FRIA - Myth Drannor's scale

roflo1

Every now and then, I take a map from the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas and try to "modernize" it (oh, how I wish WoTC would commission a new atlas).

Thanks to Remy's video on changing styles, this is usually not a problem. But I do have a question / conundrum this time. And it's a matter of scale. Take this clip for example:

I moved the scale bar to the middle of the map for illustration purposes; and as you can see, even the smallest rectangular buildings have one of their dimensions close to 100ft on average.

I told myself this was some creative liberty, or perhaps we can recall the typical "what is a map?" discussion and waive it. But before investing more time, I wanted to ask:

Not all buildings are meant to be on scale, right?

I can definitely see Castle Cormanthor being at an adequate scale... but the lesser buildings aren't. Right?

For the record, I'm going for SS5 where the 'average' building dimension is around 25ft.

Monsen

This is probably something that needs to be taken up with the original designer of the map. The FR Atlas map is just a faithful reproduction of an actual product map

The scale are from the original Myth Drannor maps from TSR.

The original Ruins of Myth Drannor Map specified 1 inch = 100 '. The non-ruin map that the one you posted is based on doesn't specify a scale as far as I can see, but it makes sense it is in the same scale as the ruins map, since it is the same place.

I looked at the original maps, and made some clips from the area around the building in the bottom left of your clip. Based on how the artist drew them, it certainly seems looks like they were drawing them like individual, to-scale buildings. But I do agree with you, the sizes is a bit large. So I'll probably chalk this down to a bit of a poor quality control with the original design. Lots of maps from those days played a bit loose with scale.

Monsen

This is probably something that needs to be taken up with the original designer of the map. The FR Atlas map is just a faithful reproduction of an actual product map

The scale are from the original Myth Drannor maps from TSR.

The original Ruins of Myth Drannor Map specified 1 inch = 100 '. The non-ruin map that the one you posted is based on doesn't specify a scale as far as I can see, but it makes sense it is in the same scale as the ruins map, since it is the same place.

I looked at the original maps, and made some clips from the area around the building in the bottom left of your clip. Based on how the artist drew them, it certainly seems looks like they were drawing them like individual, to-scale buildings. But I do agree with you, the sizes is a bit large. So I'll probably chalk this down to a bit of a poor quality control with the original design. Lots of maps from those days played a bit loose with scale.

roflo1

Thanks Monsen, lots of useful things to think about. I'm pretty sure I do own the Ruins of Myth Drannor supplement, but didn't occur to me to check it out.

Quite frankly, whenever I was presented with a map back in the day, I didn't really pay attention to scale. In fact, I've used the FRIA map for Myth Drannor in the past and hadn't noticed it either. I only noticed it until today, and only because I'm redrawing a lot of stuff.

Anyway, my plan so far is:

1. Redraw all red buildings at the original scale (I'll even use the red tile style for "marked" buildings only).
2. Remove all brown buildings and place new ones in the SS5 scale.
3. Check all labels, and identify which red buildings shouldn't be as large as the original scale (and rescale appropriately).
4. Fill in the gaps (add smaller paths, more buildings, fountains, plazas, green areas, decorations)