How to Design and Draw a D&D Hex Map! (Includes Free Template Download!)

let's make a DMD Hicks map can you even see this I don't know well I'll explain let's go so in one of my D&D games my players have finally left the city that they've been exploring and now they're venturing out into the wilderness to fight monsters and find magical treasure and as soon as they left the city I the DM ran into a literal roadblock the rules for long distance travel in D&D are weirdly confusing to me and maybe it's because I didn't do enough planning beforehand there's some sort of disconnect with traveling a certain distance in a day and then exhaustion and how long you can travel and then the players got horses and that made it more complicated and I wanted them to travel a good distance so they could have some fun encounters along the way I don't know it just got really complicated and thankfully my players were very kind and gracefully struggled through me trying to figure out these rules but after this session I realized I needed a better way to get them excited about leaving the cool awesome built-up city that we've been exploring and venture out into the wilderness and want to go to different places around the world and so I thought the best possible way to do this was to create a hex man I'm gonna make a hex map where each individual hex is one day of travel or if you're on a horse you can cover two hexes difficult terrain hexes will take two days to travel through or one day on a horse I don't know rules are complicated but this is definitely making it easier okay so I've created this blank template that you can download from the description below free to use fill it out yourself the reason it's super light blue and hard to see in the camera here is because I want you to be able to easily draw on top of it use it as a guide for creating your hex map now the main point of this video is that you don't have to be a great artist or illustrator to make a really cool looking man with this method I'm about to show you it's all about planning and then just having a little bit of patience with the drawing this is not a high skill level project my goal for creating this map is to have something that I can hand my players and have them be super excited to leave the city and explore the wilderness keep it simple so we don't have to worry about rules we'll all know exactly how long it's gonna take to move from place to place all right enough backstory let's get into the step-by-step process DD hex map alright a first step is to print out three of these templates you're gonna need one to do your planning on you're gonna need one to draw map key and then the last one is for your final hex map drawing alright step two is all planning there's really no drawing in this phase we're just gonna be listing out what goes in each hex so think of this is like a paint-by-numbers mapmaking project we're just gonna keep it super simple by writing down what type of landscape or terrain goes in each hex so my dandy game takes place in port Vella this city on the coast now this is the sort of fun process where I get to fill out the wilderness around the city so most of the hexes are gonna be pretty generic you know is it a field where as a hill or a mountain or a forest you know these are places where random encounters can happen you know or or something specific and meaningful can happen in these sort of generic landscapes but I am also putting some of the major landmarks in the area in as well so to the south of the city I have this ruined four you know there's a couple of villages there's a druid circle and a wizard tower you know some things that your players might not know about but when you hand them the map they're gonna look at it and say ooh what's this maybe we should go explore over here nothing visual yet except for the roads and the rivers kind of figuring out how I want those to work otherwise it's just writing down what type of terrain goes into each individual hex so we've done all the planning of where everything is going to go on our map now it's time to take all of these different types of terrain and create a key that we'll be able to use to illustrate our hex map so grab your second blank template and a pencil and it's time to start grilling okay for this step we're just drawing out the key to the map so think of it as each hex is its own little symbol that represents a type of terrain or a feature on the map and instead of jumping straight into drawing the map we're gonna do a little bit of preparation first and figure out what each of those different types of terrain and features will actually look like on the map so the whole point of this is to keep it simple really your mountains can just be upside down V's your forests can be circles with a little line coming out of the bottom for the trunk you know farmland can just be a crisscross pattern you know maybe it's a little bit better to give extra care to some of the more special areas so like this wizard tower or the entrance to the the Dwarven city maybe you spend a little more time figuring out what those look like because they're gonna be places that your players are gonna want to explore so really this part of the process is all about taking the time to figure out how to draw stuff along not 100% on each little piece it's enough for me to feel confident jumping into starting to draw the actual map one thing I forgot about is how the roads and the rivers are going to interact with some of these pieces so if there is a river coming out of the mouth or a road leading through some of the forest I didn't really account for that in this key so I'm going back really quick right now and figuring that stuff out before we jump into the final map illustration alright I got a box with something very exciting in in it I haven't seen the full thing so this is gonna be a surprise but from the last Portobello City eight map making video this dude Justin reached out to me from Omni Studios and said I want to send you this surprise be very excited if I can see it a little bit dude this is yes so this is a wood engraved wood etched wood engraved version of my map of born Bella so I took the map that I made in the last video the how to draw a dandy city map sent it to him and he sent me this something they're in despair there's also this dude it's a leather map of poor Vella how crazy is that I don't even know how to talk about this really lasers lasers made the image on leather but dude this is sick so I wanted to show this one to shout out omni's Studios thank you so