These two approaches to making a setting were detailed in the DMG. What are people's thoughts on them? For most of my campaigns, I go top down, sketching out continent or world-scale maps and filling in from there. However, I've toyed with starting in a village and only mapping out what's visible from the tallest building in the village (a church spire or something), and I kind of liked the small-scale, high-detail information that gave me. I can foresee problems occurring with such a setup, however, if the players go off the rails, and it's furthermore much harder coming up with how the elves work in your setting if you have only mapped villages in the middle of a single human kingdom.