How to Make a Map that Makes Sense || D&D & Dael Kingsmill

go get a pencil go get a sheet of paper or a notebook sit down we're gonna make this a pub draw draw with me if you're feeling especially daring try not to copy exactly what I do try to just make your own thing all right hello humans my name is Dale Kingsmill I'm getting a lot of questions about drawing maps just a little odd because I'm not the map drawing DND person that's WASD 20 or questing beast if you look in facilities check them both out super dope but I suppose I do have some tips I do draw my own maps and I guess I might be like that that more approachable ground of like my maps look pretty good but also I'm not like a cartographer and artiste so I know if people are interested I'm gonna show you how I do a map a continental map we might do another one on city maps this one doesn't have any crass acronyms for you to use I'm very sorry so first thing I like to draw my maps on on lined paper to begin with in pencil because that communicates to my brain that you know it's no big deal we're just drafting something where's my pencil going oh I was sitting on it this says do your best or don't whatever and that's the attitude I want you to take into this with me this is my high-tech setup that I have going I'm gonna point this generally in the direction of the paper and we're gonna hope for the best got all my important equipment I have a pencil I have an eraser shaped like a lemon and I have a pencil shop nut shaped like r2d2 you've probably already heard of this method but I mean it's worth mentioning if you haven't yet jib bag of dice and you pull them onto the page like so and then you trace around them and you make a map out of what they're done then you this is a nightmare and you trace around it and it gives you an uneven coastline which is a thing that people seem to struggle with alright and here's one of those that I prefer that I preferred that I prepared oh yeah there's mine there's my diced prepped map I think it's a good system for making Islands I don't where by it I don't tend to use it but it's worth hearing about if you haven't heard about it notice dramatic ism I'm about to make it sound but it's just the tips I'm going to be giving you throughout this are things that are so obvious once someone points the map and it's stuff that you definitely already know but you're not necessarily thinking of while you're drawing your map there are a couple of things that are like the big rules that I think you need to know about and those basically come down to plate tectonics yes we're getting into that stuff and gravity these are the two things you need to really remember while you're making a map and once they're pointed out to you you go all the way yeah that totally makes sense right so now here we go I'm going to just sort of rough a quick outline here and hope that I'm pointing the camera in the right direction I'm gonna make a continent just a half of a continent I'm gonna make it pointing this direction I think because I think we have a tendency in the early days of making maps to just make an island because it feels complete that's perfectly legit you can make yours in island but for me I love a good continent and especially because a continent tends to lend itself to if you need to change the location if you need to go somewhere more exotic a continent tends to be really good for that because it's not gonna be tricky to travel necessarily or you can make it as tricky as you want to travel but I think it's a good way to start to do just sort of a nation's worth of a map and when I say a nation I don't necessarily mean that this is all just one Kingdom or whatever but I am talking about there's a documentary that I saw once there was about horses and impact on human civilization and the thing that stayed in my head with that was the idea that an empire could only be as large as it took two weeks to travel so when people weren't domesticated horses or there weren't horses in certain locations humans could only have pretty small kingdoms because they could only travel by foot and you can you can't travel this far by foot so the kingdoms were only you know so big but then once we got horses the kingdoms got bigger once we got naval developments the kingdoms got bigger or empires or what-have-you and the idea was that you could only effectively sustain an empire of that size because you would need to get a message to the capital that there was you know strife on the border or what-have-you things like that so you had to be able to get messages to and from pretty quickly and then of course they can be broken down after that they can beat old kingdoms that are no more now my hair is getting in the way okay so if I can get this to focus up a little bit some pro tips for people who don't draw very often these are more things that are gonna seem obvious but when I watch people draw who don't draw very often I tend to notice two things either they press quite hard with the pencil which is a problem because then if they go to erase anything it's it's like embedded into the page there's an indent in the page or I see people sketching and there's kind of a tendency we all do it when we're first sort of enamored with the idea of sketching we do this thing where we draw lots of tiny little lines over and over and we think that that's what sketching is that's not sketching what you want to do with sketching is sort of trust your hand and just make big ox and let it be loose and let it be messy and then you just draw over it once you've kind of figured out what you're going with you don't want any lines to be particularly solid or straight or anything like that that's not how coastlines tend to work so I don't know all right there we go that's a coastline oh my gosh I'm I'm terrible at pointing this oh