CARTOGRAPHY RULES!

In every roleplaying game product that details the locations of an environment, usually a map is provided that will give the DM an accurate assessment of how the players can interact with that environment. For example, the PCs want to travel from Town A to Town B. Well, The DM can see from the map a few things:

1. What type of environments the PCs will travel through and what type of encounters to expect.
2. How long they will be traveling, what the distance is vs what type of ground they have to cover.
3. Any other locations along the way that will influence their travel.

Most maps I've seen in roleplaying game products contain this information and convey it well. I can't say the same thing about Paizo's product Guide to Darkmoon Vale. The maps in the product don't contain two major map conventions that would really help me out: a compass rose (or even direction of north) and a scale. The compass rose is forgiveable as an oversight, but the lack of scale makes things VERY hard to use.

So I post the comment to the publishers and they tell me that the issue would be addressed. So when another product came out without a scale in some of the maps, I took that to mean that the publishing date of the first product was so close to the second that they didn't have time to fix those kinds of things. I also know that the lead time in print publishing is a couple of months at times.

What I didn't expect was when I posted a question on the message boards as to the scale of some of the maps in the second product, I got a snarky response on the boards. Um... WTF?

Get it together people. As follows: What All Good Maps Should Have

I'm in a field where visual representations of information count for a great deal, so I understand the need to make visual information work well. Do I need to do your work for you?