much for making this for me I'm gonna have all their info down in the description below go check them out they do this laser engraving laser cutting the new vinyl stickers and 3d printed stuff to think they're getting their shops set up but I'll have all of the info of their Instagram and stuff down below the other is that I wanted to show this is like an actual practical thing you can do with your maps so like I said in this last video and in this one it doesn't take a lot of drawing talent to make this stuff but you can make a fairly simple map I know this isn't simple looking but just like the hex map we're making it's fits all and really basic drawing just a lot in a condensed area and you can print it on wood or leather or make a big print out on paper and it is super impactful thing to show off to your players alright omni's studio check them out thank you so much and let's get back to making the hex man alright we have our reference map I don't know what to call this our planar paint-by-numbers version of the map we have our key that has all of the different terrain types figured out ready to draw now it's time to grab the third blank template and start illustrating your final hex map so I'm using a mechanical pencil with non-photo blue graphite lead little stick of pencil non-photo clue it's basically a light blue color that will disappear when you scan it in since I play online I know I'm gonna scan this map in to share with my players over the internet so this type of pencil is a little bit of a shortcut but you could always just use a regular pencil to fill out your map and then trace over it on a blank sheet of paper if you want to get rid of all of the blue lines and have no pencil marks anywhere if we're getting into the weeds a little bit with the process so here on out I'm just going to keep it simple I'm just drawing each piece one at a time and then we'll go back over an ink later okay so two things to notice as I'm penciling the first is when it comes to tracing over things with the pen I'm just gonna rough the areas in and trust that I'll be able to draw the trees and the roads and the hills and all that really easily straight and pen just because there's such simple shapes the second thing to notice is that wherever two hexes of the same terrain type meet I'm not worrying about the border I'm actually overlapping the border so if there is a mountain range or a forest multiple hexes are bumping up next to each other that contain that same mountain range and forests I'm just going to overlap them but anywhere that two hexes that have different terrain types meet each other you'll notice that my drawings don't cross over the border I'm leaving space so I can define the hexes on the map at the very end even though you can't see it because it's that non-photo blue i've penciled in all of the details of the hex map and now it's time for the final step inking so my initial thought was to use one of these faber-castell Pitt artist pens they're kind of my go-to for map making and I think instead I'm just going to use this 0.5 millimeter of ballpoint pen it's a little bit finer so I'm going to be able to get the details in some of the houses villages and stuff I should say the tools for this don't really matter I'm just letting you know what I use in case you're curious but really any black pen will look good all that said final step here we go inking time-lapse time [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the map is completely drawn there's only one last step and that is to add the gridlines of all the hexes so right now there's a bunch of terrain everywhere we need to divide it up so the players know how far things are from each other so if they want to leave from Portobello and travel up to this hole know how many days it'll take on foot and by horse or whatever mode of travel I choose speaking of this hole the weird weird one of the artists that really inspired me to try out this hex map thing is a person that goes by skull fungus I'll put their information down in the description below they draw awesome hex maps and isometric dungeon maps super cool stuff go check out their Instagram for lots of fun D&D map inspiration alright using the same pin just gonna jump in and make some little dash marks all around these hexes let's go [Music] [Music] all right hex map of port Vella and the surrounding wilderness is completed I think adding the final touch of the little dash lines all around the hexes really brings the whole map together it fills in some of the negative space and also makes it super practical for the party to use to judge distance really easily no more doing math trying to figure out exhaustion and miles horses all that no more I think the super important thing to remember about making a hex map like this is that it's not a topographic topographical top top of topographical it's not a topographical map it's not meant to show exactly what the terrain and landscape looks like it's just to give an indication so you as a dungeon master can fill in the details as your players explore hex by hex so yeah with just a little bit of planning and patience you can make a map like this the drawings aren't complicated you just have to take the time you don't just take the time to plan out your map by labeling each hex you have to take the time to make the key and figure out what your forests are gonna look like and what the mountains are gonna look like and if you have swamp or desert or whatever mountains can just be an upside-down be and trees can just be little circles with sticks on them and if you fill up the entire hex grid with that stuff it'll look really awesome let me know if you have any questions about this process down in the comments below also I'd love to hear what kind of how-to D&D stuff you'd like to see I've approached these videos based on the type of things I need to show my players I'm always learning and trying things to help get my players invested in the game if there's something like that that you're interested in getting my take on I would love to hear about it check out Omni studio and skull fungus in the description below thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one see ya [Music]

Channel: JP Coovert

Views: 99,732

Keywords: jp coovert, hex map, cartography, dungeons and dragons, dnd, d&d, dungeon drawing dudes, grid map, terrain, hand drawn, diy, illustration, pen and ink, map, ttrpg, hex grid, dungeon master, table top rpg, world building, how to

Id: Fwkfo97P1Cs

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019