Tips on scaling for RPG map?

[Halfacreofun]

Hi everyone I'm new to the forums. I did a quick search for help with scaling mountain ranges, forests, lakes and such. Didn't find anything. I'm working on a map of a continent for a D&D campaign I'm going to be running. Any tips for the pros on choosing sizes for mountain ranges.

[Tonnichiwa]

First of all, let me say welcome to the Guild.

So, your question about how big mountains should be is completely dependent upon how big you want your map to be. Is it going to be a local area map? A map of a single country or region? a map of a continent? or a map of a world? Also, how old is the mountain range that you want to create? Is it relatively young like the Cascade range of mountains in the United States? Or is it really old like the Catskill mountain range in the United States?

The older the mountain range, the smaller the mountains will be due to erosion over the millennia. Which of course means, the younger the mountain range, the larger the mountains will be.

I'm sure there are more factors than that but I'm no geologist and only know a few things about mountains, not the extremely intricate details.

As far as lakes and forests and things like that go, again, that depends on how big you want your map to be. The larger the map, the less actual detail that is needed on the map. The more you zoom in, the more detail starts showing up. So if you were going to do a map about a regional area that had a fairly young mountain range, you may have very high mountains, which would probably then create a large selection of lakes due to all of the valleys of the mountain range, and then you would probably have quite small trees.

For an example, look up CharlesRobinson's world of Kelleemah in the Regional/World mapping thread.

[Halfacreofun]

Thanks for the info. I'll have to check that out. I've been surfing around checking out what other people have done.

Eventually I'll be building an entire world. Multiple continents. Fully zoomed out to show the whole world then all the way down to specific towns and dungeons. These will be used for an rpg campaign and possibly even for a novel my wife may be writing based on the

[Halfacreofun]

Oh at least for now I'm doing everything by hand. I don't have any fancy programs (or skill with them) to work with at this point. Plus I feel like hand drawn maps just feel much more "real" for a fantasy rpg setting.

[Ozdarchangel]

Hey man, welcome from a fellow new member!

Here's my 2c from messing around with the same question in my head (1c per suggestion) in:

1) Your style matters.

If you are going for an "illustrative" map as opposed to hyper-realistic, you have far more license to draw mountains at any size that's feels right on the map you're drawing, since they're just "representations of mountains" rather than to-scale

2) Download and browse Google Earth.

If you know roughly what scale you are going for (which for my D&D campaign boils down to knowing characters can generally travel 24 miles in a day, and working out how many days I want there to be between towns/villages and how many towns/villages I want on this single map), then you can zoom to that same scale in Google Earth and browse around for an idea of how big lakes and mountains appear within the climate zone you want to set your story.

Anyways, there's no groundbreaking ideas here, but those two have helped me immensely.

[Halfacreofun]

Hey man, welcome from a fellow new member!

Here's my 2c from messing around with the same question in my head (1c per suggestion) in:

1) Your style matters.

If you are going for an "illustrative" map as opposed to hyper-realistic, you have far more license to draw mountains at any size that's feels right on the map you're drawing, since they're just "representations of mountains" rather than to-scale

2) Download and browse Google Earth.

If you know roughly what scale you are going for (which for my D&D campaign boils down to knowing characters can generally travel 24 miles in a day, and working out how many days I want there to be between towns/villages and how many towns/villages I want on this single map), then you can zoom to that same scale in Google Earth and browse around for an idea of how big lakes and mountains appear within the climate zone you want to set your story.

Anyways, there's no groundbreaking ideas here, but those two have helped me immensely.

This 1st map will definitely be illustrative rather than realistic. So I'm not super worried about the size of the shapes I'm using but more the distance that the terrains span. Using Google Earth is actually a great idea. I had been looking at maps and notices just how huge the lake and mountain ranges I had put on the map looked compared to say the Rockies in the US.