Hello everyone,

I hope this is the right place to post this.

Recently, I've been ruminating about scale on my maps. They are always something that I have struggled with concept wise.

Quick background: When I first started making maps, I would just create the land and then create a scale that seemed to fit. Something did not seem entirely right about doing it this way... so I started looking around for different ways to create fantasy maps. I watched the map-making tutorial created by Artifexian and really liked that style of map, although it is incredibly tedious. I really love the style and the way everything looks. Being able to accurately scale things is so awesome, and I have been improving on zooming into different regions and keeping the appropriate scale when doing so. I really like doing the world approach because it allows me to create realistic climates and it feels like I have more control over creating things.

Now the issue... I am going to be making multiple regional maps for a TTRPG that I am developing with my partner. For these regional maps, I am not going to be putting the time nor the effort into creating a larger world map as we will not be using one. I am struggling with how to appropriately scale these maps.

Do I just lay down some land and decide more arbitrarily the distance between things without considering more real-world implications (such as curvature of the planet)? Or do I just make the world map and zoom in on the area that I want to focus on so I can obtain a real-world scale? Do you have any tips/tricks that you use when making regional maps in terms of scaling? How realistic do I need to make this? I would love to keep with the atlas-style map because it's so clean looking... I just don't always want to have to do everything that goes into it...

I hope all of this makes sense... please feel free to ask clarifying questions... thank you for taking the time to read this and for your help!