Draw Your DnD World!!

welcome to map Crow the RPG art show my name is Kyle and today we're drawing your DND world [Music] it happened to you you've been bitten by the Home Brew bug and you want to draw an Overworld map for your new kingdom or country or island or whatever so that your players can interact with this fantasy land that you've made for them so you print out a hex grid and start just drawing random continent shapes maybe you have an idea for like the whole island is shaped like a dragon or a skull or you are trying to make it look like natural landforms and really pay attention to elevations and the directions of river flows and all of these geological details you start marking off where your major locations are your cities your roads your mountain ranges your forests and whatnot you've even done a lot of research ahead of time and checked out JP coovert's wonderful tutorials on how to draw Maps using just simple shapes and if you haven't you really should check the Link in the description below and as you are finishing up you have this nagging question in the back of your mind is this map any good I mean it serves its function it has everything kind of laid out on it it conveys the proper information but it's sort of a bunch of arbitrary squiggles on a hex grid What would make this map better than another map and you answer that anxiety by just putting more stuff on it more locations more Islands those are really fun to draw and they add a lot of visual interest maybe you can add a compass rose or little sea monsters or ships but really you're not improving the map at all or rather you are drawing more map but what you should have been drawing this whole time is a game board now I have a big disclaimer here I'm not trying to tell you what you should like or what you should enjoy doing or anything like that I want to offer you a different perspective to get different results and I do not want to diminish what you enjoy what you do or what anybody out there is creating and adding into this wonderful Community this is the map of faeroom by Mike Schley you probably recognize this map it is beautiful and it is ubiquitous Schleich has done a lot of work for fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons over the years he's done dungeon Maps he's done isometric location maps and of course these large Overland Maps as well and it's basically set the standard for what a modern Dean D map is supposed to look like and this map of faerun really shows its assumptions about what a map ought to be or at least what the art brief said it needed to be because everyone certainly artists are all aware that maps are of land and land looks like this from the vantage point that this photo gives us we can see a lot of assumptions about what maps of land is supposed to show it's showing grasslands forests mountains coastlines notice you can't see any detail of cities or Farmland that stretch on for miles and miles at this scale it just doesn't show up imagine if you were a player in a brand new campaign and your DM had printed out this exact image and then labeled it up with a bunch of fantasy cities ask yourself this where do you want to go first on this map you might look at a peninsula you might look look at a snow-capped mountain your eyes are going to be drawn to where there is detail or contrast but by and large this map doesn't really offer any suggestions as to what is an interesting location and what is just more land with nothing really special to say about it our contemporary scientific assumptions about what maps are and what they're useful for and what they should look like have definitely colored what faerun looks like in all the published material and because of the assumptions of visual design that are laid upon this map the place names are kind of doing a lot of heavy lifting on this map to communicate where Adventure is to be had the fields of the dead and the forest of worms and the wood of sharp teeth are all fine they suggest what you might find if you go into the woods but visually speaking that's not being carried at all all and I want to be extra clear here I am not picking on Mike Mike is a brilliant artist capable of drawing anything he wants to this is an art brief situation this is an art Direction situation this map doesn't even have a hex grid to help you keep track of these distances it just has a little map scale down in the corner and you need to measure those yourself this map doesn't have any political borders on it it doesn't clue you into what kind of wildlife you could see here it's sort of a blank inoffensive canvas that is just very very clear about land features and distances as a game board this map of faerun I think really falls short of the mark of offering up what Dungeons and Dragons is about and what you can do in it this map is Carta Marina and it was created by Olas Magnus in the 16th century olus did not have photographs of what the world looked like from space Olas had books he had other maps and he had the stories of sailors describing the cultures the Flora the fauna the folklore the military actions of the areas he was drawing and I'm willing to bet if you were starting a new campaign and your GM brought out the entirety of the Carta Marina or even just a segment like this from it you would pick out some detail and say let's go check out that thing because olis was concerned with human scale information not scientific facts about what the world really looks like I'm sure this is as accurate as olis could make it as far as geography and placement in scale but what he's really interested in is conveying place not just location The Carter Marina has what the creative team behind Zelda breath of the wild calls gravity check the link in the description below for a link to an article about what I am mentioning here but the idea is when you're creating an open world video game certain locations as they come over the horizon need to pull you towards them these need to stand out from the rest of the features that your screen is full of and sort of like yank you around from location to location kind of getting lost in the moment-to-moment emergent adventure of the map and while