How To Make A Fantasy City Map In Minutes!

oh I want to make a map of a fantasy City but I want to do it as quickly as possible so check this out I'm using the word dragons or actually the letters in the word dragons to figure out the layout of the streets in this city so I've got my big posca marker and just a regular sheet of white paper and I'm writing out the word dragons but I'm varying the size of each letter and I'm mixing up the orientation you know kind of rotating the letters so they overlap and build out this map of these city streets the word dragons doesn't matter at all you can use whatever word you want I'm just I like dragons so I'm using dragons now I could add more words or or letters to make the map a little bit bigger but I'm just gonna add a few extra lines here and there to kind of city five this street map but the cool thing about this process is that by using the word and the letters in the word you kind of get out of your head about planning a realistic looking City layout and what's really cool is that in a matter of minutes like a minute you have a realistic or at least believable layout for a city so I just got this new book by Andrew Kolb called Oz fantasy role-playing setting and there's this one little section of the book among many many many helpful sections that describes this method of very very quickly coming up with the city streets of a section of Oz so this this book is a setting book it's like a point Crawl Through The Emerald City and it has all kinds of wonderful tools like this to help you run a game inside the city of course there are a ton of great characters magic items Maps random tables it's just a really lovely book that has a great tone and it's full of excellent ideas like this map drawing technique that are useful even if you aren't running a d d game inside The Wizard of Oz world so quite satisfied with just coming up with the city streets of this random fantasy City so I'm going to take this one step further or maybe maybe a couple steps further so I'm going to use my light box and my posca markers and for this process you don't need pasta markers specifically that's just what I'm using you can use colored pencils or even crayons whatever you have and I'm going to be filling in the spaces in between the city streets kind of like solid blocks of color that represent the city blocks and the reason I'm using the light box is because I want to see where the streets are that I've already planned out with the word dragons but I want to leave those spaces blank on this actual drawing so the the streets will actually be the white of the paper in between all these city blocks of color originally I was just going to use one color but then I thought let's make this a little more vibrant and interesting and use multiple colors and that got me thinking oh each color could be its own District of this city and I started to imagine some sort of turf war going on like in the Oz book each area could be controlled by a powerful wizard or a famous person of influence now I'm just drawing a city I don't know what the city is called I don't know what's actually going on in these different districts but maybe you have some ideas so if you can think of a cool name for the city and what each of these districts are all about leave them down in the comments I'd love to hear your ideas once these blocks are all in I'm gonna put a gray border around the whole thing to represent the walls of the city I'm putting round circles for the towers that go at all the important parts there's two towers that'll be the gates of Where the streets exit the city and you know anywhere there's a major corner just keeping it simple with circles and lines now we could stop there this would work perfectly as a map to hand your players and let them fill out the sections as they explore the city but of course I wanted to go one step further again and using a smaller 0.7 millimeter black pasta pen I'm gonna add some buildings to this city map so I'm keeping it really simple just just triangles and lines and little Arch doorways and the fun thing about this process is I'm mixing up the different styles of buildings for each district so the coral color gets pointy towers and the green color gets real blocky type buildings and blue are buildings that are all stacked up and piled on top of each other and I don't know maybe this says something about the types of factions in each of these areas and you know I imagine this city to be really big in each of these blocks has way more buildings than I'm illustrating here but the idea is that each of these buildings I'm drawing maybe represents one of the important places that the players might want to explore in each district or each block so yeah I hope seeing this process gives you the confidence to try and make your own city map it's a lot of fun doing this stuff and I was really really surprised at how quickly this all came together I spent less than an hour on this drawing and I could totally build out an entire DND campaign from just this one map if you if you'd like to see the type of Adventures that I make or you'd like to support the channel and help me make more videos check out my patreon it's linked down in the description this month I'm working on a book full of encounters that the players might come across on a lonely dark Road that's maybe heading towards this fantasy City let me know what you think of this map down in the comments what should I call the city what are each of these districts all about thank you so so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one see ya [Music]

Channel: JP Coovert

Views: 40,617

Keywords: how to, draw, create, make, city map, fantasy city, easy, tutorial, dungeons and dragons, d&d, posca marker, ttrpg, tabletop role playing game, cartography, simple, medieval city

Id: a2F7WXLcd6s

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 06 2022