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)
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.
@@WizzoTheMagicMan I remmber a DM/GM that made at least two copies of every map. one map was made in computer the more or less 1 to 1 map thanks to be in a computer/laptop 100% of the time each tile could hold as much detail as the GM/DM wanted. that map contained all the info the DM needed the does this tile contain any farm, its population, more detailed Bioms like if its farm tile what kind of farms or is it just full of cattle ranches kind of deal, is there a shop on this tile or if the player paid a NPC to set up a trade station there the DM could add it and not needing to remember it and it also supported have the player discovered it or know about it (flag). and then the map the player would have it could be anything from a scribble made by a kobold to a professional map made by professional cartographers.
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.
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 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.
I came here to say just that. I typically make a world map in the way he first described, taking notes of what ideas spring to mind. But for a campaign-level map, this approach is brilliant! And you can even extend it by giving the players an initial rough map of what they know about. Not to scale, of course! And then when they get their quest, a more accurate map of this type can be handed as a prop.
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.
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.
i took that one step further and made the map look like an advertisement for a specific tavern, cause that's what it canonicaly was, it even had a legal disclaimer on the side saying that it shouldn't be used for traveling
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
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.
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
@@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
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.
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.
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!!
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???"
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
I used to edit the best Dwarf Fortress maps I get each game. For a quick start. Now after watching geopolitics of Faerun on YT. I spend weeks and months tweaking maps that will never see a campaign. Yes this is fun for me.
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.
Wow. I've taught world building for years, and published books on the subject. This is THE BEST short vid I've ever seen on how to bring a hex map alive for your players. That shift from "science-informed world view" to "things/places of particular interest" makes all the difference in producing a visually appealing map where the game play suggests itself. Well done! And you've gained a subscriber. :)
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.
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.
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
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'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 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.
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.
I think this concept of drawing a D&D map is fantastic, in that it actually supports both the DM and the players. Seems like good general advice for TTRPG world building. Even if you're working with a published setting, you could seriously give it a boost by telegraphing your maps this way... with electronic tools, you can make a world map that evolves with this advice.
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 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.
Something I really like about this is it makes your player's builds more meaningful. Ghosts and Beasts vs Arachnids and Witches, based on how your players build they can not only decide future unlocks but also make a choice that is fun or less harmful to them. A linear path without choice means builds get shut down. This also gives the added benefit of giving you, the DM, a chance to design the big important places around what your Players are using to reward those choices and offer regular fights with enemies that are weak to tools that are lacking letting you turn something simple into a challenge. Throw in some lore about how the entity in question was tipped off you were coming and in the days it took you to come they rearranged things and it makes people more invested in the world. They are being watched by a living adapting threat. Now it makes sense why the easy path has more traps and the hard path has none. This also means you're rewarded for taking the hard paths early, as the threat won't be as aware of your abilities and instead place their threats in reverse. The world naturally rewarded you based on your choices as that delivery person leaving town the moment they saw you come relayed incomplete information to the threat.
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.
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!
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!)
The entire premise of this advice hinges on the idea that a map is something you present to your players as a bunch of options for where to go or what to do, but that's not how I use maps at all. I wouldn't likely give my players a detailed map like this, because it's unlikely their characters would have access to one. Mike's maps do pretty much everything I'd want them to do. They show me as the DM the general terrain layout, what the scale of the world is, and the names of locations which I can research individually as needed. And if am showing this map to my players, that's all the more information I want them to see too (and I may even remove some locations). I wouldn't put plot points on the map. I'd introduce those in other ways. Of course, that's not to say something like you created couldn't be useful for a certain type of game, but it's not an inherently better map. It really depends on what you want to use it for. If you want it to tell a story about what adventures are to be had throughout the world, then it's great, but if you just want to document the terrain layout and points of interest, then a map like Mike's is much better. And a downside of trying to use a map like yours is that you kind of have to plan ahead at the start of the campaign what sort of adventures lie where, and it's harder to add things later where and when you need them. You may find that one of the things you initially drew is no longer very useful or interesting for the campaign, or you may come up with another really cool idea to fit the evolving narrative, but have no room for it on the map. It's much easier to adjust or repurpose points of interest on a map that only has location names, and isn't trying to tell a story before it happens.
This is a channel for artists looking to draw a different looking map or a different way to think about maps. If you find yourself in no need of either thing, that’s perfectly fine.
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.
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.
I have a campaign where the map is a central character. No, it's not a hexcrawler. Rather, it's a hunting grounds that the players keep returning to, so it's the battlegrid, but supersized, inspired by Monster Hunter. Recently, I saw a video by Extra Credits Gaming that explains how open worlds are designed and I think that those lessons can be broadly applied to D&D as well, both on a hexmap and on a battlemap. I would love you to do a video on how to design a 'old stomping grounds' kind of battle map if that's interesting to 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”
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!!!!
