I noticed the scaling might be off. Am I right in that?

[Henning]

Hi! First post outside the introductions.

Like the title states, I started working on a fairly rough sketch of my world's map. It's going to be used in a TTRPG campaign, hopefully several. During the sketching however I started wondering whether the scaling of the mountains, forests etc. that I have put in so far are too big, effectively making the landmasses look much smaller than intended. So my question is for you folks is, can I leave it the same size and make it up to be an artistic choice? The goal is not for this map to look overly realistic, I do want to keep it stylized. (stylistic?)

Again, it's worth noting that this is supposed to be a world in similar size to Earth. And that it's just a rough sketch so far. Sorry for the poor wording in this post.
Oh, and ignore the numbers to the left. I forgot to leave them out before posting.

[Redrobes]

I would say the scale is a bit off to be honest. If you look at earth and get a map out and look at some of the biggest and longest rivers they will all be just a thinnest of lines in real scale. If the map depicts mountain ranges then its ok but as individual mountains then those would be hundreds of miles wide.

It all depends on whether this is artistic depiction of an area or a more exact rendition of its geography.

[Henning]

I would say the scale is a bit off to be honest. If you look at earth and get a map out and look at some of the biggest and longest rivers they will all be just a thinnest of lines in real scale. If the map depicts mountain ranges then its ok but as individual mountains then those would be hundreds of miles wide.

It all depends on whether this is artistic depiction of an area or a more exact rendition of its geography.

Thanks for the reply.

I get what you mean about the rivers and will definitely take a look at them, make the major ones thinner and maybe remove some of the smaller ones that wouldn't be easily seen on such a big map. For the mountains and whatnot, I'll have a look at how others have managed it.

[Batat]

It absolutely depends on your aesthetic choice. Our world had maps like this:



Nobody will actually use that map to navigate a world. If you want to convey a sense of awe for the mountains and forests, or a feeling of the world mostly an unexplored, mythological space, I would say it's fine to build it like this. If you want a more grounded, lived-in world, making the features smaller would help it.