Guidelines for scaling your map

[Ciel]

So I picked up my book of fantasy mapmaking though I was little let down it didn't go into explanations for how to scale your maps and determine distance between towns and such and make a readable legend for it. I'm not very good at thinking ahead of scales so I like knowing how much I should space out things before adding in full details, I suppose!

if there's a thread that already exists that goes into depth on this, i apologize for not seeing it!

[Falconius]

I'd go into google maps, or any other satellite map images, set it at the scale you think you want and use it as a guideline. Alternatively you can take an object in you map with a known size, like a house, draw it figure out your scale based on that known object and then keep going. (works also with bigger things, like let's say you know you want this sea to be 100km across, you can set your scale according to that and then fill out the rest.)