Neverwinter Night Map Making

This month I'm focusing on getting a Neverwinter Night module out of the door. I had started it a while back but I pick up the levels I made again and started building on them.

The first thing I did was crop them.

I'm not quite sure why I was so much in favour of larger maps last time (it was a 12x12 tileset I was using for the main area). The first thing I noticed when I kicked into the level was just how long it took to get around the castle. That wasn't going to do at all so I moved things around a bit (since cropping will take off a chunk of your map) and reduced it to a 10x8 map (it's really a few tiles less than that). Still a bit worried about how big it is even now though; it's not being used for random battles throughout the area and therefore having a large map serves no purpose other than to lose the players in it or waste their time looking for the right person to talk to. This isn't interesting gaming and I'm still thinking of what I can do to further counter random wandering in the game (I'm hoping that I won't feel the need to further resize the map) while at the same time not just making the NPCs sit around in the same location all day. I want to be sure that, if my scripting and dialogue are good, the game won't be dragged down by poor map design.