The original Dragonlance book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, didn't need a map. Because a major plot point was that all the maps they had were pre-cataclysm and over a hundred years old. They had smaller local maps, but no explorers had stitched them together as 100 years is short to do that. So traveling over the map outside of where they would normally be in their lives, meant they couldn't be sure where they were going or where they'd end up.

They went to Tarsis-by-the-sea to take a ship to cut down their travel time, only to find it had become a dry seabed.

They did still have a map, but much more local to where the group started out and lived. I suppose that's why in most fantasy settings, you need a local map, because big world ones like Tolkien had require a lot of stability over a long period of time, along with trade and a market for large map.