 100 miles), add 20% to reflect a frequently traveled secondary road
- For local centers (villages, remote covenants, etc.), add 40% or more to reflect local paths
- For rivers, based on the amount of twisting and turning it does, add 20% to 80%
[/:m]
[]Divide the adjusted distance by the means of travel under ideal conditions - Road travel: 24 miles per day
- River travel, following the current: 40 miles per day (was previously 32)
- River travel, against the current: 8 miles per day
[/*:m][/list:u]
This gives you the ideal travel time between the points. Then, based on the actual travel conditions, add 0 to 100% to reflect actual travel conditions (weather, season, bringandage, etc.) to obtain the actual travel time.
So, for example, let's take Petronius' and Aedituus' trip from Triamore to Koblenz.
If they try to travel by the roads only, on the most direct route, that's 150 miles. Since Triamore is not a major center and the distance is over 100 miles, we add 40% to get the actual distance to be walked of 210 miles (150*1.4). Dividing this by 25 gives us an ideal travel time of 8.75 days. It is in July, so we can assume minimal problems over that distance, but it's hot so they need more frequent stop. So let's say we add 10% to reflect actual travel conditions (pretty darn good ones) for a total of 9.6 days of travel.
If they travel by a mix of road and river travel, through Verdun and Metz, they have 3 legs to travel: Triamore to Verdun (50 miles), Verdun to Metz (30 miles) and Metz to Koblenz (110 [strike]150[/strike] miles).
- First leg can be traveled either by the roads or moving up the river. We can reasonably assume that there is a well-frequented road along the Meuse river linking Verdun to Liege. So using the river would be 60 miles (50*1.2) traveled either at 8 miles per day (boat) or 24 miles per day (roads). The second one is better, so that 2.5 days of road travel.
- The second leg is simple, 30 miles of road travel along a good trade route, so that's (30*1.2)/24 = 1.5 days of road travel.
- The last leg is down the Moselle river, over 110 [strike]150[/strike] miles. Looking at the map, the Moselle is very sinuous, so we'll add 65% (previously 30) to that distance instead of 30% (that we would use for road travel). So that's an actual distance traveled of 181 [strike]195[/strike] miles (110*1.65), divided by 40 [strike]32[/strike] miles per day, for a total of 4.5 [strike]6[/strike] days of boat travel.
So using a mix of road and river travel and going through Verdun and Metz gives us 8.5 [strike]10[/strike] days (2.5+1.5+4.5) plus 10% for travel conditions, thus a total of 9.35 days (previously 11). Just a bit quicker [strike]longer[/strike] than travelling across the country directly from Triamore to Koblenz, but probably much easier and less tiring.
Do these numbers make sense to everyone?
I think that's reasonable.
Tweaked a few numbers based on more accurate distances and slightly faster river travel indicated by Orbis. That's for a civilian boat, military was twice as fast (probably a small galley).
The changes are indicated in red.
I'll transfer the travel guidelines in the wiki and adjust the travel times there as well.
I moved the posts discussing travel over here...
Building on travel issue, there's the Redcaps issue. Mainly being that there are about 150 Redcaps in the Order, roughly 11 per Tribunal, on average (HoH:TL also says that there should be at least 10 per Tribunal). Where are the Mercere Portals, how many of them are there? Just some things to think about.
Well, GotF (p.26) states that Durenmar is one of the two Mercere Portal hub in the Order (the other being Harco) but does not specify how many portals there are and where they lead. It would make sense to have one between Durenmar and Harco, so that the hub don't need to duplicate each other. GotF further states that portals links to "A small number of the most powerful covenants throughout Europe maintain a permanent link with the use of Mercere Portals"; we just need to decide which are the most powerful covenants.
I would say that for sure Magvillus (Guernicus/Rome), Verdi (Verditius/Rome) and Coeris (Tremere/Transylvanian) would be covered in the network, since they are all powerful domus magna. The Cave of Twisting Shadows (Criamon/Greater Alps) would also be a strong candidate, as would be Duresca (Iberia), Valnastium (Jerbiton/Greater Alps), Blackthorn (Stonehenge), Doissetep (Provence), Val-Negra (Provence) and Alexandria (Thebes).
Some weaker candidates would be Fudarus (Tytalus/Normandy), Fengheld (Rhine), possibly one covenant in each of Hibernia, the Levant and Novgorod.
