Mapping a world: Start with regions, or start with the world?

[lostatsea]

Personally having done the regional to world route. If your group does alot of globe hopping and you don't keep your world map up to date I found that you'll find that individual regions tend to not fit as they seemed to in regional play. What I mean by that is when you go to fit the regions into the world they end up to closer or farther then previously represented. Or several regions end up being located in the same area. So it is perhaps a good idea to do a rough map of the "KNOWN" world and pencil in the regional maps as you uses them. I recently LOST alot of regional maps to a drive crash so I now I currently have a unified World map and am currently recreating my regions. and plugging them into the larger map jigsaw puzzle like. Seems to keep placement more coherent altleast for me.

[Hai-Etlik]

If you real want to get this right, you need to deal with projections. Projections suitable for the full globe aren't much good for larger scale maps, and vis versa.

I'd suggest starting with a very rough global map. Just enough to have an idea of the extent and location of things. Then do regional maps in suitable projections. I'd favour Conformal projections for this: Normal Mercator for the rough global map, Lambert Conformal Conic for wide areas in mid latitudes, Transverse Mercator for tall areas, and Stereographic for the poles and maybe for compact areas.

Then you can put everything in a common global projection to combine it. Normal Equidistant Cylindrical would probably be a good choice for data you plan to reproject into other forms. For a final global map, there are a lot of choices. I favour Winkel Tripel myself, though it looks rather "modern" and might not be suitable for fantasy maps. A pair of hemispheres in equatorial azimuthal projections work well and have an interesting look about them. Normal Mercator is good for a map emphasizing marine navigation.