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!
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.
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.
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
I learned to make good maps by studying and copying the style used back in the day. Judge's Guild, and though I cannot find it, I had a book of blank hex maps, inside the covers was many topography symbols popular back then. But then again, I've made crude, on the fly maps and shrugged. Depends on what you have time for.
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.
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!
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
*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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
My first session was today and I was the dm, I had spent the last month crafting a adventure for my sister (and last minute our cousin) and I used google slides and ms paint to put it together, they loved it and we had the whole thing over a zoom call. That is what I think when I hear "drawing your dnd map"
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.
I'm making an indie video game and I've been dreading making a world map because it's tough to figure out the physical locations of nonconnected levels selected in a menu. I don't want to balloon my scope too much but the way, Kyle explained how to plan a map by key campaign spots instead of geographic set up makes things slightly easier to plan. There's still too much to learn and put together and there isn't a manual on making a video game.
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.
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 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.
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.
I’m so glad I found this! I’m building my hexcrawl for a Mausritter campaign and this video articulated what I’ve been working out in my brain. Thank you for this 🥰
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!
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
This was a really good video for me to watch. As a newbie homwbrewer I got too hung up on a large scale world that could take a party from 1 to 20 and wanted to make something ambitiously large that I discouraged myself from actually doing it because I didn't think it was *big enough* This video made it much easier for me to take a step back and say "it's okay to start small."
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 ☆☆☆☆☆
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.
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!
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.
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
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?
Beautiful Work, Great Video. Most of us do not have you drawing talents, regardless of your being correct, so we rarely make such nice maps. Perhaps you should make a video of just these Map symbols with links to pages where we could copy them for our own maps. Thank You.
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
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.
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.
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 was an interesting video. I wasn’t sure I agreed with your point when you started but by the end you convinced me. I will have to look into this for the next campaign I run.
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.
Best video I have seen on this topic. I appreciate the BoTW illustration on why that map is so great. I have found analyzing that game has helped me shape my own games into more meaningful experiences. I often ask myself: Why are they exploring? For gear? Why do they need more (breaks?) For food? How am I doing health? For rest? When can they heal up? Makes even a simple orchard worth discovering.
Woot woot, Bernard Suits! That is the first time I’ve ever seen a reference to Suits in the wild. It’s amazing how habit just separates the words ‘game’ and ‘map’ when i think about my game map. Thanks for tying them together again.
Hey, you can see Italy, hi! Carta Marina is pure Chaos, makes me feel every step will be exhausting, also to be honest i used to draw hex or square maps only for segments of the map where the players are or can go, (right now I'm working on a non-euclidean solution), the map you drew at the end would be good, but I prefer to draw a normal map, put a transparent film on top and then add stickers i prepared as players explore the map or get news about something, or know about a place from their origins etc.
The good news is there are tons of others channels that have tutorials about drawing the maps you seem to like. Draw what makes you happy! If trying something else makes you happy, then that’s why I’m making these videos.
This is honestly a game changer. I’m not the best artist but these drawings are pretty simple but they are so enticing. I want to join your campaign just to hear what you came up for the ghosts in the henge lands lol. Thanks
That's something I think has to be remembered about D&D. It's pretty light on simulationism but heavy on gamism, so it benefits from having a map designed as such.
This video came at the perfect time for me. I'm trying to build my own homebrew campaign in a kingdom called Kolandria and I've been struggling so hard trying to make a good map for it. Between map makers and random generators, I could never get something I liked, but this might be the best advice I've gotten up to this point. One important location is a castle called Ravenkeep. It was named as such because the previous queen was a raging tyrant who had the blood of thousands of her own citizens on her hands, earning her the nickname The Raven Queen. The current queen, the Raven Queen's daughter, is far kinder and genuinely wants the best, but because of her lineage, everyone believes it's a ruse. Originally, I was just gonna draw a castle on the map and leave it at that, but after watching this, I think I'm gonna characterise it by drawing a raven emerging from the castle.
Incredible insight into the user experience! Every video changes how I approach DnD (and TTRPGs in general) and gives me so much inspiration! Thank you!
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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
This type of map (Carta Marina) is called pictorial map for those who want to search more maps in this same style.
@@harrisonlorens3585 😢 whinny bitchy man. 🎉
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.
Holy crap that ideas actually fantastic, I may "borrow" that idea
Wonderful idea sir, now i shall take it for my own use
@@doingboing100 This is a simple and fantastic tip. Thanks for sharing!
@@WizzoTheMagicMan I remmber a DM/GM that made at least two copies of every map.
one map was made in computer the more or less 1 to 1 map thanks to be in a computer/laptop 100% of the time each tile could hold as much detail as the GM/DM wanted.
that map contained all the info the DM needed the does this tile contain any farm, its population, more detailed Bioms like if its farm tile what kind of farms or is it just full of cattle ranches kind of deal, is there a shop on this tile or if the player paid a NPC to set up a trade station there the DM could add it and not needing to remember it and it also supported have the player discovered it or know about it (flag).
and then the map the player would have it could be anything from a scribble made by a kobold to a professional map made by professional cartographers.
