Draw Your DnD World!!
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- Опубликовано: 16 дек 2022
- Draw your DnD World Map for your homebrew game!! We learn about game design from Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and a 16th century map to make a hexcrawl map for Dungeons and Dragons and convey our worldbuilding!
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JP Coovert's awesome map tutorial: • Making World Maps for ...
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Draw your DnD World Map for your homebrew game!! We learn about game design from Legend of Zelda Breath of the wild and a 16th century map to make a hexcrawl map to help our Dungeons and Dragons and convey our worldbuilding!
Download the MONSTROUS Preview Packet: www.thecloudcurio.com/monstrous
Sign up for the email alerts to make sure you here when the project goes live!
Patreon: www.patreon.com/mapcrow
I have never once felt a need for this. I absolutely do not feel my game is lacking for having done maps the former way. My players tend to engage quite a lot with adventure and points of interest.
THAT SAID I STILL CAN'T WAIT TO TRY THIS! It seems cool and I'm wondering how it will change the WAY we are engaging. Will absolutely be using this in my next game. Thank you for this content!
Yeah after a second watch, I'm super excited. We started tracking time more accurately than distance, and this seems like it will make distance, and survival, and travel decisions much more integral to our play style. (Which I think our older school players will love if nothing else)
this shit awoken something inside me, your the bob ross of the dnd world you beautiful man
All of us GM's need moar videos like this, it's universally applicable to any system and it really did help me simplify my maps, Thank You
I'm sad now. There are no new ideas.
@@stormchi all ideas are new but some have been thought before
I think I needed this. A campaign I was running fell apart because my players didn't seem to want to **do** anything. I had a map, with a bunch of labels, but each hex was just a generic biome tile. They'd poke their head into a couple dungeons here and there, but never ventured very far into them. We've discussed what they liked and didn't like, and they're willing to give it another try. But, I think I'll try more gameified maps this time around, and see if they find them more entising.
Maps like this can help create engagement, in my experience. But in my home game, I am not just letting the maps do all the heavy lifting. I'm checking in with my players every couple of session and asking what kinds of things they want their characters to be doing and what kinds of conflicts they'd want to see in the world next. After I've seeded in the plot hoods, by the time they actually get to it, they forgot that they asked for them! Haha
A bit of cross-pollination: a Matt Colville video about incentives ("Towards Better Rewards", 2022-01-06) says the same plus a bonus technique: make literal quest cards with explicit rewards on them.
Colville suggests the quests should be player-generated - based on what the PC is saying at the table - to avoid railroading while the rewards are DM defined to manage power creep.
You can get creative with rewards and tailor them to your players' interests (powergamers, roleplayers, etc), and class composition.
Eg:
> +1 on persuasion checks with Fey creatures
> Advantage on constitution saves
> Spell: Bladesong of Kelthar ("wait, what does that spell do?" could trigger a folklore investigation, and then...)
You can also slap a deadline (eg. must be done on solstice) to trigger urgency or a cost (eg. do this to prevent witch's curse) to trigger loss-aversion.
Anyway, the point is that a known reward/penalty can give players something to pursue beyond idle curiosity, since curiosity can be harder to align a group around.
I mean, the big thing is *do they have a goal?*
What do you want their goal to be? What do they want their goal to be? What's their party's motivation for doing anything but leading normal lives?
I like to start my campaigns by having everyone build characters *together* as a session zero and I have a rule. They need to already know each other and they need to have something they collectively want to do, as a party.
Why else would they be together? They're all trying to get money, or fame, or land, for something. What is it? How are they thinking of getting it? Are they planning on opening a detective agency? Tomb robbing? Becoming "adventurers for hire" in the traditional sense?
Answer those questions and you'll hopefully find that they practically start GMing the game themselves. You just need to throw obstacles in their path.
This is a topic too big to fit into a youtube comment but, I highly suggest you sit down with your players and discuss what their character goals are. What's the arc they envision for this character? Your players weren't disinterested in your map, they lacked motivation to do anything because nothing tied them to the world or their characters, and quite frankly this is almost entirely on them. If you put a dungeon somewhere, what motivation do they have to enter it if they're "mercenaries looking for work"? None. But what if one of them is looking for a family heirloom and a piece of it is in that dungeon? Huge motivation, they NEED to go there. Work with your players to develop characters with goals, or else you'll never get away from the aimless meandering that campaigns are easily susceptible to. Adventurers are doing the single most dangerous job in the world, these people need something, anything, that explains why they wake up every morning, put one foot in front of the other, and go on adventures. And then when they have those, you develop a story incorporating those elements. That's what a real "plot hook" is. It's not some guy in a tavern offering 20 gold to go kill some orcs, it's something that directly "hooks" into a character and "reels them in" because it has a direct, obvious tie in to them.
Search for the ADnD Book of Villains. It will help you. Your players need a direction, a clear quest goal. Then your map is the travel and exploration of the region conflicts, were they gain more quests (sidequests) from locals, as well as allies ans enemies.