the Carter Marina certainly conveys more gravity than the map of faerun in 5th edition it's still not a game board and that is what you are creating if you are prepping for a home brew game so let's get out a new hex grid and see if we can't synthesize some of what we've been talking about before we start drawing coastlines and mount mountains and land features let's start with the most immediate thing that is going to matter to the players which is a place to start the game in oftentimes a populated city or a small village cities need a source of fresh water so let's draw a river going directly through the middle of it the next thing our game needs is a perilous location to travel to some kind of dungeon or evil tower something like that and we don't want this adventure location to be exactly nearby so putting it on the other end of the map is a good idea while drawing this map I am much more concerned about the distances of each hex than I am about the scale of what is in each hex the primary purpose of drawing things on the map basically how they would be seen is to suggest Adventure is to spurn People Into the Wilderness to go look at things and interact with the game world now that we have our two most important locations for our short campaign we can start drawing in some interesting land features but these land features are not just arbitrary and they're not just there to add naturalistic detail they are there to suggest interesting decisions to make so we know that if there is a mountain between us and the evil castle we either have to climb over it or go around it this adds a level of decision making for the players and it involves decisions in the game about time and distances and resource tracking and all that which presumably if you're using a hex map that is going to be in your game now that we've gotten some land features in our two locations let's put something interesting and perilous between these two locations adding a bunch of more land or swamp or Hills or grassland between the two locations is not enough we need that to be characterized in some way to Telegraph what the players might expect if they go there so I've added some hinges and standing stones in the middle of this more land to make it characterful and memorable but of course having one location is not enough that location has to be a choice between two things so if you add one area between two destination points you need to add another to go through and we want these areas to be large so it is a significant decision to choose one over the other and we also want to imply what kinds of factions or creatures could be coming in and out of that area as well if your players can look at the map and see that they'll have to deal with wild dogs and ghosts when they're going through the Hedge lands or spiders and witches if they go through the spider Woods or Orcs in guard towers if they go up through the road into the evil tower or if they have to deal with angry Giants or dwarves if they go through the mountains all of these are going to help Telegraph interesting decisions to make to the players and also help the players communicate what they want to be in the story in the challenges that they're laying out for themselves for the GM so the GM can start prepping ahead of time so instead of trying to invest your map with interest by drawing lots of details or interesting shaped mountains or really evocative place names think about how to communicate the priorities of your game world and the decision Space by drawing the tiny little houses and funny little ghosts and it's you know silhouetted little dogs as an artist every time you sit down to draw something you are confronted with an infinite possibility space and every decision begins in an arbitrary space so the wisdom of The Craft is to remove that arbitrary decisions with decision visions that are full of wisdom and meaning so if we're making a game map we need to communicate what decisions the game is asking us to make we start by populating the map with the locations that we start and we will need to one day travel to and then we add lots of locations where we might have to travel through to get there and as I am fond of reminding people I like birded suits definition of game as a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles so really the map is setting out all these different obstacle courses and offering your players a chance to circumvent them or make meaningful decisions onto what obstacles they feel prepared for under what time constraints and what narrative contexts and once you've got everything laid out on your map with all of this information about factions and creatures you might encounter on the road the game kind of starts running itself especially if you are using encounter tables to make the world come alive I think that will do it for the last episode of map Crow for 2022 what a wild year it was and what an exciting year 2023 is approving to be expect some exciting announcements about projects and books in January until next time my friends farewell [Applause] thank you for your patience everybody I know it had been a while since I put out a new video uh but the end of the semester was um quite dramatic for me I got sick and of course I had to do all the grading to end my classes and and I was doing some traveling and all this kind of stuff so I just decided to give myself a little break from putting out videos and really thinking about what I want these videos to do and what I want this channel to be for folks and in the future I'm thinking about running my patreon credits over the back end of the after show here and then also answering any kinds of questions that come up that don't really need a whole video uh but would be interesting to kind of talk about in a shorter format and also just a place to put weird drawings from my Sketchbook I feel like I'm drawing uh just you know how high quality High finished Polished Work only for this Channel and for everything and there's just no place to really kind of show My Weirder sense of humor that's happening in my Sketchbook so I'm thinking that's where this is going to go from now on so enjoy spudzo the mobile potato

