/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>14437412
I like to keep things fairly vague unless it's important because that's how feudal characters without really good cartography think of them. Just look at how people today still vaguely go "oh it's an hour that way." Know what other lands relatively border the one you're dealing with, what hemisphere you're in, etc.

Farming village #2251 doesn't care if it's in the foothills of the mountains or the floodplains of the delta feeding into a lake or the local sea. It only matters if it matters in the story itself.

Now something like a border dispute or a ground campaign forces you to map things out properly. Or a character that travels a lot in the story. You have to develop their route and such. But as a secondary character, they can just make vague references to "plying the flax trade down the Soldien" and that could be a river or sea or the Soldien Road or whatever.

From the perspective of maps though, always understand that everyone in a pre-rail society will judge commerce as coming from the water. So the riverfronts and docks will be the center of things. Just take a look at stuff like coastal cartography back in the early 1800's.