Castles and dungeons get a whole new lease of life - a window ledge is a great archery position, cavalry charges down corridors make sense, a doorway is not such an easy choke point, an open hall takes more than one turn to cross, all the calculus of moving and fighting within a space changes.
Fun with scale switching
To try and illustrate; I scanned and dropped a grid onto Castle Balronco from the fondly remembered Southern Reaches campaign - it actually looms over the Flytrap bar, haunt of the diminuitive flylings; so was already a place where scales were being fiddled with.
This place started as a repaint of a genuine castle on the Dordogne in France which provided ample detail for the outside - the skeleton of rooms drawn here are wrapped in walls at least as thick as the pointy arrow-slits along the top and bottom left and similarly some of the interior structural walls are very thick indeed. It provides a dungeon-appropriate level of connectivity and served well for the sessions I ran using approx 1 square = 5' scale.
If you bunch that up to 1 square is 15' then once you get into room 1, that big hall, it is a long dash to get across to any other exit leaving you exposed to ranged attacks or vulnerable to hit-and-run from mounted foes. Similiarly the doorways go from normal ~ 3' width to treble that, needing two adventurers shoulder to shoulder to hold it. Fireballs and other such area effects are not guaranteed room-clearers anymore. The list goes on.
None of this is too wild - there have been big maps in modules forever, but it is the ease of getting a second solid use out of a map by massively upscaling it, calling it a giants fortress, and setting your adventurer there. There are quite a few examples of this for existing giants fortress but I would also suggest calling it a giants ruin and having anything but giants there would also get you good mileage.
Continuing massively in this direction; bumping the scale up to 100' and making it a floating titans lair that must be traversed with a Spelljammer or some manner of underwater lair needing a submersible could also be fun.
The invert of all of this - down-scaling a map - can also be done but gets tricky because doors and passages rapidly become impassible to adventurers. This could be a neat puzzle, with an entire miniature dungeon that has to be navigated only through use of mage hand, familiars and hooks on lines, but unless size-changing magic is widely available to your party, it is not such a useful trick.
Castle Balronco in play
The Castle had three factions in it; fly-ling smugglers on the ground floor using the lower left rooms, beetlefolk wanderers where were flying in and out of the top of the castle and unbeknownst to the other two groups, a spider-vampire in some isolated rooms near the roof.
It meant that the ground floor was a combination of well trafficked but also partly-trapped - the unsound structure was not being disturbed by the small, light fly-lings marching about but the bigger player characters would set things off.
Beneath the castle was a dungeon - lifted from a photo of woodworm damage - which proved suitably labyrinthine.
If I were to run the place again, rescaled, suddenly all of those arrow slits become an entryway into some sort of grand temple and the now-huge central spiral staircase demands some sort of set-piece confrontation on it.
To close
Running on an up-scaled map changes the calculus of encounters - moves take you less far, ranges matter more, lines of sight, darkvision ranges, all the mechanics of encounters changes. At a minimum, it allows a straight-up recycle of a map, at best you could get some really memorable second uses by re-working who is present and making things different.
Note, there is nothing to stop you just rescaling the opposing forces; having small folk doing 'big' battlefield tactics in medium scaled places.
There is a map there, so I am counting my Joesky tax paid.
This was for the ever appreciated RPG Blog Carnival organised by Of Dice & Dragons.
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