Quote Originally Posted by Daelin View Post
What I think is more interesting, is that many fantasy maps are maps of regions, with the whole world intentionally left out.
Well, if you are traveling around on foot or by horse, or wind-blown ships, an entire globe is (measured in travel time) incredibly huge. If it took ten years of hard travel to get to Mordor, (or from Mordor to the Shire) the story looses a lot of intensity. Practically speaking. if you try to show the whole planet, the features that are important to the story, and important to these slow-moving people would get jammed together so there's no room to properly show them.

Especially as travel tends to have all kinds of extra dangers in fantasy worlds, it is entirely reasonable that the all of the world that matters is a fraction of the globe.

Though i think there's some truth to the unknown/mystery angle too.