Mapping A World

Mapping a world or even a big chunk of it can be quite the project, cataloging some local details is even more work. In the real world we haven't even really completely finished the job yet. One of the problems is the world is a bumpy squashed sphere and that just doesn't project well on a flat surface without distortion. Luckily when making a map for an RPG world we can cheat, we also don't have to do the whole darned world even a big chunk of one is a whole lot of ground to cover and we don't even have to worry about distortions caused by mapping a bumpy squashed sphere onto a flat surface.

I

In the sample map above there's an area about a 6th of the surface of the earth. That big island highlited in red is roughly the area of the U.K. and the area highlited in green is about the area four states of Texas (very roughly, I'm eye-balling this).
The orginal map this one comes from is a mile to a pixel where as this reduced copy is about 9 miles a pixel. With 60 mile hexes there would be roughly 120 columns of 85 hexes each or 10,200 hexes.
Going down to 10 mile hexes would gives us... errr... about 370,000 hexes. Now that would be a heck of a lot of work to detail as minimal detail hex-crawl.