This type of map (Carta Marina) is called pictorial map for those who want to search more maps in this same style.
oh this could be good info for AI prompting, thanks!
@@RPanda3S Jesus Christ
@@harrisonlorens3585 😢 whinny bitchy man. 🎉
@@harrisonlorens3585 AI overlords have taken over D&D too, we are doomed xD
@@RPanda3Sif you're gonna outsource work perhaps consider supporting real people and not stealing their works to frankenstein into horrid abominations?
My current campaign’s map was canonically drawn by a kobold with… questionable cartographic skills. The world is almost post-apocalyptic, so the players don’t really have much other choice than to use it. But, since the kobold is so lacking in academic training, the map has all sorts of little drawings and notes all over it, and this has been quite effective in getting them to want to visit different locations. I think flavoring your map as having been drawn by an actual character in the world can be very useful.
Oh... This explains why my game world map feels so unfinished despide being super detailed.
The map you drew at the end reminds me of a world map I had as a child. It had all these whimsical little illustrations on it marking famous landmarks, showcasing flora and fauna and even folk tales and historical events. I do destinctly remember that there was a little cartoon marking where the Titanic sank. My sister and I would often look at that map and talk about all the places we wanted to travel to someday. It was kind of an adventure map.
Heck yeah! If I was playing an RPG in London, I'd probably want to use a tour guide map instead of a super accurate street map, ya know? If it's essentially a point crawl, make the points say something! Cheers, Melin!
@@mapcrow I think it's also a great way to give some structure to a sandbox type campaign. You can direct your players a bit by putting certains points of intrest on the map. Tour guide maps are essentially filled with plot hooks. I am definitly going to try and put some visual clues on my map to hint at cool stuff they can discover. I have struggled to find a way to tell my players they can find domesticated triceratops without telling them out right. Rethinking how I draw maps might be the solution.
dude, same here. thinking like a child might seem stupid but its SUPER useful for dnd stuff. after all, kids know about fun and simplicity is most times the best way to go
@@sofialaya596 yes. We can deny it all we want, but somewhere deep inside we all still carry that spark of childhood. And indulging in that childlike joy and wonder is half the fun of ttrpgs. So why not embrace it and pander to your inner child by putting cute little illustrations on your map instead of contour lines?
@@mapcrow _"I'd probably want to use a tour guide map"_ -- indeed, I think that's simply a restatement of the philosophy espoused here. A tour guide map is basically identical in style to the gameboard style being suggested. I.e. providing human-scale details on the map to guide the map's user to interesting places, and to allow them to make human-scale decisions about goals and destinations.
I'm definitely guilty of trying to draw accurate or pretty maps vs useful ones just because I love the aesthetic of old maps too much. I've found a good middle ground is drawing my nice little old fashioned map and then having the map be marked and annotated by an NPC.
I especially like doing it where players can pick up multiple versions of the same map and learn more based on who had the map before them. Gives a neat way of drawing attention to places later on you don't want them investigating earlier AND it can be a neat way of slipping in some character building/background info they wouldn't have gotten otherwise
Heck yeah! In-world maps are a lot of fun and useful for all the reasons you stated! Follow your curiosity and joy! Cheers!!
Who knows, maybe the guy who lives in the "Evil Tower" has his own map, where the port city is marked as "Evil City" ...
@@simon_lukas You gotta provide new, actionable info for the players though, not just a new perspective.
@@RPanda3S yes, but you can achieve that by providing other clues. Such as finding evidence the port city is working on smuggling "lesser" races for slavery in abysmal conditions and the nobility is not only aware, they set it up. Then you find out the "evil tower" inhabitants are those that broke free and have been trying to build a resistance.
I absolutely love the idea of finding multiple maps of the same area bit with different info highlighted or missing/present. I might use that in my own games as well some time
I feel like this is more a lesson in scale than it is in anything else. Having a zoomed out world map can be useful in certain settings, but I also create region maps that include the local landmarks, anything exciting that could be there. I only usually give the players access to the local map, leaving the world map for my personal planning and tying the world together.
As someone who is currently drawing a map for a brand new city in my campaign setting and finding it a bit overwhelming, this was exactly the video I needed this morning! Thank you, Map Crow!
Glad I could help! I am also running a city game! I also have a video where I talk about how I make my city maps too! Cheers, Dana!! ruclips.net/video/5sLTjO-KZik/видео.html&ab_channel=MapCrow
He's right. Anyone who told you to draw a real map was lying to you. Think of how old final fantasy maps were set up. Think of fallout new vegas. You could honestly drop 80% of that map and only lose 5% of the game play
This is such a cool approach to map making, and it makes it seem far more accessible to me than everything else I've seen online. I've always thought of maps as spaces things are set, never pieces of a gameboard, and this really helps! Also, I absolutely love the new intro and ending credits, that potato is such a good little guy!