Channel: Map Crow

Views: 384,813

Keywords: drawing tutorial, drawing tutorial easy, dnd campaigns, world building, dungeons and dragons, world map, map making, dungeons & dragons, fantasy maps, game master, fantasy cartography, d&d map, fantasy map making, fantasy map drawing, dungeon master, map drawing, rpg map, world building dnd, worldbuilding, how to, draw your dnd world

Id: dUH-FLcfTmA

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Ish_Joker]

What sort of map?

(better to share an image rather than a video to give an impression of what style of map you'd like. I'm not going to watch a 15 minute video to get that impression :) )

[u/Maestroode]

I watched the video you posted. It seems that it took 15 minutes to say:

Start with a regional map instead of a world/continent map.

I don't intend for this comment to be a response to the video, but I WILL say that I think it is quite solid advice. Try that, start with building a small regional map.

My first dives into map-making were to research Inkarnate vs. Wonderdraft. (I also threw Dungeondraft into the mix as well.) In the long run, I purchased all three, ironically as it would be. I think the first few steps would be to learn the programs and how they funcion. Wonderdraft's ability to have massive asset libraries is fantastic but can be wildly overwhelming. For that reason, I started with Inkarnate - sometimes less is indeed more. It was just easier for me to start pointing, clicking, and creating. Later on when I got the handle of the major concepts, I dug back into Wonderdraft and picked it back up.

What map-building advice can I offer?

Well, you watched the video too, right? I'd use that advice. Work down in scale to get onto the basic level your players are going to be dealing with. Whole campaigns can take place inside a single city. Or, you could do it all within a 200 mile/kilometer area. The thing is, you don't need to go big. I started by having an idea for a continent and then taking an area of it that would be my major area the campaign takes place in. I made that into 9 kingdoms, then took one of those and expanded on it. Then took one part of that one kingdom, and fleshed out detail. Think of it like zooming in on an area. (Essentially, it's exactly what the video suggests.)

What asset suggestions can I offer?

None. If you choose to go down that rabbit hole, know that that's exactly what it is -- a rabbit hole. You can make perfectly good maps with only the baked-in assets for both Wonderdraft and Inkarnate. How do I know? That's what I did.

So, I'm a composer/music teacher. (I'm not composing video game/digital music in a DAW, but straight up sheet music that I put in front of MS and HS kids.) Custom assets are like me downloading specific instrument sounds to playback in my music-writing software. It's like downloading new and interesting fonts for your word processor. In the end, none of that matters if the nuts-and-bolts aren't there. This board can be dangerous because it's very easy to see lots of these polished world maps. It suckers us into thinking "that's the standard." Remember, we DON'T see all the maps that people threw out or started over. John Williams wrote more music for Star Wars that didn't make it into the movies than did -- so start small.

What tutorials can I offer?

Well, go to YouTube and dig in. The biggest helps to me were the channels "WASD20", "Icarus Games", and "How to be a great GM". There's tons more and each has their own voice that will resonate with you. WASD20 and Icarus seemed to have lots to offer with map-making, since that's really where this post has landed.

I hope some of this helps (for you and anyone else who reads it). But in the end, go with the advice from the video - make a regional map, not a world map.

Cheers,

~Maestroode