A Map that Breaks All the Rules (Fantasy Mapmaking)

in this video I'll be drawing a fantasy map that takes all of these supposed rules for more believable maps that are grounded in science and breaks them hi everyone my name is Nate and you are watching WASD 20 a channel about tabletop RPGs and fantasy maps some of you may remember a video I made a while back called ten rules for more believable fantasy maps these rules were really more rules of thumb tendencies for rivers mountains land masses etc that can help you make maps that feel believable and make sense now I do think it's worth knowing some of this real world science type stuff and I'll put a link to that video right up there in case you haven't seen it after all I believe it was Pablo Picasso who said learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist and breaking the rules was also something I mentioned in that video in fact it was kind of a sneaky eleventh rule at the end break the rules you see there are always exceptions to these rules of thumb here on earth in actual nature and in a fantasy world where you have things like the gods walking around or magic running rampant there of course could be even more interesting exceptions so today we're gonna have some fun with those rules and see how many we can break and also we're gonna try to actually explain why things are the way they are in this new world I'll be creating before we get to the drawing however I do want to thank my sponsor for this video dungeon fog when I need a custom encounter map for a D&D game I love dungeon fog because it enables me to easily create a good looking map whether it's a dungeon a forest a castle or even something modern or futuristic there are tons of great looking assets and I can even use their GM tools to run games for my players online right in dungeon fog you can go try it out for free right now at dungeon fog calm and I definitely recommend you do that also in terms of world maps I'm getting really excited for dungeon Foggs project de oz to be entering alpha soon so definitely stay tuned for more news on that as we begin drawing the map here the first place we're gonna go is to the landmasses we want to make some landmass shapes that don't look like anything on earth that look a little bit fantastical and so I'm trying to you know throw for example plate tectonics to the wind we're not going to consider that we're not going to consider that maybe this fit over here at one point and it's moved and now collided with this landmass and things like that nope I want to make shapes that will have the viewer scratching their head and wondering how on earth did things form this way and so I'm going for this sort of swirling vortex this spiraling outward sort of look for my land masses with this big central landmass and then these islands radiating out from that in this sort of swirling manner now what could actually make things this way let's talk about that a minute and understand throughout this video I'm gonna be coming up with ideas but you probably have some better ideas so leave those down in the comments below one thought I had was it was actually formed this way by some kind of hurricane or storm that was extremely powerful and had the power to actually erode land masses in a certain way another idea I had is that perhaps it was some sort of water current rather than like wind or matter being carried through the air perhaps there's actually a current in the water that has done this and if you want to get all kind of mythological with your gods and stuff like that perhaps there was a God who kind of stirred the pot here so to speak and actually had some sort of staff or giant spoon who knows that actually stirred this world into being you know mixed the ingredients so to speak and and stirred it up all right now we are going to be drawing our mountains on this map and the first rule we're gonna disregard is that one about no lonely mountains we're making some lonely mountains so you can see I'm making two very big Peaks here one on the main landmass and one just north of that and yeah on earth mountains do tend to form in ranges enlarged with other mountains but you do have rare exceptions to this so in nature volcanoes are one of the more likely cases for a lonely mountain something like Mount Fuji or Mount Kilimanjaro and then you also have in Solberg's which some of you have pointed out in previous comments and one a great example of this is luru in Australia and you can do a little more research on those if you're curious but they can be pretty cool-looking so on my map I do have one volcano up there in the Northeast and that one we can make a natural occurrence I'm okay with that but for our other two lonely mountains I like the idea of having a more magical origin or a bit more fantastical anyway and so I'm thinking that they were both fortresses at one point for rival demigods perhaps dragon demigods and that these were kind of their roosts or their fortresses and over time they have eroded maybe very few people actually think that's the true origin but deep in the history of this world that is their true origin then on this Western landmass here you can see I do have a mountain range a little more traditional on that one now on this map I'm sticking to a pretty simple style of mountain where I'm no just doing a very basic Mountain shape trying to have some overlapping with the range here and for the shading I'm just doing some kind of diagonal hatching nothing real fancy here now we are doing rivers and lakes and here is where the real insanity begins because we're gonna be splitting rivers like crazy now splitting rivers or river bifurcation does actually happen in nature it's quite rare but we do see many places where it happens naturally on earth so here gonna I'm going to be doing a Delta which is one way that this can happen and that's you know not totally out of the norm but then we get up here and I'm gonna be making the river split in many places and I'm also going to be breaking my rule only having one drainage point from a lake and we're gonna be having multiple drainage points so on this central continent I'm imagining that this is all created by beings long-dead who decided they wanted to kind of spread the water wealth a little more evenly throughout this continent so through their blood and sweat they dug these canals essentially throughout the continent I'm not sure if that's feasible or plausible but I'm guessing it is I mean look at