Glad you like it! I'm glad this video seems to be helping people articulate feelings they've had about maps and show them something different to try! Also very happy you like the intro and outro! I felt like I needed to redecorate the videos a bit! Haha
This reminds me of another type of map I love: theme park maps. I used to collect the maps from every theme park or water park that bothered to make one. I loved the way they could guide you to whatever attraction you wanted to visit even if they didn't have realistic scale or proportions.
Thank you for articulating the words I need to hear to fully understand why I had been so frustrated with any realistic looking map I put on hex paper.
You are so welcome! And thank you for the kind words! It's very encouraging to hear that from someone who is making such wonderful videos! Cheers!!
Ok quick tip for DMs.
Use your environment. I ran a campaign using the mall as a dungeon. Sears was a goblins den and the king was on the second floor in the Santa seat thrown.
My players knew exactly where everything was so when the big fight in the food court my players all ran to Panda Express because of how defensive it was and they found leftover items like oil and used it to make the ground slippery.
At this point everyone wanted to see what their favorite store was hiding.
Your mall-as-a-dungeon presents itself as a second hidden tip too. In our D&D tropes, dungeons are most often just rooms connected by hallways. If one is creative, one would make the room change in shape to not be rectangular, but in general it's just "draw the rooms first, then connect them via hallways".
The mall doesn't do that. A mall is a collection of big hallways with rooms attached to them. That is not your average dungeon description.
Mix things up. Look at your surroundings and notice how different things can be when repurposed as a dungeon. Maybe think about the layout of your parental house, or the house of a friend. Go to a zoo and imagine it as a dungeon. Perhaps it's underground in your design, but the twisty bendy paths going around often circular rooms is a very different dungeon design from rooms-and-connecting-hallways.
I think the people who made the Faerun map knew what they were doing. It's a macro scale map for a meta campaign, so its purpose is to be a blank canvas. When I've made multi-user settings in the past, I realized it's important to have that top scale where things stay pretty much static, because different groups are going to be using that map for different campaigns. Keeping it vague and static means that a player from one group can move to another group and not be confronted with any massive changes to the game world. "Oh, I thought the capital city was destroyed in an Earthquake..." or "I already adventured in the Cloakwood and visited all the points of interest, so I don't want to go there again."
It's when you zoom in and make your own micro-scale maps that you have to change your approach. You're basically building a graph of interesting locations, and they have to be readable so that players can make a meaningful choice about the next node on the graph that they are going to visit. "Shall we go East to the Goblin Lair, or North to the Spider woods?"
Exactly this. The advice in this video will get you a map that can make it through a campaign, the Faerun map can make it through an entire DnD career.
Why did I never think of a DND map as a game board!! Once you said it, it made total sense but omg you completely shifted my perspective! This has already been so helpful thank you SO much
Honestly after listening to this video the first map that popped into mind was eldin rings map. The base map without having explored the world is filled with hints about locations, caves are marked as orange and black holes, ruins and towns are drawn on, important buildings like magic towers also have their own markings. It made exploring so much more interesting when you looking for a weird building or structure in an empty map, of course there are things that you stumble upon but they are almost always around some sort of interesting marking on the map
The nice thing about Elden Ring's map is that while it still has this quality (especially regarding Minor Erdtrees), it is also a really finely detailed and nicely drawn map. It's very readable, so looking closely can almost always give you an exact path you can take to get from point A to point B. It's a great map because it has both.
This, to me, makes it better than Skyrim's map. I have a hard time using that one for navigation because it's literally just a zoomed out view of Skyrim. It's got all the bells and whistles that draw in the reader's attention and curiosity, but I'll be damned if I can find out how to get to every single little place.
Really helpful advice on how to make the map more intruiging to players! Realistic doesn't mean exciting.
Thank you! Yeah!! Realistic can be really beautiful, but it is gameable? That's the question I'm asking. Haha!!
I realized the game Pyre does exactly what you’re talking about. Whenever you make a travel decision you get a choice of a few different routes which pass through distinct and evocative places. You have some ability to guess what it means to go through each place.
Yeah! FTL has a similar approach too! Essentially, what I'm proposing is called a Pointcrawl in ttrpg spaces. But mostly I wanted to focus on the difference of maps with and without gravity for this episode. Thanks for the kind words!!
If you aren’t an artist or don’t wish to draw an immensely detailed map, a good substitute for this is narrative details. Rumors, quests, information and such about various portions of the map and landmarks you’ve set up. This has the same effect as drawing interesting details on the map while only requiring some descriptions from you.
It would be fun to have multiple maps of the same area but depending on who drew them would tell you a bit about the culture. A map with checkpoints and borders could be from a highly militarized nation or a detailed map like in 5e could be from a scholar who obsesses over minute details.
I had this idea of a city that was shunned by a city, it did not include it on the map for many years. It was added but people were shooed away from there.
