(Map Making is Half the Fun)

Welcome to the third of many posts that will be focusing on the art of world-building, particularly when it comes to D&D. This one is fairly long and relates to making maps in a virtual fashion, so I’ve broken it into two pieces.

For this section, weʼre talking about turning your world from a vague landmass into a thrilling world of communities big and small. No small order here. If you havenʼt read the other two sections, definitely check them out as weʼll be building most of this off of the ideas weʼve talked about previously.

How do you flesh out a world as big as the characters youʼve created?

The good news is that youʼve already laid in a lot of groundwork for actually building a world so shaping out the land and the sea and all the dominions within should be relatively easy.

I almost always start with the characters that Iʼve now created (plus my inciting plot monologue) to start building my world. At this point I have a few big bad evil guys (BBEGs) and a few other influential people, both good and bad. The beauty of this is that you can start to decide if they are acting this way (if they are motivated) by a rejection of society (they are an outcast/they have seen the real truth/they are breaking a system/etc) or because it fits in with society (they are rich/powerful/deigned to rule/etc). Having these two axis to work with means you can create a variety of characters in the same area and based on how strongly they fit in or reject society, you can build a complex world with little work.

Either they are acting out because of society or they are acting out to reject society. So if you have 5 big characters, you can have 5 societies easily drafted up in no time.

For example, letʼs look at Star Wars. You have about 5 or so main characters: two from the same planet, for these purposes at least (Luke and Obi-Wan), Han Solo, Princess Leia, C3PO & R2D2 and Darth Vader. If we place them on a chart:

You can easily go across, and based on eachʼs personality, build the environments or societies that made them/they occupy. Not all locations are used immediately or used in more than passing, or even to illustrate a point.

Starting on the left, you place your character and depending on what you’ve written on them, you write out whether they would reject or be unhappy with where they live or if they benefit or choose where they live. Then you list how strong it is, which is how you can have characters from the same area with differing opinions or for different reasons. Could these be factions in this world? Possibly.

Then you can see how various graduations along them build complex societies or societies where multiple characters can exist and both would make sense. Thereʼs more art to this than science so you really just need to have an idea of whether itʼs a strong push or a weak one. These arenʼt binding guidelines of what you need to do, just a way to get a sense of what you want to do.

Hereʼs one I did for my BBEG:

Baldric the Bold

• Because of

• STRONG — he both rules and is ruled by what he discovered about the main religion, he hates tradition but it’s become a defining characteristic for him

• Nefryitak society — the heavy caste system of magic established that there is an inherent order to peopleʼs worth and that real powerful magic, or truth is the only thing that matters. People who reject it have a hard time fighting against it, so most move within the system, even if they hate it

This will also help you build out what societies PCs might fit in— especially for newer players. Even if they pick one and act out of turn with that culture, it still fits because itʼs a rejection of that society.

But now onto the fun part:

How do you make a map for a world that doesnʼt exist in reality?

Map making, by its very definition, requires a place to exist in order to map it. Map making is the butter to the bread that is the world, you need it to make toast better but the bread is still the key component. Otherwise you are just buttering a countertop.

So how do you do that?

Now thereʼs plenty of map makers online but some of them are futsy on my system (Macintosh family for LIFE) or they require a lot of editing OR they needed me to go in and do a lot of manual work to match my world that I’ve been dreaming about. I didnʼt just want a map to overlay some places—I wanted a map that reflected this real world that I have built above.

And I did that in a few steps, using Affinity Designer. My original map for my world was done in Illustrator but seriously, why pay for that when there are better or cheaper options around. All screenshots are from Affinity Designer, except for any pics of the original map in AI.

Why Affinity Designer?

• Same tool as Illustrator but cheaper and I don’t have to give money to Adobe with their ridiculous subscription system

• Nicer workflow, once you get the hang of it after switching

• Easier installation of brushes — you don’t have to go through their weird 3rd party application service, just install brushes and fonts as you normally would

Why not in Photoshop? For a few reasons, here’s why I work in Designer/Illustrator:

• Rasterization — working in Designer has the benefit of being a vector image, so I can size up or down however much I want, export to all sorts of formats, while keeping the quality very high

• Brush tool — works just like it does in old PS BUT it makes paths that I can free transform out of the result, point by point, which is super helpful in the city and location maps, less so in the world map

• Pen tool seems more powerful — I have no data to back this up but it feels like it is. Plus with the Direct Selection tool, you can easily adjust points on a path without having to go through the harder-to-decipher-yet-same task in PS

(Fair warning, while it IS a few steps, there can be a lot of repetitive actions within, you probably need around 2-3 hours depending on your familiarity with the software)

1. Pick a landmass type—use the list from the Civilization games, as I almost always do—actually all of the Civilization games do a great job of distilling what a city, city state or nation needs to function, so it’s a great resource to look into as you build those out 

• In my case, I picked Archipelago originally because I had written in some violent floods a thousand years before, leaving only plateaus in its wake. For my sample here, I chose instead large continents, because I wanted something familiar to earth

• Why does this work? Because it gives you a hint of what amount of conflict can people expect. Did you choose Pangea? Then chance of conflict is going to be higher at borders. Many small islands? Thatʼs great for those that want a lot of exploring but also leads to exploitation and defense of key resources like fresh water. Pick a landmass that makes sense for your societies that youʼve plotted out.

2. Pick an animal—it can be any animal. In my case, I picked sloths because I was, in all honestly, I love sloths. Draw or trace your animal or find a picture of it online.

• Use your handy dandy applications to make the animal into a blob: You can do this using image trace on Adobe Illustrator or Gaussian blur on Affinity Designer and turn your animal into a smoothed somewhat formed creature of sorts. The goal is a silhouette.