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.
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 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.
I came here to say just that. I typically make a world map in the way he first described, taking notes of what ideas spring to mind. But for a campaign-level map, this approach is brilliant! And you can even extend it by giving the players an initial rough map of what they know about. Not to scale, of course! And then when they get their quest, a more accurate map of this type can be handed as a prop.
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.
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.
i took that one step further and made the map look like an advertisement for a specific tavern, cause that's what it canonicaly was, it even had a legal disclaimer on the side saying that it shouldn't be used for traveling
That's amazing
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
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!!
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
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.
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.
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!!
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???"
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!
I used to edit the best Dwarf Fortress maps I get each game. For a quick start. Now after watching geopolitics of Faerun on YT. I spend weeks and months tweaking maps that will never see a campaign. Yes this is fun for me.
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!!
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!!
Wow. I've taught world building for years, and published books on the subject. This is THE BEST short vid I've ever seen on how to bring a hex map alive for your players. That shift from "science-informed world view" to "things/places of particular interest" makes all the difference in producing a visually appealing map where the game play suggests itself. Well done! And you've gained a subscriber. :)
This is a lovely compliment to get from someone with your bibliography! Thank you so much, Teramis!
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.
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.
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!!
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
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!!
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.
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 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.
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.
I think this concept of drawing a D&D map is fantastic, in that it actually supports both the DM and the players. Seems like good general advice for TTRPG world building. Even if you're working with a published setting, you could seriously give it a boost by telegraphing your maps this way... with electronic tools, you can make a world map that evolves with this advice.
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!!
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 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.
Something I really like about this is it makes your player's builds more meaningful.
Ghosts and Beasts vs Arachnids and Witches, based on how your players build they can not only decide future unlocks but also make a choice that is fun or less harmful to them. A linear path without choice means builds get shut down.
This also gives the added benefit of giving you, the DM, a chance to design the big important places around what your Players are using to reward those choices and offer regular fights with enemies that are weak to tools that are lacking letting you turn something simple into a challenge.
Throw in some lore about how the entity in question was tipped off you were coming and in the days it took you to come they rearranged things and it makes people more invested in the world. They are being watched by a living adapting threat. Now it makes sense why the easy path has more traps and the hard path has none.
This also means you're rewarded for taking the hard paths early, as the threat won't be as aware of your abilities and instead place their threats in reverse. The world naturally rewarded you based on your choices as that delivery person leaving town the moment they saw you come relayed incomplete information to the threat.
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!!
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!
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!)
The entire premise of this advice hinges on the idea that a map is something you present to your players as a bunch of options for where to go or what to do, but that's not how I use maps at all. I wouldn't likely give my players a detailed map like this, because it's unlikely their characters would have access to one. Mike's maps do pretty much everything I'd want them to do. They show me as the DM the general terrain layout, what the scale of the world is, and the names of locations which I can research individually as needed. And if am showing this map to my players, that's all the more information I want them to see too (and I may even remove some locations). I wouldn't put plot points on the map. I'd introduce those in other ways.
Of course, that's not to say something like you created couldn't be useful for a certain type of game, but it's not an inherently better map. It really depends on what you want to use it for. If you want it to tell a story about what adventures are to be had throughout the world, then it's great, but if you just want to document the terrain layout and points of interest, then a map like Mike's is much better.
And a downside of trying to use a map like yours is that you kind of have to plan ahead at the start of the campaign what sort of adventures lie where, and it's harder to add things later where and when you need them. You may find that one of the things you initially drew is no longer very useful or interesting for the campaign, or you may come up with another really cool idea to fit the evolving narrative, but have no room for it on the map. It's much easier to adjust or repurpose points of interest on a map that only has location names, and isn't trying to tell a story before it happens.
This is a channel for artists looking to draw a different looking map or a different way to think about maps. If you find yourself in no need of either thing, that’s perfectly fine.
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.
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.
I have a campaign where the map is a central character. No, it's not a hexcrawler. Rather, it's a hunting grounds that the players keep returning to, so it's the battlegrid, but supersized, inspired by Monster Hunter. Recently, I saw a video by Extra Credits Gaming that explains how open worlds are designed and I think that those lessons can be broadly applied to D&D as well, both on a hexmap and on a battlemap.
I would love you to do a video on how to design a 'old stomping grounds' kind of battle map if that's interesting to 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”
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!!!!
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!
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.
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.
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
I learned to make good maps by studying and copying the style used back in the day. Judge's Guild, and though I cannot find it, I had a book of blank hex maps, inside the covers was many topography symbols popular back then. But then again, I've made crude, on the fly maps and shrugged. Depends on what you have time for.
