Shown Features When Scaling Down Question
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Hi and welcome to the guild.
This is more of a philosophical question about what is a map. A map is a representation of space that shows features and locations. If you look at very very old maps they bear no resemblance to an aerial looking down over the ground sort of construction. For them the map is an arrangement of items so that it provides the reader with the information that is required which in most roman / dark age kind of times was more about what road to take in order to end up at a specific destination and what stops on the way you might encounter and how much more travelling you have to complete to arrive. There is no sense at all of looking X inches to the right for X miles of travel.
So that is a roundabout way of saying the map is whatever you want it to be. It is more important to define whether the river needs to be known about at the scale you have chosen to map at. As you zoom in and the scale goes up then presumably you would want to know about smaller features such as less wide rivers and smaller lakes. But the choice of whether to or not is with the cartographer.
Appropriate and reasonable are words used to describe that choice and there is no defined or specific cut off - especially with fantasy mapping. If you are making an accurate drawing of continental scale land then almost no river at all would be shown. If you do the math and have even a small continent of 500 miles across and say 3000 pixels to show it then anything would have to be at least 500/3000 or 1/6th of a mile large before it would make even one pixel on the image and yet nearly every continental map would show rivers way less wide than that. Why ? Because its really important to know that something so un-traversable as a wide river will prevent you from getting across or that big boats can operate there and nowhere else.
Each map shows different things and you can have many maps of the same place showing different things each being useful. So its all about what is important for the viewer of the map based upon what the maps intended information it wants to convey and that choice is the map makers. It is an artistic slice of the infinitely complex space that the map covers and what you dont show is as important as all the things that you do. What is "happening" below is entirely dependent on what you consider "happening" is. A person in a city looking for something to eat may not be interested in all of the nightclubs and cinemas. And that is why roman and dark age maps did not bother with accurate land shape since it was irrelevant to them when travelling.
Thank You!