A map there would provide the REAL story as the others were like “they’re horrible people rada rada rada”
What a great way of thinking about maps! Loved this. Here's to another awesome year!
Being specific is always the key. Sometimes that means narrowing down the scope and scale of the world, having a large map for yourself but then making a more zoomed in version of the area the players are exploring
Yeah, and you can always handout another map and expand later! No need to give them a whole continent all ay once!
As someone who also tackled maps in a video (I fancy a nice hex map with flat colors to indicate terrain and hex-specific doodles to indicate landmarks); this was a really, really, really great watch. Helps me to further understand why I feel the way I feel about maps.
Thank you for the kind words!! Making a video about maps that is interesting and useful is hard, so encouragement from a peer is very nice! Cheers!!
This is actually really useful to know, since im working on a whole world's worth of map. As always, your tips are grand!
Glad to hear it! Yeah definitely check out the link to the Carta Marina in the description!! Cheers!!
The point of a map is to inform the players of what is already explored. It takes you to a point. Parts of the map are to be filled out by players are where you have adventure.
The way you play it, sure! But I do it a different way! Lots of different playstyles out there, and I'm just describing the one I like!
It took me a few hours but, long after I finished watching this video, it occurs to me that what you've reinvented is the TOURIST MAP. This is exactly like the maps look you find in tourist info offices: roads drawn (more or less) to scale, but with attractions drawn in a vastly magnified scale.
Reasons why the map in Fallout 76 is my favorite map of all time in a video game. Especially since you can't always trust it. The map says there's a huge lake in the middle, so when you get there and find out a dam has exploded and wiped out the entire city nearby, leaving the lakebed barren, your brain goes "WTF HAPPENED HERE???"
I am reminded of two different maps from my childhood: The Hundred Acre Wood, and the World of Teddy Ruxpin. Both had this "Look at what adventures might be here!" Sort of quality that is really fun and exciting. Teddy Ruxpin in particular I think had a strong influence on me in that regard.
This is information that is missing from so many 'how to make a map' videos. While I don't know if it will instantly make my maps better, at least now I know what I don't know!
Heck yeah! As an art professor, I always say that if you don't know why your are drawing, you don't know what your are drawing. Form follows function and all that.
I've actually been looking more at tourists maps. I end up kind of at the same point.
I start with some major landmark set pieces, but then I wind a road between them, setting up a small node of interest like every day's travel between them, be it a town a bridge, a ruin, or a secret dungeon. It ends up looking a lot like a roll to move boardgame, but also like a themepark or guide to tourist traps.
I'll also start just planning out a few major landmarks and the starting area, then waiting for the players to near things to worry about filling things in.
I've stopped having players go off the rails at this point, because they can always see the next interesting thing just down the road, or just a couple days away. Sure sometimes I'll make a small detour they may or may not take, but they like to head to the big city, then pick a branch to go down first from there.
I'm a World Builder and I have a huge world map that looks likes the one from Forgotten Realms. But I also have, what I call, regional maps, that are more alike what you draw at the end. It has the details and the cool places and it's a smaller region, which means I can do more details. I think both maps are important for one, having an idea of where you are in the world, and then, where are we going next. My D&D Campaign has a main storyline with a serious goal, but it's also large and open ended, and sometimes the characters just have to help a village in order to progress, so they will build Renown by doing some contracts in the surroundings, etc.
This is very interesting, I did not think about it like that before. A note though:
This approach is very campaign/story focused. You make a map for a specific story you want to tell, which for me personally is putting the cart before the horse. I prefer to make a map for a scenario and then place the story inside. E.g. examine the map and then emulate which lands an evil lord would occupy according to his goals and character. Of course I also think about the stories to tell while drawing the map, but if your approach involves 20% realism and 80% storytelling, mine would be the other way around. My land mostly exists before I place a story inside. I might shift a mountain or two to make for a more interesting journey, but on the grand scale it is set in stone.
Also, these self explanatory maps are great for videogames, where the player is more or less alone in deciding where they want to go, but the same is not true for TTRPGs. The players have the option at any point in the story to seek out the help of NPCs in explaining locations on the map or listen to rumors about strange places. Or as a last resort, the GM themselves can give meta explanations.
Not per se. You can use this map in an OSR-style sandbox play. Nothing on the map prevents you from getting a quest to destroy to evil prince in the lair, going to the forest of spiders, befriending said spiders, then changing your mind and raiding your starting town.
This pictoral map is really not that different from regular maps, it just swaps out a black dot on the map with a legend saying it's a town, for an actual picture of a town. Or a top-down forest with the name "spider woods" with images of spider webs between trees. The representation is different, but the map itself is the same.
One thing you can say is, the scale is different. Yes, this is not the map of a world. Still, nothing prevents you from doing this style of drawing world wide. Hell, to reference old fantasy maps, when a sea has unexplored bits, there is often a drawing "Here be dragons" with a picture of a sea monster. That in itself is a pictoral use of an otherwise normal map.
