Map making in games

Ever since I became aware of the concept of a campaign in a roleplaying game I’ve been planning campaigns. Many of these campaigns never saw the light of day but almost all of them included a campaign map. I should make clear here that when I refer to campaign maps I’m thinking of a map of the physical world or area in which the campaign takes place. If you imagine the maps that are often found at the front of fantasy books you’ll be on the right track. Discussion of other maps such as story maps or dungeon maps is set aside for another post or posts.

Usually my work on a new campaign has been sparked by an idea associated with a particular place in the campaign world such as a city, an unusual topographic formation or a biome and the campaign map has grown from that seed. Unfortunately the world outside this location has tended to be fairly generic, drawing excessively from those maps found at the front of fantasy books. Locations like Elvish tree cities, inland seas with dangerous currents and strangely circular deserts were all pretty much standard in these early campaign maps.

The kingdom of cloudhaven, this actually saw some play

I’m not going to say that these maps were ‘bad’, they were often quite pretty and always a lot of fun to make, but they were generally pretty uninspiring and not a lot of thought went into what was represented by this or that place name. My recent experience suggests that a campaign map is not the place I should start when thinking about starting a new campaign.

My second most recent attempt at a campaign map has made it quite clear to me why this should be the case. As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m about two years into running my current game and at one point I had built up an investigative adventure that took the party quite some time to work through. This left me with a bit of free planning time so I decided to create a complete campaign world (distinct from the world I'm running my game in) from scratch starting with a campaign map and working from there. I had a couple of ideas for interesting locations and a vague notion of how I wanted the land masses to be laid out.  I knew that I wanted the map to look like a map of a real place so I broke out my atlas and started looking at the maps therein (mostly Europe) to get an idea of what coastlines should look like, how big various geographic features tended to be and how far apart cities are.

As it turned out, this new campaign world lacked the spark of life I needed to invest any effort in it and I basically abandoned it after just making a few rough sketches, and turned my attention to making a map for my current campaign. What’s that I hear you ask? You didn’t have a map for your campaign?  I did not.

Location unnamed, but there is definitely a feudal kindgom

When I started the planning process for my campaign I had been reading a lot of Joe Abercrombie, specifically the First Law trilogy (I thoroughly recommend these books), which did not feature a map at the start of the book. I did a little reading around and discovered that Mr. Abercrombie had deliberately not included a map as he was sure that fans would analyse it in minute detail and find that it wasn’t quite consistent with the text of the book. That characters had traveled from place to place too slowly or too quickly, that there shouldn’t be a forest there because there is a mountain range there and so on.

This made me realize two things. One, a poorly conceived map would constrain any stories I was attempting to tell in the future. Two, the action I had planned took place in a newly discovered continent quite far away from the area the player characters were from. So instead of drawing a campaign map I described the locations that the player characters needed to know about and left it at that.

This approach worked really well up to a point, and one of the players (whose character is a cartographer) drew a pretty nice map of an area they were adventuring in that I later extended into a new area.

However after the player characters had been wandering around for a while those descriptions had become a bit complicated and were scattered across half a dozen files in my campaign folder. I found it necessary to draw a rough map that allowed me to easily tell where places were in relation to each other, and once I had done that I really wanted to make a nice looking map that we could lay on the gaming table and draw on and add notes to. I found some map drawing tips on various blogs, went back to my atlas to refresh myself on what coastlines look like and started drawing. Most importantly though, those areas that were empty, I left empty. This will let me add locations that help build the story rather than constrain it.

In the words of LaTorra and Koebel ‘Draw maps, leave blanks’.

The Midland Confederation, watch out for corsairs along the friendly coast