WIP - Scale and map symbols for a regional map?

[delguidance]

Are there any good guides for filling in a small-scale or regional map, say on the level of Pennsylvania? Global tutorials are great for mountain ranges and rivers, but at the scale of smaller regions there are new factors that come into play like the separate ridges of a mountain range, smaller water bodies, wetlands, and cities.

For example, I made a nice world map. I followed pretty detailed tutorials using GIMP and Wilbur for heightmaps and getting rivers right. I was pretty confident in it. Since I did a lot of the hard and detailed work in GIMP I decided use Wonderdraft for some fun and fast maps.

Then I decided to make a regional map of some random area. It had some rivers and mountain ranges. I thought it would make a good sized area for an adventure for a role playing game. When I calculated the scale of it based on my global map I realized it was the size of the United States! This was way too big of a map to show the details needed for local adventuring area.

Grey Wolf Region.png

So I decided to zoom in and use something that would be about 100 miles by 150 miles. It's hi-lited in red in the larger map above. Something that corresponded to the size of about a dozen counties in a corner of Pennsylvania. But in doing that, I realized my global map was almost useless besides giving it the corner of a mountain range and a few rivers. So here's where I'm at with it:

zzzzz.png

I get stuck because there are such clear tutorials for shaping the planet, and I use the old DnD Worldbuilder's Guidebook, but even that's weak on what to do when you drill down to this level.

How do you decide what scale to set your maps at?

Any advice on how to start filling in the smaller scale map is much appreciated!

[KMAlexander]

I think this is actually when maps are most effective for travelers. Since you can detail all the little streams and forests accurately. Continentally it never makes all that much sense to call out that stuff on a continental scale, and usually, when it was done, it was there to add flavor not necessarily be representative. Like take this map of Egypt by Ruscelli/Ptolemy, there's a "forest" there, but it's not exactly helpful.

Egypt.png

So at the level you're looking into now, things get a lot more interesting. As mentioned above, I think water is a key one. There are so many streams that feed into rivers that come off mountains and crisscross the land. That alone can fill a map up significantly. Take a look at Georgio Widman's map of the Lombardy region. You can see how he's filling that space.

Lombardy.png

Often cartographers would get even more detailed, labeling mills (water and wind) as well as churches, towns, etc. Roads both major and side roads. County lines. One of my favorite maps created by Georg Matthaus Vischer tackles Austria, and the level of detail is fascinating, especially for a hill-profile style of map.

Austria.png

Oh! One other thing! There's always WAAAAAAAY more towns and villages and settlements in real life. Fantasy Cartography tends to thin out the actual number of human settlements. Some of this is intentional since maps often serve a story, and you don't need the map to call out locations not visited in the narrative. But like, if you look at Pennsylvania, there are nearly a thousand incorporated towns (Wiki tells me 939) which can fill out a map.

Hopefully, that helps!

[delguidance]

I came up with a solution to my problem. TLDR: Add noise and erode the land in Wilbur. This added in smaller rivers and streams which guided the small-scale spread of towns.

As I said, I had started with a part of the global map that left me without much detail or direction for filling in a small-scale map of 150 by 100 miles. Here's what I had:
00.png
I went back to the highly-pixelated piece of the global map:
01.png
In Wilbur, I smoothed out the pixelation and approximated where I knew the rivers would go. This made a nifty topo map:
03.png
I am NO expert at Wilbur and I don't know what 98% of the different variables do, but I played around with adding noise, erosion cycles, and incising river beds until I had something passable:
04.png
I used this as an overlay back in Wonderdraft to copy in new streams. This led me to moving some villages around to place them near water ways and also realizing where wetlands would crop up. Having a sense of local topography really opens up where wetlands go.
05.png
From there I could play around where forests could be shaded in and here's what I came up with:
06.png
I used the Adobe Color Wheel to coordinate complementary and analogous colors which is a subtle, but immeasurable help to getting colors to harmonize.
Adobe Color Wheel

I am still left with a question of how to create a good-looking map that is not cluttered up, but is still useful for conveying information. For example, I initially used symbols for the swamps, but they are just something else to "read" and a swath of color does the job somewhat better.

Let me know what you think!

[KMAlexander]

I think that's a big improvement and the colors look great. I'd either create an outlet for that landlocked lake in the north or understand it's going to be a saline-heavy body of water. Since this is for a TTRPG, adding locations of interest might be helpful (ruins, mills, windmills, forts, etc.), but so much of that depends on what you want to communicate to the player.