I was wondering why the approach shown in this video didn't completely vibe with me. Your comment cleared it up. Thank you.
Great lesson, Mr. Map Crow. I want to present a dichotomy in the current ttrpg meta that you helped me understand: that between the PbtA-style, fiction-first dictate to "draw maps, leave blanks" approach (that is, don't preplan, allow the players and the story to generate the map) and your "draw maps, create choices" approach. I pulled my DnD group, with some kicking and screaming, into fiction-first and was confronted directly with the problem of "sometimes your players just don't want to draw maps ." I expected some of this, of course, but was thinking of the problem as their relative inexperience with player autonomy, rather than the appeal of the choices approach. My previous experience, also with a table of PbtA noobs, was that we actually overbuilt the world in a lot of ways. Everyone had ideas and we jammed the post-apocalyptic city full of interesting things, most of which we never got around to seeing (that's fine, it made for good lore). I expected much of the same with the second time around, but the players, who had just exited the 5e railroad at Tomb of Annihilation Station, really balked at it. Previous to your explanation I hadn't seen how adventure paths presented choices, and with my new perspective I can see that this is lacking in my blank maps. Time to pencil in some interesting choices for them.
This is very much like what I've done with my homebrew setting, in the 90s I ran into problems trying to just make it all up as I go along and make anything playable. Then I saw an article on the Catalan Atlas while in a dentist's office, it was like a bolt of lightning had gone through me the second I saw it. And so, since then I've been using it as a reference point. My goal for next year is to put together a tiptych of the world map made in this style to hang on the wall where we play.
All that is a long way of saying I agree with you 100%, give the players something to look at and hang their goals onto. They may have climbed the mountain because it was there, but the real reason was because there was a lost city in it's peak and they just had to know what was in there.
Heck yeah! Well put, Keith! Yeah old maps are cool!! I should bring them up more often!!
7:00 this is also called Signposting in Game Dev. Just exit Vault 111 in Fallout 4, don't move and just look at the horizon. You have several signposting in the skyline to pique your curiosity. This video was fantastic, thank you!
A thing I think you do really well is representing thinks on a small scale. Do you have any general tips for representing things with like that and making them distinct?
HMMM! That's a good question!! I learned to do this by drawing backgrounds for comics for a decade. But it's all about silhouette. If you watch my Character Design video, the same basic principles apply. What are the clear simple shapes that separate one element from the other? The video by JP in the description does a great job exemplifying this as well!! Practicing by drawing 16x16 pixel graphic tiles is another thing I've done a lot of too!
I love adding video game design philosophies into TTRPG design -- there's a lot of conversation each can have with each other that enhances both!
Heck yeah!! Video games haver learned so much from table top, it's nice that it goes the other way around too!!
I remember seeing a board for a horror, possibly transylvania-themed board game. It covered a small area overall, but each area of interest had a small illustration describing it along with a brief title. That what was inspired me to think about small maps for rpg campaigns. Another inspiration was maps for amusement parks, which were pseudo isometric with little illustrations popping up off of the page showing the various attactions in the park. There's other similar maps floating around out there.
I tried to get others to show some interest in this idea, but none of the OSR types I was chatting with at the time thought it was a great idea.
Thanks for doing this! I haven't even bothered mapping for any of my DnD games because I haven't really seen the point. Now I see the point! The insight that you're making a "game board" not a "land picture" is really helpful, and I think it will help me run better Theater of The Mind overland travel as well.
Just something as simple as "Do you want to go through the Hag Swamp or the Howling Forest?" adds so much depth to the problem of getting from here to there.
I've been DMing for almost a decade, and maps were always a slog to make. This method is genius. Subbed.
Welcome aboard! And thank you so much!!
Normally when I make maps, I like to add important formations that are not to scale, just displaying what is there in that particular area, like a city, a canyon, or a crater
*Even outside of the game table, this map method makes for better story telling.*
I can remember some old color cartoon story book as a kid. It was giant (twice the size of a where's waldo book) and had dragons and goblins to act out the story and teach children life lessons such as don't be greedy.
One of the things that stood out to me was how well the map added to the story. You could imagine the characters travelling to those places. The exaggerated art style make them feel like they came alive, and you got a tone for what each place felt like, be it an awe inspiring austere air ship or a humble rambunctious village where pranks and squabbling over food around the village bonfire were the main pastimes.
