How to Draw Your Own D&D Town Map!

in this video I'm gonna show you a really easy way to create an awesome-looking fantasy town map let's do it okay before I jump into the video I just want to say you know I spend a lot of my time coming up with imaginary worlds for my friends and I to be heroic in and after watching the murder of George Floyd and seeing the protests going on all over the country all over the world I've realized how important it is to stand up to injustice and fight hate in this world so I'm going to be spending more time listening learning donating acting and being better so I hope you'll join me in saying more often and loudly that black lives matter okay so let's talk about creating a fantasy town so the whole first chapter of the Dungeon Master's guide is all about creating your own world and I think creating a town a you know a small place you can fill it with NPCs and story really really easily so that's what I did I've looked through here and got some ideas so the first thing I did was try and come up with a reason that the town is there so found a little section about how some towns are governed by a group of elders and then it mentioned that the eldest group of people in a community would be elves or a dragon ooh a dragon that kind of rules over this area would be super cool so I thought typical fantasy village you know it's at the base of a mountain maybe it's in a in a valley next to a river this dragon has taken over this old fort and is now the the leader of this town and you know people go to the dragon to settle their disputes and the dragon protects you know the town and the surrounding farmlands in exchange for a tithe of some sort you know attacks maybe so that got me thinking what could this town give this dragon and for some reason my first thought went to Jurassic Park how the t-rex eats the goat so it's gonna have all the townspeople be goat herders and stuff but then I was like huh now that's that's too gruesome maybe this dragon is here in this particular area because this is the only place in the whole world that can grow these special apples so all of the farmland and stuff around our apple orchards the dragon protects the land from orcs and goblins in exchange for all he can eat apples so yeah that concept took about five minutes to come up with and that is enough to springboard all kind of possible quests that your players could go on actually I only spent five minutes coming up with a concept but then I spent probably thirty trying to come up with a cool name for the town and couldn't find anything I'd like so knowing that concept what I want you to do is leave a comment below of what should this town be called because I have no idea and I want to name it something cool okay so that's the first step coming up with a cool fun concept for your town now we can start actually planning things out all right so the next thing I did was make a list of all of the things that would be in a fantasy town so you know there's the typical stuff like a blacksmith a tavern or an inn stables maybe a general store then I started thinking about what other sort of things would be in a town that centers around growing apples you know there would probably be a cart right and a farrier just someone who like fixes up horseshoes I think maybe there is like a world-famous bakery in the town I wanted to have a fort that the dragon lived in maybe like an old kind of ruined fort and then there was also an old cemetery which will make sense in future videos so yeah just thinking a little bit further about what would make a town seem realistic what sort of shops and and buildings are gonna be in this kind of town for it all to make sense so making a list of everything that's gonna be in the town is gonna help with the next step which is figuring out how we're gonna draw all the buildings and the trees and the river all of the actual drawing of the map so let's get to it so if you've watched my previous map making videos you know that I never jump straight into drawing my nap I always make a key first so what I'm doing here is just figuring out how I want to draw each of the individual elements ahead of time so this is going to be an overhead map of a town so the buildings are just going to be the the roofs so drawing a rectangle with a line through it and maybe putting in a little chimney like you can just just make a town out of a bunch of those rectangle line chimney I'm doing a couple of variations just to mix things up so the buildings aren't all the same you know putting some awnings here and there and maybe some of the bigger buildings like the inn have a sort of Tower and I'm also spending the time to figure out how I want to draw this fort so I know it's not gonna be a crazy big castle or anything like that just something that is bigger than all of the buildings so it's got a couple of towers a ruins section where the dragon goes in and out and I was thinking that there would still be a big central room where the townspeople could come and meet with the dragon that would be like a separate location from where the dragon keeps its hoard of apples and gold and stuff so for the trees I'm just doing these little squiggly circles and adding in little details that kind of follow the circle around and then where there's gonna be a more forested area where it's not just standalone trees I'm sort of keeping that same size circle of the tree but then overlapping them and kind of breaking them up to make like a clump of trees instead of just individual squiggly circles and then for the apple orchards I'm just gonna do pretty much similar trees but put little dots in there to indicate apples and then I want them to all be lined up straight like they're you know the apple trees are planted in a in a straight line to indicate that it's an actual like farm or orchard and last is the river so I think it makes sense this town is next to a river especially if it's a farming area so I'm just drawing like a kind of squiggly outline indicating some water with some broken up lines on the inside going in a few rocks and little grass type textures in there too but the real trick to this is gonna come when I get an actual map which is right now let's get working on the actual actual map all right so the tools I'm going to be using our regular sheet of blank white paper I have a pencil and an eraser I'm using three different size micron or multiliner pins these are the faber-castell Pitt artist pins they're my favorite I have a size medium size fine and a size small and then the last tool that is 100% not necessary but I'm gonna give it a shot are some light and gray Copic markers that I'll tell you more about as we get into that later okay so I'm starting with my pencil and the sheet of paper and all I'm doing here is roughing out the major locations of the map so I know I'm gonna have this river that kind of runs along the southern side of the town the four is gonna be on a hill that's in