I don't understand the scale of maps
Hello. I'm still struggling with understanding the scale of maps. Take my WIP map for example. It's the size of europe, potentially. One of the continents on Sarturas.
Now, surely because each of these sections identified by the white border lines is essentially the size of a country, there would be thousands of rivers, lots of lakes and many cities. I've looked at tons of cartographers guild maps but there aren't that much. I don't know how to tell the scale. Do people only put in things that are considered big or important?
Are things just different in fantasy maps? Take the Shire for example, that's not really a country, is it? It's a smaller font and so presumably is smaller than Rohan.
http://www.tolkien.co.uk/file/IfbTdA...8c691eb83d.jpg
I always have trouble trying to explain my questions because the things I don't seem to understand are so fundamental.
I would say that scale have to be considered regarding map dimensions. If you can't put all elements you would have regarding the scale, you're limited by the map dimensions so you'll probably have to focus on the more important elements (and this will be determined by the map purpose - political, geographical or whatever else).
When you draw a map, you have always to consider 2 things.
One is the scale and the second is resolution. Scale alone doesn't allow to know what you show and what you don't.
As an example let's take a 4000x4000 resolution representing a square of 4000 km side - this broadly corresponds to your map.
That means that the smallest feature you can show is 1km because 1x1 km is just one pixel.
Everything below 1km cannot be seen by definition.
If you take rivers, only the biggest will be wider than 1km and that's why you will not show many of them.
Of course you will cheat a bit because as a river is tapering, you will get below the 1 km limit somewhere even for the biggest rivers. But once you started to show it, you will track it as far as its source even if you wouldn't see it in reality.
If you take mountains, then even massive ranges will have a height that corresponds to only a few pixels.
So here too you will cheat a bit and exagerate the size of the mountains especially if you are using brushes which show mountains that are far too big for the resolutions you use.
Forests are hardest because you don't resolve anything - smaller copses are invisible and larger forests can be basically recognised only by their color - no detail is visible.
As for man made features like frontiers, towns, roads they rarely obey the scale/resolution relations - they will be (symbolically) shown if considered important regardless of their dimensions.
What Deadshade said.
The map is not the terrain. The map is a representation of the terrain -- an abstraction. You can skip unimportant features. Maybe there's a hill in the middle of a big plain -- but if it's only a few meters taller than usual, and it's not a landmark, and it hasn't got any human habitation on it -- who cares? Putting it in would just clutter up the map and make it harder to read.
Now, that's clearly modified by the purpose of a map. If it's a road map, you care about roads and need to depict them as clearly and in as much detail as possible. If it's a topographical map, maybe that hill matters after all, but the road not so much. The selection of which features to present depends on what the map's for, and what the map's readers need to see. If it's a city map for a tourist, you may need to depict every street -- but do you really need every building? Maybe you can skip the alleys. There's no hard and fast rule, especially in fantasy cartography.
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