I made a continent wide map for me as a DM to consider resources and political issues but I was struggling with ways to make a closeup of the area for players... this video came at exactly the right time
Wonderful! I'm so glad to hear that!! I have also noticed that same issue when I'd done big ole maps in the past!
in the past i've used the Civilization 6 level editor (or whatever its called) to design maps like this as it has just the right pictoral scale you talk about while also really easily handling things like procedural mountain ranges, rivers, biomes, cities, political borders, landmarks, and more without you needing to be good at art
I do this with interaction format. Large monsters seen off in the distance. A disheveled and scared villager screaming at the general populace. A pinned note on a post offering a quest or a road sign informing danger ahead. Although I see the value in it, I don't like putting it on the map because people can concentrate on something they arent ready for simply because it looks a little too enticing. You'll always get that one who wants to argue that they can pass between all the dangers to get to the bigger boss battle, and it's hard to argue that something is genuinely impassable at every turn without being an obvious railroad tactic. It also doesn't appear on actual maps and part of exploring is finding out as you travel.
This explains why 20 years of trying has led to frustration with sandbox style games.
Hopefully this will help in at least one direction! Happy New Year! (Yay professor/teacher life! Just graduated with my PhD this month!)
As a data and Geographic Information Systems analyst, can confirm good advice. Maps are about more than what does land look like and we see that everyday: see a road map, it's not just where are roads but those yellow roads are highways you know that because you use them so often -that is a highly specific example like if you had only drawn where there are ghosts instead of where each adventure type is. One of the things you don't say, but I found interesting in your video is the balance of telegraphing vs mystery. If you had a map key and were trying to tell people exactly what was in a location, you might label the ghosts as banshees, but by not having a key you keep it as generic undead maintaining the suspense of what will they find. Your map making technique digs at the purpose of a dnd map.
This is so awesome!! As someone getting into drawing world maps, this is super helpful! Thank you for all the videos you've made, and here's hoping 2023 will be just as productive!
In my longest game that I play in, my DM maybe like 7 years ago let us see a map of the world. And off to the side was a giant mountain on wheels, which he described as the roaming dwaven fortress city.
It was the coolest shit I saw, and for 7 years I've been looking for angles to sneak off to see that city haha. (End of the world shenanigans makes that hard)
I've always been super inspired by that move.
When I was drawing a map for my home-brew world I just threw in a bunch of half baked ideas to the side lines to give the illusion of depth, and just had a stick figure hawling around a slab.
This has since turned into my next one shot where my party is hanging out in the roaming stone city, being hauled by a titan that the party is entrusted with stealing the heart of.
I love the idea of maps that have interest points on them! Always worth it, even if you never get around to those locations.
The homeliness and endearing comfort that your channel character exudes is SO understated. I like the art style. Gives your boisterous and yet inviting voice the perfect face
Thank you for this video! I just plotted out my first province and it just looks so fun and goofy. I've got a forest with cultists, goblin camps, bandit towns, a big castle with a mine that they get magic stones from, a swamp and a farmland filled with ghosts.
I would've never gotten this much down in one spot without this kind of creative direction. I can't wait to link together quests and encounter charts and dungeons I feel like I'm so close to actually playing this campaign! Thank you!!!!
The map in the Hobbit always stuck out to me, and I think it's for a lot of reasons you mentioned. Smaug is drawn right onto the map - there's a dragon here. There are also notes on the map like, "There are spiders." Anyone glancing over it gets an idea of what to expect where.
This is very useful!
I needed to convert my RNG maps ripped from a game I used to generate it to "paper" and I love this idea. Between being able to characterize the towns a little to expressing areas like the Wicker Woods and the Dry Land, this gives me a lot of ideas.
Very interesting perspective on this. I don't run a dnd game but even as someone who just worldbuilds for fun, the interest-first perspective and building out has been helpful when I get lost trying to get biomes and large scale land masses to feel right.
I've been stuck with drawing my world map for over a year now and this has been eye opening! Thank you so much for sharing and explaining so well as well as providing an example and thought process as you create a new map
Im 100% going to do this, i love it! My party started a campaign recently, and i gave them a rough draft of my map to help them with backstories and stuff but... i think for the adventures themselves im going to draw smaller chunks of the world like this from now on. Maybe 1 kingdom/territory at a time.
Heck yeah! No need to give them every place the COULD go. Just give them a few places to go and a few places to go through to get there!
Your ability to convey such clear meaning in what you draw contrasted to how simply you draw it leaves me in awe, dude! I've always struggled with drawing and second guessing myself so i just dropped the whole thing, but I love these!
Wow, thank you!!
I love this way of looking at maps! It also reminds me of how older medieval maps had illustrations of monsters and sea-creatures to imply danger, mystique, etc.
You make some excellent points. I remember exploring in games, most recently a MC modpack, and seeing something loom in the horizon or on the edge of my minimap that I don't recognize and going "I have *no idea* what that is, I'm going to go poke it" and those moments are great. One of my DMs has been using worldmaps for a while, and while they're alright, they're definitely the more realistic style. I think I'll show him this video.
Thanks man. This is gold. I'm just at the point of doing this and this is the exact advice I was after. I want my players to look at some options from their starting point and decide for themselves where they want to go so that I can plan the session based on that decision. And this kind of map makes many different places nearly equally tempting.
