How to Draw Your Own D&D City Map!!!

I want to show you how easy it is to draw a Dungeons & Dragons city map yeah all right I've been running in D&D a campaign set in a home-brewed city and for four sessions now my players have been running around the city with no map we're done with that you guys need some sort of reference of what I'm talking about it's time to draw Portobello my city so I got to planning and thinking about how I wanted this to look and I realized drawing like an overhead city map is really not that hard you're only using lines and basic shapes and really just drawing little symbols over and over again and you're going to end up with this super cool looking map an amazing visual to give to your players and it's really really easy to do it just takes a little bit of planning and a little bit of time so with that let's jump in and I'll show you how to plan everything out all right so I'm over here at my drawing desk but before we get into the actual drawing you got to make a list of all the major landmarks in your town so I know my city is built around this Harbor so there's docks there's a market there's guild headquarters there's a temple there's a magic school all these different places that I know I want the players to visit make a list of all of them so you know ahead of time what you absolutely must draw on the map okay all right the first actual drawing step and why this whole process is gonna be so very easy is to plan out the we'll call them icons the simple shapes that are going to indicate the more complex ideas of a man so on a map you have buildings you have trees walls all of the elements that make up a city you're going to figure it out how you want to draw it now so I'm taking this sort of overhead kind of symbol heavy map idea so it's it's not a realistic map we're not drawing actual buildings in perspective we're just indicating them with these simple rectangular and then trees I'm not drawing tree trunks and branches and leaves I'm just doing these little squiggles with dots and that is going to indicate the trees that are spread out through the city you know so I'm making this list this key that explains what each element of the map is so once I do start drawing on the map it's gonna be very easy to just knock everything out because I already know how to draw everything there's not going to be any figuring out how rubes are supposed to look or how to render grass and water it's all up front here and by having this separate sheet of paper with my list of key locations and my key on how to draw each individual element I'm going to be able to knock this out way faster than if I was to be planning it while I was drawing all right we have our list of locations we have our key now it is time to actually start drawing for this map I'm not using anything fancy I have just a regular sheet of paper pencil and just a standard ink pen not one of those kind of crappy ballpoint pens that I mean I guess technically this is a ballpoint pen you know the the ones that you draw a line and it already looks kind of faded you need a pen that has solid black ink so I'm just using this you know ball nothing fancy no crazy art supplies needed for this all right we're gonna start planning with just pencil and paper here for this first real drawing step we're just we're keeping it real loose feel free to erase and change and do whatever you need to do to make the map feel right for you but also kind of realistic too so we're gonna start with the actual terrain before the city is even built what does the landscape look like so my city port Vella obviously it's a port city it's built around this Harbor that was created by a meteorite strike so that's why I'm starting with this giant circle and that's going to be a big body of water the coastline kind of runs off the left side of the map I have two forests that are going to run off the top right and bottom right of the map other than that the geography of this place is really flat so there's not much actual terrain to do besides the harbor and the little islands and stuff so once you have the terrain figured out then you can jump in and start adding some of your key locations and think about what a city is built around so I'm starting with the docks and the harbor and right off the docks is this big kind of like open-air market so that's what this circle in the middle of the map is and then the main roads are leading out from that market my city has walls but it is also outgrown outside of the walls so I have kind of like an inner city and an outer city and then just blocking in some of the bigger locations that you wrote down at the beginning so as you can see this is super rough everything is gonna get a race so it's not a big deal to be messy with it the important thing is to get your geography laid out and some of your bigger main locations alright so the next step in this process is to start drawing roads so if you look at any map roads are what's labeled as how people travel around cities and it's what all buildings are built off of so these roads are going to be our guide to laying out all of the many buildings in the city so you might have noticed that on the key I didn't make an icon for roads and that's because technically once we get into this we aren't going to be drawing any roads we're gonna be filling in all of the spaces in between the roads and then the negative space will create the roads moving throughout the city so you can see because we've laid out the topography of this area and some of the main features of the city so for me the docks the walls and the central like marketplace are kind of the main landmarks so most of the main roads are going to lead to those places or follow along the walls around the city stuff like that now because port Vella is this kind of unplanned city you know there's no monarch there's no real like ruling government I want it to feel like it's sort of built up and just kind built on top of each other there's no grid I want to put a lot of like diagonal roads just kind of lead to know where they were built that way because they had to go around something maybe and you know hopefully even though it's chaotic and busy it still makes a little bit of logical sense you can also see that I'm erasing you know stuff doesn't look right just erase it try it again and really now that we have all of our roads planned out we have all of our major locations figured out where they're gonna go it's time to start inking it's time to start finishing this drawing and now and this is when it all starts to come together kind of start drawing a bunch of buildings now or inky take your pins start drawing rectangles all over the place it's time to just draw a bunch of buildings make them go up against the lines you've made for the roads and you know just start doing them in go crazy make little alleyways and side streets and have gaps every once in a while and the further out from the city we go I like to spread the houses out a little more the roads start to feel less worn if there's a particular place of interest maybe give it a little bit more attention and build it up a little bit this part is gonna take a long time and it's best if you just go Zen mode just start crankin rectangles don't get impatient with it and just remember that this part is really fun because you get to see your map kind of come alive all right I'm gonna keep cranking out these buildings I'll see you on the other side [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so we made it past the sort of mind-numbing building stage of the city map the only thing left to do is to fill in all the extra little details I'm going to share with you a little artistic secret so you can fill up a sheet of paper or whatever you're drawing on was really simple drawings just by filling it up you make it complex and interesting and fun to look at so on this map I think the most complicated thing I'm drawing is probably the the little ships and anybody could draw though nothing I'm drawing here is complicated but this map looks complicated and hard to make because I filled it up with so much stuff but it's really not you've seen the process just takes a little bit of planning a little bit of time to fill everything in and by the end of it you're gonna have an awesome complex super fun to look at practical to use city map [Music] yes I finally have a map of port Vella to share with my players as they're running around the streets getting into trouble doing cool stuff this is going to be a great resource for them to use in the game and I hope that this video has showed how easy it is to make something like this for your players all it takes is spending a little bit of time on it I promise your players will go nuts about having a map that they can fold and that's super rewarding or you know maybe it's not your players maybe you make it for your DM or the rest of your group or whatever I just love making stuff for my dandy games it's so rewarding and fun and I hope you do it as well thank you so much for watching if you have any questions about the process leave them in the comments below let me know if there's any other creating for D&D videos you would like to see we've done the dungeon map we've done the city map maybe next is a world map or probably like a region map and then do a world map I don't know we'll see so let me know what you think thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: JP Coovert

Views: 392,901

Keywords: D&D, DnD, Dungeons and Dragons, Map, Cartography, city, town, village, draw, drawing, hand drawn, illustration, black and white, classic, old school, pathfinder, rpg, ttrpg, table top, role playing game, diy, jp coovert, port vela, campaign, custom art

Id: 63DZ7nLpSDE

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 15 2019