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.