Simple, effective, easy to understand. I can't believe you can technically communicate more by doing less. This takes care of the "dead space" problem I've had with my maps. Thank you.
This is such a great way to view the use of maps it turns even simple traveling into a bigger part of the game with more emphasis on the players choicest
I think a great example of a map done right can be seen in Elden Ring. The moment you get your first map fragment and see Limgrave, you immediately see at least a dozen of distinct points of interest your eyes are drawn to. And even at full scale, the areas are distinct and give a clear indication that SOMETHING is to be found there.
I remember doing my first DnD map for a homebrew and I had to go through 3 full maps before I decided to game-ify the map design, cause hey, DnD is a game! And this video touches on many points I wish I knew sooner. Great guide for anyone wishing to dip their toes in DnD mapmaking.
This style reminds me of Nate Treme’s stuff. Like East of East or the baby one or the one for Ghost Star. His hex maps have just the right amount of gameable information.
Love Nate's work! Didn't have it on my mind when working on this, but it's still a big compliment as far as I'm concerned! Cheers!!
Damn. I've DMd a lot and made a lot of maps for them, heavily relying on names to carry evocative nature. It'd never even occurred to me to create a map like this, but the benefits are obvious now you bring them up. Really interesting stuff. I'll have to try this moving forward.
I really love this mindset. I'm starting a new campaign with my brothers and although I want to be able to heavily prep and plan out cool things for them to do I want them to have choice and I feel like this is a great way to give them choice while giving me a heads up on what I should be prepping next without forcing them into a box! Great stuff, thanks for sharing!
I have literally loved carta marina ever since I saw the maps quite literally come to life in animated things like flapjack. And learning that in the past it was believed these sea creatures were real which is why they’re on official maps.
you are my new favorite "fantasy cartography"/D&D/"functional for gaming purposes art" youtuber
if youtube still had the old star ranking system i'd give you ☆☆☆☆☆
Wow,I love this so much you just have no idea, and this fits so well with the way I think as well as a problem I've been having mentally about hating the idea of worldmaps, since they tend to remove mystery and undermine curiosity and the sense of discovery and adventure. This is exactly what I needed to flip the script on that
The map you have drawn is a layer of information available to the characters at the beginning of the game. My drawing skills aren't as good as yours. You could not tell a duck from a dragon if drawn by me. So I tend to draw maps of the first type and add meaningful names to specific regions. That works for our group pretty well too. Of course it is important that the game master knows what to expect in each region. Maybe that's the most important part here. A game master who doesn't have detailed ideas of what to throw at the players when they go here or there is lost. Random encounter tables might help for a while but they are not a permanent solution. Random encounters don't tell a storyline where events are interlinked with each other.
I think doing both is a great idea. I’m doing a massive planet and possibly additional realms in the future. You do a large scale map, show the size and scope of places that players won’t even see for months and let them just see it, without anything other than names and colourations. Do the same thing for continents. Then for countries/smaller regions, really apply the design hook elements. Wide, accurate maps let players get a sense of how big the world is, while smaller scales can be much more detailed and well-designed, letting players grasp exactly what they’re going against.
Great video, gave me more to think about for my maps in future.
THIS! Aaaaa I needed this!
I've started SO many games by drawing out a map and having the exact experience you described.
This video has been a huge help in understanding my issues, and has made me excited to start my next game.
Great video! I've already started making the region map for my next campaign, but when I make the smaller areas the players will actually have to traverse, I'll keep these tips in mind. They will only get a map of the starting island they know well, but won't be privy to the entire region, and will have to rely on NPCs and whatnot to find adventure. Eventually, they'll be able to buy maps from cartographers, which will not only increase their ability to navigate, but which might also be... unreliable, and full of things from folktales that will lead to more adventure!
So essentially start local and expand out. Personally this approach has always been a struggle for me. I find drawing large continent or region scale maps to be easy and fun, but draw a blank when trying to make smaller scale one. I think each kind of map is just as important as the other in different ways, but lots of good advice here on making more "interest based" local maps
This actually gives me some ideas for a campaign involving a group of cartographers exploring an area for the first time. If I have a basic map with major talked about locations from those who have had contact with people from the area, but haven't themselves traveled there, and have those marked, along with basic ecological areas marked, we could use the random encounters in various hex grids to fill in the points in between with information about hazards, surprises, etc. found during the course of exploration. World building and mapping can be a collaborative process, just as telling the story through play can be.
I already did this a little bit with buildings and mountains, but I like the extra layer of detail down to the creatures. I agree completely.
There's some stuff in here that's like, good advice for life, especially on communicating and the need for meaning in our arbitrary pursuits
It makes sense that the cartographer would make the maps like this so that people can know the dangerous and info about were they are and should go
i needed to hear this. I'll be running a hexcrawl for my pathfinder game and bought bunch of hexpaper and I'm excited to get to drawing
Heck yeah!! Think about character scale land marks and animals and I'll bet that you'll have a blast drawing it AND using it in your game!!