• Or you can do this old school—grab an online coloring book page for your animal. Bonus points if itʼs really low resolution. Color the whole thing in black or some other dark color. Overlay it with graph paper and trace the shape on the graph paper. You can even do this digitally and use the graph lines to start working on step four, which is:

4. Create a grid or hex grid on a new layer. I like Hex grids because they look cool and also work better for large, world maps. Anything smaller than that and I prefer squares. Maybe it’s my family history in landscape design? Who knows.

There’s really no fancy way to this, just create a hexagon using the polygon tool, hold down shift while you do it so the hexagon is equal, then copy and paste those next to each other. Hexagons should have a black outline and no fill color. Group them once they reach about ten or so, then copy the group and stick together. I usually start out with one the size of the canvas, shrinking the Groups down until they reach a size I like and can cover about an inch off the canvas on all sides.

5. Duplicate that group of hexagons! And now you’re ready to make some land. Next on the list is to duplicate that layer and start making those hexagons into land. I also will sometimes make a lower layer in blue (below all the sloths and hexagons) and change the opacity of the sloths to 50-60% so I can see it better. The Lock option is going to be your best friend here, so you don’t accidentally select anything you don’t want to select:

I also like to zoom in, so I can better grab segments. One thing you’ll like to do (which I forgot to do until halfway through the first landmass….) which is Group the green segments together as you go. Group and Lock are you basic functions as you go. To select more than one shape at a time, you’ll need to shift click.

I like to leave gaps in the sloths, one, so it doesn’t look like a bunch of sloths turned into hexagons, but two, so I can vary up who lives there. Lot of islands? Sea faring folks. Wide expanse bisected by a wide river? Warring areas.

Doesn’t matter which colors you pick right now, because you can change them up later once you have all the shapes defined.

Repeat this process (select, Group, color, Lock) for each landmass you want, making sure to adjust the coastlines and areas to your liking (at this point, you might start to hate your animal for having so many parts/arms/etc. This is natural):

6. Move all your landmass groups to their own layer. This is for two reasons, one, easier to turn Visibility or Lock on and off and two, now you can easily make some ocean depth.

7. Repeat the process with ocean depth. If you’ve done this correctly, you can start from the center of the locked landmasses and drag Select wider areas of hexagons to change to lighter or darker shades of blue. Group, color and Lock as you did before.

Tired of working on large areas? You’re in luck—it’s time for height, cities and rivers.

8. Let’s add some height! Height is an easy thing to add and gives context without having to be detailed. You probably remember most of your maps through school showing height. I find it’s easiest to work from a duplicate of the landmass map and start the same process over again, instead with dark green for lowlands, like deltas or swamps, then yellow, orange, dark orange and brown for the various heights, with brown being the highest areas:

Now you can start to throw in some stories as you get ready for the Cities segment. Like this area has a high up plateau with a fancy lake on it/ Maybe the lake is where the gods sit in Slothia.

9. City time! So far, we haven’t even used my favorite tool in all time, which is the Pen tool and that is a crime. The Pen tool holds all the secrets to the universe IMHO. You’ll need it for the next two segments, which is making cities and trade/general routes and rivers. The big benefit of the Pen tool is that you can do cities and routes in the same step, making it fast and easy.

Once you are using the Pen Tool, use the settings to change the width (slightly bigger than the lines for the hexagons), change the style (dotted or dashed, your choice) and the end points (circles!). Using these three things, you can easily create som cities and trade routs by following the hexagon lines from one area to another:

I also use this time to create some kingdom boundaries since I’m here (duplicate a landmass Group, change the color and opacity, delete sections of the group you don’t want) so I can show where entry and exit areas of a city might sit.

10. Rivers! Text! Using the same, glorious Pen Tool, make some rivers. I have a few done in different ways here (Pen tool based and Brush tool based) depending on how much variation you want with the rivers. Naturally, the size and shape are all up to your discretion and only serve to show the general area that rivers exist in:

I also use this time to make some locations and cities, but never do I write the name of every city, for the same reasons I mentioned above. I want to give myself an out so I can retcon locations as I go. There’s also an implied number of cities scattered around the routs and in the empty areas that you can throw in if you need to.

Is this a foolproof method? No. But it is easy to follow, especially when you have no artistic skills but still want to control the result. You could also just download a randomly generated map, but if you’re like me, you want to make it your own and lack the advanced skills to make something that looks like it came out of the Silmarillion.

[/actual advice]

Personally, I feel like maps are only as good as the people and places in them. And trust me I do write out a lot of places. There are tons of awesome set pieces that Iʼve written that rely heavily on the location, but I never try to cement it into a specific location. (For example, when I work on the physical maps, I always overlay them with overhead sheets so I can write with dry erase on the map, then get rid of it. Players just need to know then area, not the exact map spot.)

One of the great things about starting at such a high level, the entire world or continent view, is that when you place an icon down, depending on your scale, getting down to the PC level can vary between fifty miles and a couple hundred miles, meaning you donʼt need to be exact.

One of my favorite lessons from The Design of Everyday Things (and seriously, I should be paying Don Norman royalties at this point) is that the difference in being 97% accurate and 95% accurate is pretty negligible to the average person and system. Unless you need to be absolutely accurate on distances (like in combat) being absolute is unnecessary.

Our next segment will talk about making City Maps and location maps, both in Affinity Designer and in person, mostly because it’s another bulky post but because it will tie nicely into my thoughts on moving our sessions to Ye Olde Virtual Realm.

Now time to get back to my Hard/All Collectibles run of the Uncharted series and to work on my knitted blankets and knitted sweater.

<3,

Steph