There could be more, but I'd rather have too few than too many.
Regarding the number of redcaps: In one of his letters, Petronius mentionned a small redcap retirement home and archives in Verdun. He also has a redcap named Clemens in his background. Most of the redcaps are probably not permanently associated to specific covenant.
Durenmar is obvious.
However, if both are hubs then there are either a significant number of portal or a certain amount of redundancy. My guess is redundancy, but I could easily be wrong.
If Val-Negra had one, it must be assumed destroyed, as Val-Negra is the "Lost Covenant" (and has been for 4 editions now).
Do we want Doissetep? It's appearantly been wipe from canon, but that need not matter.
Alexandria is not the most powerful covenant in the Thebes, but certainly the most obvious for a portal.
I'd go with Fengheld (linked to Harco if not Durenmar).
Crintera is another option, though they'd probably want complete control over who uses the portal.
Each of the unspecified ones is .. fine, though their relevans rather depend on how much we expect to use them.
seconded.
Considering the amount of resources and effort goes into creating a set of portals, my guess would be that House Mercere would strive to avoid redundancy. Thus a link between the hubs at Durenmar and Harco.
And, since my understanding is that those portals can be moved, you can reassign portals in order to optimize the network.
An idea that just crossed my mind is that the portals, even when commissioned by a another covenant or House, might always belong to House Mercere. The commission only extablishes a contract that the portal will remain at your covenant for a negociated number of years (after which you can renew the contract) and a set of clauses which allows House Mercere to reclaim the portal if you violate some conditions (such as investigating the nature of the portal's enchantment). That would certainly fit with the "mercantile" aspect of the House. Whether we wat to use this idea is up to the troupe.
Yeah, I listed Doissetep and Val-Negra, even though they are not part of current canon. We might keep one, or both, as "lost" covenant whose portals no longer work.
I would say that Fengheld would be linked to Harco. I doubt Durenmar would agree to them having a direct link to Durenmar, considering their rivalry.
I also think that, because of the fact that they are more secretive, Crintera would refuse to have a portal that brought people directly to their doorstep. But that's just me...
The unspecified leading to the other tribunals just make sense from a Mercere perspective. Ah, just found the following text in HoH:TL (p.80): "As the Order expanded, Mercere's followers established outposts on the edges of the Order - the British Isles, Novgorod, the Holy Land - and connected them to Harco with these Portals." It also notes that after the Schism War, "many Houses elected to close their Portals, and others asked that they be moved to more defensible positions outside their covenant walls."
This would support the theory that Crintera does not want a portal -- their non-Roman origins made them disthrust the rest of the Order right after the Schism War, so they were one of those who had their portals closed.
So the network could look like this.
Durenmar (hub): Harco, Magvillus, Verdi, Cave of Twisting Shadows, Valnastium, Blackthorn
Harco (hub): Durenmar, Coeris, Fengheld, Hibernia, Levant, Novgorod, Alexandria, Val-Negra (closed)
Magvillus: Durenmar, Duresca (House Guernicus has strong control of this link)
There might be a few more, but they would not be widely known.
Note that Crintera also has a non-hermetic portal to Prippet Marshes in Novgorod. In the same way, Irencillia may have faerie paths to other places in Europe.
Er...
What annoys me is how they are described as such a big deal in HoH: TL.
I had a verditius in another saga who build his own, from basic principles:
Teleport person to location based on this (fixed) AC.
It's not level 65*, it doesn't need all those extra rules.
Yes, it causes warping to those using it, but so do the Mercere Portals.
It's just ReCo base 35, +1 touch, probably +N for requisites, build twice.
In general, the Mercere chapter of HoH: TL annoys me.
*Unless you pick exactly the right number of requisites, and charge for them
Oops, my bad, I forgot that part. So okay, they cannot be moved ("this ain't no Stargat, ya know").
Well, actually, the fact that portals (of the Hermes and Mercere types) do not cause warping, and do not require requisites, is the basis for Petronius' original research. Otherwise there wouldn't really been any benefit to them in the first place.
So yes, you can devise spells are enchanted items that would allow transportation through Rego (Form) effects, but these effects are inferior to "true" portal magic, which links the space between two locations, allowing anything to move through without exposing creatures and objects using it to "powerful mytsical effects" (with the resulting Warping).