When you are hesitant to click on any ''draw your world'' video because you fear it is just another discouraging and boring breakdown of geography and weather and scale and all that other scientific stuff, BUT NOT THIS ONE. My friend you did it again, such an informative and eye-opening video that teaches us to focus on what TTRPGs are all about... (collaborative) STORYTELLING.
Thank you so much!! Yeah, I really hate making clickbait titles and thumbs, but this platform will bury me if I don't.
@@mapcrow oh totally not clickbait!
This helps soo much. I have a world that my players want to live and participate in but I have been soo overwhelmed with the map that breaking down into these steps makes me feel like I can do this. I got this. Thank you.
I made my first map, that was so much fun. I have made tall objects in the distance that the players can see, and I hope they will discover the hexes in between.
Timing man, timing. I am literally procrastinating about drawing my DND map as I watch this.
Heck yeah procrastination!! Thanks for watching!!
My first video and such awesome advice. Thanks so much!
This is the sort of thing I think I really needed. The next big step I've been planning to take for my first campaign is making a proper map that isn't a placeholder. This is going to help loads!
Just found your channel, you're fantastic!! Your analysis and explanations are accessible and interesting. Ready to binge the rest of these videos, they're wonderful!
This is all incredibly good advice for homebrew maps. Any map has to serve a purpose, after all.
Peutinger's map is a good example of a pragmatic map. It charts the distances between places and has little accuracy as to where places are geographically. Just how far apart they thought places were then. Places and obstacles are the only things on the maps. If it isn't a place you want to go or something in your way, it's not on the map. A good starting point for random and hidden adventures.
I was struggling with an area map for a while. Watched this, loved it, I have an area map that has way more content on it than I was ever thinking would be in this area.
Crow, your videos are helpful just like always. I feel like I've always had a hard time drawing maps...I've also been adverse to using randomly generated maps as well. I've always wanted to give it a go, but I don't draw enviorments well. This just makes things so much easier. THANK YOU!
Heck yeah!! Check out JP Coovert's videos too! He tends to have more actual drawing tips than I do! Also, I caught your latest video! Very Nice work!!
@@mapcrow thank you! I'll have to check them out as well
Outstanding. Thank you so much for this. First video I’ve come across of yours and I can’t wait to go through you ur catalog and play with some of these concepts.
Terrific advice and I hope more map makers start doing this, thanks for sharing!
Fantastic insight into mapping for games. I love the concept of thinking about maps at the human scale.
Thank you! Yeah, human scale, or Player Character scale to put a finer point on it. How can the map clue in details that druids, rangers, and rogues would all be curious about?
OK yeah, seeing this and hearing your explanation, this is *such* a better approach than trying to start with a full continent or something. Once you've got this done you can even "pan out" for a larger scale map while following the same approach
This is basically like I created the map for my sandbox campaign. I placed cities, dungeons and points of interest in a distance to each other, that there is a good pacing of travel vs. adventures. You normally have a day of travel, which leaves time for random encounters, but isn't as much that it discourages travel, so I have lots of location changes. The map is divided in zones, that get more and more dangerous, the more you stray from roads and population centers. The dungeons are connected by plot in a way, that the players are only directed to a dungeon, if they are high enough in level for the zone it is in. I also have two maps: one hexmap with icons for locations and coordinates for the dungeon master as a quick reference, so they can look up dungeon descriptions, mark random encounter locations and calculate travel times. And one a little more sophisticated map without a hexgrid for the players, where they have to paint in their own markers and distances.
Thanks for all your videos!! All your work is so inspiring and really gets me thinking about how stories are being told. THANK YOUUUUUUU
im reminded of old fantasy tactics games like heroes of might and magic which represents each location with a small image, roughly of perspective, which informs players at a glance of what that place represents, as opposed to just a label
Welcome the RPG World of the late 1970s. This is how we did it in the world of no public computers and no world-wide internet. I still have my world maps from back then..hex paper, pencil and colored pencils, all protected by plastic open-top sheet protectors. 44 years and still in use, as are all my hand-drawn city maps.
just about to start my first proper game after half a year of being a player. I really needed this, gave me much insparation for the new game! It'll be about a world where magic is a forgotten and forbidden knowlage, and all the players will be spellcasters on their way to spark the magic back into the world. Also there will be a huge need for them to show off, because otherwise, their spells will be ineffective, as more you belive in magic the more it affects you. Gonna go drawing literally right now :0
That's a pretty sick concept. Nice.
What i've done in the past is draw semiaccurate maps but colour in only the parts where I want the players to adventure. The colours draw their eyes and I can get creative with the shading to make parts stand out.
Game Developer here using this as a bit of inspiration for a game. Thanks for your work, I will throw you a copy if it ever reaches a playable state.