My problem with Exalted...
I'm sure I've mentioned this before, and I'm sure it's been talked about to death in the various RPG.net forums, but allow me to reiterate it yet again: Exalted would be downright perfect if it weren't for the poorly designed and poorly thought-out map.
Well, the map itself isn't that bad. It's actually just the scale that bothers me. It's almost as though someone went through all the trouble of making a map, complete with rivers and mountains and islands and forests and showed it to the dev-team over at White-Wolf and said "here, how's this look" and the dev-team said "fine except it's too small but rather than redesigning it from scratch, let's just crank up the scale and tell the players that there's lots of "space between spaces" for you to fill with whatever you want".
But they didn't change any of the features on the map. So what was likely intended to be a tiny island becomes a small continent. What was meant to be a range of large mountains become colossal, space-scraping edifices of earth and stone. There are several forests that are too large to really do much with. Do we really need the Silent Crescent forest (just west of Gem) to be 750'000 square miles? That's more than the total land mass of Mani-fucking-toba! You could easily have entire campaigns within that territory and never visit the same place twice. And - more importantly - you'd be making pretty much everything up from scratch since no details are mentioned in any of the main splat-books.
Other discrepancies are all over the map. Most of the big shadowlands listed on the map are unnecessarily large as are many of the main "rivers". Parts of the Yellow River are easily 50 to 75 miles across which is more on the caliber of Lake Erie or Lake Ontario than any river.
This would be less of a problem and easier to ignore if the setting was something other than bronze-age style fantasy anime. But realistically, people get around creation by foot, wind, or animal power (for the most part) and that can put a real kink on things unless you're really willing to breeze over the travel-times and include lots of magical means of communication over distance. If you're not willing to do such things, I think your campaign might start to feel isolated and cut off from the "epic" happenings that White-Wolf have worked so hard to lay out in their (many) splat books. In fact, you might almost choose one 250'000 square mile square on this map, and forget about the rest of the world for the most part.
The question becomes is there an alternative or a fix? Am I thinking about this the wrong way? Has anyone else had this problem or had general problems "filling in the blanks" on the Exalted map? Or has anyone else had trouble with travel/communications?