the northwest part of the map and the apple orchards are gonna be in the south east across the river but really I just wanted this town to be almost like you know a single road that that runs along the river and I sort of wanted everything to meet in the middle of the map in this sort of like town square area as you can see I am super loosely blocking stuff in since I already figured out how I'm gonna draw everything on the key I'm not spending a bunch of time drawing everything out in pencil I'm just gonna go straight in to inking which is the next step okay so using the medium the biggest size pin I'm going to make an outline of the map you know so just drawing the edges of a piece of parchment or something like that so then I go in with the size F pen and start filling in the major areas so you know gotta get the river in there and then I lay out all of the buildings so you know these are really really simple to draw they're just rectangles you know with the peaks of the roofs indicated with lines I'll personally like to keep things real simple and straightforward and and not get too into like making little hatch marks and and shading and stuff but if you want to go crazy with it you should definitely go for it so one big thing is I'm not drawing in the road or the pathways yet because I want to make sure that all of the buildings get in there so that the paths can lead to the buildings and once the buildings are done then I start adding in the outlines of the trees sort of filling in the blank spaces of the map with the trees side note real quick I know I talk about this in all of my videos but I really really want to stress that even if you think you can't draw you can absolutely draw a map that looks just as good as this if not better honestly I'm just drawing rectangles with lines you know squiggly little circles and little patches of grass there's no fancy drawing here so yeah I just really really want to encourage you to give this a shot because there is nothing like throwing down a handmade map in front of your players I'm telling you it goes such a long way to get them invested in your game or maybe you just have a story you want a map to go along with I promise it promise I promise I promise you can do it just give it a shot so now that all the buildings are in all the trees are in the fort the river the bridge all figured out now I can go back in with the size small pin and start adding in details and actually this pin is running out of ink so I'm switching roles size six just a real simple gel pen and I'm crossing my fingers that when I get to the markers it doesn't bleed everywhere so with this smaller pen I'm doing the little lines of grass to sort of indicate where the hill goes up near the fort and up around the cemetery and then kind of down to the river everything in this town is a dirt or mud road so I'm not doing any like cobblestone texture or anything like that I'm just kind of breaking up the lines adding a little bit of grass patch marks here and there maybe a little rock every once in a while I'm being real loose with it and not very strict because it's meant to be an imperfect dirt road for the river I've added a few of these banks places where the earth meets the water and maybe more of a sharper angle hopefully just these sort of vertical lines kind of give it that sort of feel and then making it look like water but again having these sort of broken up lines along the edge of the river I don't know maybe there's a cooler way to draw water but hopefully it looks like a river I'm adding details to the tree just really loose broken up little hatch marks and I try to keep them going in a circle around the inside the tree not not perfectly around but just a little bit of texture to give these squiggly circles a little bit of rounded dimension all right once all of the details are filled in this is looking like a pretty complete map and you could absolutely stop here use this map to show your players but I'm gonna go one step further I'm gonna use these light gray Copic markers to get these buildings and trees really popping off the page so I am using cool grade number zero and cool gray number three so the number zero the lighter color I'm using on the pathway the roads I'm just using the brush tip I'm being really loose I'm not coloring in the lines super well so it's really important to me that this looks like a hand-drawn map and so I'm being fast and loose with the marker to sort of keep that feel going I'm also gonna use this light gray color to completely fill in all of the trees and the more northern and eastern parts of the roofs so that way when I move over to cool gray number three the darker color I can sort of give the buildings a little bit more dimension so the southwestern part of the roofs of the buildings are gonna get the darker shade of gray and I'm actually gonna use this darker color to the building's cast a little bit of a shadow so I'm like intentionally going outside of the lines on the left and bottom sides of all of the buildings and the trees as well so again really loose just using the brush tip to sort of create shadows in the left and bottom portions of the trees and the buildings so the places with the highest contrast are going to really pop off the map it's the same concept as using the thicker lines on the more important stuff like the buildings to have them stand out more than the smaller lines of the details like the grass and stuff so I'm coloring in the river with the dark gray to differentiate it from the roads and pathways which are the lighter Gray's you know now that I think about it it probably would have been a good idea to test these markers out on the key if you're watching along and you want to try out these these gray Copic markers you know do a few tests on your key or on a separate sheet of paper and figure out how you're gonna render everything first before jumping on to your already completely drawn out already looking awesome town map and that pretty much covers everything I think I've got myself a pretty cool-looking fantasy town map [Music] all right so I am really happy with how this map came out if you have any questions about the process leave me a comment below I look at all the comments and love talking to you down there please hit me with some names for this town I'm so I'm the worst it coming up with names so I think this is a fun concept for a town and be really cool to have an awesome name to go along with it alright my dudes thank you so much for watching I hope you're hanging in there and I'll see you in the next one so yup [Music]

Channel: JP Coovert

Views: 108,358

Keywords: D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Town Map, Village Map, World Map, Overhead Map, ttrpg, jp coovert, cartography, world building, pathfinder, fantasy, medieval, map, faber castell, pitt artist pen, gelly roll pen, copic marker, diy

Id: YLrR8Oh3vrc

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020