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.
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 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!
*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.
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 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.
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!
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!
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.
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
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
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.
My first session was today and I was the dm, I had spent the last month crafting a adventure for my sister (and last minute our cousin) and I used google slides and ms paint to put it together, they loved it and we had the whole thing over a zoom call. That is what I think when I hear "drawing your dnd map"
That’s what I do for my home games! I even made a video about it. This video is about a different thing.
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.
I'm making an indie video game and I've been dreading making a world map because it's tough to figure out the physical locations of nonconnected levels selected in a menu. I don't want to balloon my scope too much but the way, Kyle explained how to plan a map by key campaign spots instead of geographic set up makes things slightly easier to plan. There's still too much to learn and put together and there isn't a manual on making a video game.
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.
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 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.
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.
I’m so glad I found this! I’m building my hexcrawl for a Mausritter campaign and this video articulated what I’ve been working out in my brain. Thank you for this 🥰
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!
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
This was a really good video for me to watch. As a newbie homwbrewer I got too hung up on a large scale world that could take a party from 1 to 20 and wanted to make something ambitiously large that I discouraged myself from actually doing it because I didn't think it was *big enough*
This video made it much easier for me to take a step back and say "it's okay to start small."
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 ☆☆☆☆☆
This is all incredibly good advice for homebrew maps. Any map has to serve a purpose, after all.
Bro that map looks glorious. I don't think ill ever be able to make something that nice. Just look at the mountains! The details are just wow.
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!!
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.
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.
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
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!!
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
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?
Beautiful Work, Great Video. Most of us do not have you drawing talents, regardless of your being correct, so we rarely make such nice maps. Perhaps you should make a video of just these Map symbols with links to pages where we could copy them for our own maps. Thank You.
If you would like help drawing, I suggest you check out some videos in the space for that kind of tutorial.
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.
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.
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.
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 was an interesting video. I wasn’t sure I agreed with your point when you started but by the end you convinced me. I will have to look into this for the next campaign I run.
I love really detailed maps and am a Geography buff so this was the slap in the face I needed.
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.
Best video I have seen on this topic. I appreciate the BoTW illustration on why that map is so great. I have found analyzing that game has helped me shape my own games into more meaningful experiences.
I often ask myself: Why are they exploring?
For gear? Why do they need more (breaks?)
For food? How am I doing health?
For rest? When can they heal up?
Makes even a simple orchard worth discovering.
Woot woot, Bernard Suits! That is the first time I’ve ever seen a reference to Suits in the wild.
It’s amazing how habit just separates the words ‘game’ and ‘map’ when i think about my game map. Thanks for tying them together again.
Hey, you can see Italy, hi!
Carta Marina is pure Chaos, makes me feel every step will be exhausting, also to be honest i used to draw hex or square maps only for segments of the map where the players are or can go, (right now I'm working on a non-euclidean solution), the map you drew at the end would be good, but I prefer to draw a normal map, put a transparent film on top and then add stickers i prepared as players explore the map or get news about something, or know about a place from their origins etc.
The good news is there are tons of others channels that have tutorials about drawing the maps you seem to like. Draw what makes you happy! If trying something else makes you happy, then that’s why I’m making these videos.
This is honestly a game changer. I’m not the best artist but these drawings are pretty simple but they are so enticing. I want to join your campaign just to hear what you came up for the ghosts in the henge lands lol. Thanks
That's something I think has to be remembered about D&D. It's pretty light on simulationism but heavy on gamism, so it benefits from having a map designed as such.
At least 5E is. Earlier editions would lean heavily into simulation play at times.
This i exactly the video I needed, working on a campaign setting at the moment and feeling really stumped as to the map
Thank you!! I'm happy to help!! Draw the map that helps a player make choices in character and I'll bet you'll see fantastic results!!
This video came at the perfect time for me. I'm trying to build my own homebrew campaign in a kingdom called Kolandria and I've been struggling so hard trying to make a good map for it. Between map makers and random generators, I could never get something I liked, but this might be the best advice I've gotten up to this point.
One important location is a castle called Ravenkeep. It was named as such because the previous queen was a raging tyrant who had the blood of thousands of her own citizens on her hands, earning her the nickname The Raven Queen. The current queen, the Raven Queen's daughter, is far kinder and genuinely wants the best, but because of her lineage, everyone believes it's a ruse. Originally, I was just gonna draw a castle on the map and leave it at that, but after watching this, I think I'm gonna characterise it by drawing a raven emerging from the castle.
Incredible insight into the user experience! Every video changes how I approach DnD (and TTRPGs in general) and gives me so much inspiration! Thank you!
Glad it was helpful! DnD is a wonderful game, but I also enjoy over thinking everything about it!! Haha