the Netherlands and now here on this island in the bottom right we're also disregarding our rule about no coast-to-coast rivers we do one big coast-to-coast River and then we're making it split all over the place and I'm actually looking at this and thinking maybe the land was shattered perhaps there was a great battle a god or a Titan got involved and actually shattered this land cracking it and now the salt water flows throughout this island basically and yeah maybe there's no fresh water at all and it's kind of barren other than that of course these sorts of things do occur to some extent on earth but when you have a coast-to-coast River it's actually called a strait and it usually doesn't look much like a river at this point I also decided to do my kind of regular coastline effect the quicker version where I just kind of go around and do these kind of wavy dashed lines very lightly around the coast and then I go back for a second pass a little even more lightly a little more sporadic and yeah it just kind of gives it a bit of a wavy look along the coastlines all right next up we are going to be drawing settlements and one of my rules for settlements is that settlements are usually going to be found near water so perhaps on a river or a lake or especially like in a good harbor area so on this map I'm gonna do none of that I'm going to place my settlements pretty evenly spaced distant from the water here now let's talk about why that might be why would you find settlements like this well one reason is maybe trade is not really a big thing there's not much commerce between the different settlements so they're not going to be using the water to transport goods and such another reason I thought of is maybe they really are concerned with being defensible and I'm not an expert on this but perhaps they want to be a little bit more isolated from each other and not have water as an easy access point to their cities because they're afraid of invasion so those are some of my ideas and I would absolutely love to hear some of your ideas for that down in the comments below now we'll be moving on to forests and I'm sticking with a pretty simple yet detailed style here where I'm doing the little pointy trees and doing kind of a little sea of those that I'm rounding out the bottoms of those forests and adding some little tree trunks in the form of vertical hatching now in terms of rules for forests I don't really have too many but I am actually making a point of trying to do less forests near the water than I would normally do I would normally surround bodies of water with forests because there's going to be a lot of water to feed the forests in those areas but I'm making a point to try to just stick them round the map a little more randomly in this case and another thing I'm definitely doing is ignoring the rain shadow effect now I don't really have any great locations where that could occur because my one range of mountains doesn't really have much room for forests on either side but I am putting forests on either side whereas in many of the mountain ranges of Earth you do tend to see a rain shadow where one side is very lush and has lots of vegetation and the other side is quite dry I also decided that I'm gonna be distributing my forests and lots of other things fairly unevenly around these islands so I'm starting to play with climate a little bit there too and a lot of other things and just trying to make something that I don't feel is very true to Earth climate and the way things occur in nature here so this upper right island with the volcano is gonna be totally covered in forests and then many of the other islands will have no trees at all kind of like they're single biome islands kind of like you see you know in Star Wars for example single biome planets like you know the forest planet of Endor and things like that speaking of climate I am gonna be finishing up by doing some terrain here and that is obviously greatly impacted by climate as well as some other factors as well but I'm mostly sticking to that single biome Island idea so we've got our jungle volcano island this northern central one I'm thinking is mostly snowy and icy then we've got our kind of mountainous forested on the Left we've got our shattered can of saltwater island here on the bottom right and then the central landmass just has a lot of variety some swamps grasslands and forests and things like that in terms of reasons for this I'm thinking that perhaps each race or tribe that lives on each of these islands uses magic differently and that has had a huge impact on their surroundings I mentioned in my rules video the whole Narnia thing you know always winter and never spring and that idea that there is some kind of magical curse in Narnia that is keeping it winter so you can absolutely go nuts with things like that perhaps it is the presence of some artifact that keeps it a certain way perhaps there was a magical Cataclysm in a certain area or an ancient curse perhaps it's the presence of a certain being that keeps things this way so those are all fun things you can consider for your fantasy worlds speaking of fun as I finished this one up here I do want to give a quick plug to the current mapping contest going on on the WASD 20 discord server it is in contest to map a lair of the abyss so super cool interesting go check it out well that's gonna do it for this one everybody if you have any comments or questions please leave those down below if you like this video I would love it if you can give it a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe so you can get more videos like this lastly before we go I want to thank the WASD 20 patrons these people are making it happen for me here on the channel they support my videos on a monthly basis and they get some pretty cool rewards too like weekly live map drawing streams with me so if you get value from these videos and you want to support head on over to patreon comm slash WASD 20 thanks everybody take care you'll see me again very soon [Music] you

Channel: WASD20

Views: 430,429

Keywords: d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeonfog, dungeon fog, project deios, wasd20, fantasy mapmaking, map making, cartography, geography, rules for fantasy maps, high fantasy, sellsword maps, drawing, art, drawing maps, fantasy maps, magic, trees, rivers, worldbuilding, dungeon master, game master, dm tips, dnd, rpg map, dnd map

Id: z__gw0flKHM

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020