I'm so sorry so that's step one draw a messy coastline make sure that it kind of ins and outs if you're struggling with it for a bunch of days on the page and just sort of trace around them the next thing is mountains here's where the plate tectonics come in because if you look at a lot of mountain ranges and the outlines of tectonic plates you will see that a lot of coastlines are formed by the edges of tectonic plates it's where we've all we all know the thing the tectonic plates come together and they push together or one goes under the underneath the other and you end up with volcanoes you end up the mountain ranges that's how we get these things so a lot of the time when you're putting a mountain range in your map on your continent you're going to probably want it to be coastal this isn't a hard and fast rule they don't all have to be coastal but a good element of what makes a coastline is often mountainous terrain even if it isn't a mountain by the time you add in water and gravity and you're gonna you're gonna sort of want a mountain range happening I think this looks like a good line see how this comes in here because we have as my as my camera because we have this sort of Bay happening and then this comes in the other direction and then sticks out here that is a particularly good line for a mountain range to take it to be the edge of it of a tectonic plate you see that by the way I'm not saying that you need to work out all the tectonic plates of your world it's just good to be informed by that information trust me when I was when I was younger I tried to like design this the tectonic plates first and then builds the continents out of that and it it just doesn't work unless you are a geologist I assume so of course if you're looking at this you could have you could have put yours elsewhere here's another good line you could have taken with it you've got this sticky-outy bit that wouldn't have been a bad one at all you could have a an island chain coming off here actually that would be pretty neat do I want to do that instead I might want to do that instead guys kind of like that line I'm gonna I'm gonna put a little mem I'm gonna put a little island chain coming up here because actually what noting that's what a lot of island chains are and why a lot of island chains are volcanic it's because those mountains or the equivalent of mountain ranges they just happen to be under the water does that make sense I'm just pointing it totally in the wrong direction I'm so sorry yeah that's kind of cool yeah so if you look at for example between Russia and Alaska there's a really specific line taken in the island chain that runs between those two and that's because that's at the top of the Pacific tectonic plate that's the line that it follows and so there's a chain of islands that are just the tops of what would be mountains if there wasn't Mordor same with Indonesia that's the edge of tectonic plate New Zealand is entirely mountains that come from the edge of tectonic plate so that's where we get a lot of those I kind of like that I wish it was a little bit more uneven so this is what you know this is what we're doing with this you're just sort of trial and error aim don't feel afraid to change stuff after you've done it [Music] because I feel like that that looked a little too even for my liking I'm a big fan of asymmetry what if we make this one a little bit more of a hook shape yeah maybe stick a couple of these islands out here and then we can have a bit of a break before we get more islands how about that yes that's pretty cool I like that [Music] yeah that's not bad I wish a little bit that it was further from the coast so I'm actually going to move the coastline in you don't see I want that same shape basically but see see how I'm trying to weight it down this direction a little bit just to provide a little bit more asymmetry I'm going to take away this lump see what I've done here see how I've pressed a little too hard and then you end up with these dark lines because it was super confident I liked it a lot I was like yes look it in Eddy and then now I'm erasing it it's a little bit more problematic so yeah I like that I like that that's cool that's cool little string of islands you got some interest to our coastline check it out we're doing mountains here we go Oh WASD 20 has the coolest tips on drawing mountains for your map like in terms of what the key is for them I just do little Lulu peaky little peaky Peaks would be cool if this mountain range gets a bit broader down here and then they can sort of fade off into more hill country at the top all right cool we've got some mountains happening over there do I want more mountains I might I might make this Coast over here mountainous - I was considering it and then I was unconsidered it but I think I'm back to liking it again okay now this is a big fat continent we should probably have some water happening inland whether it's an inland sea whether it's a leg things like that let's um stick a cool lake in here somewhere how about don't we do that now what's going on with Lakes it's similar thing it to when we're doing the coastline you just want it to be sort of uneven doing it's whatever's so with a lake where you get these extra pointed bit that tends to be where a river connects to the lake and feeds into it two seconds I need my both hands to erase this momentarily I didn't quite like the look of that I didn't unlike the look at that but it's ending up a little bit more again even than I necessarily wanted to maybe it's just because I need this one to point the other direction that could be it there we go that's more like it that's more like it because the dealio with lakes and rivers is and this is gonna be really obvious the minute I say it but some of you may not realize water obeys gravity I think the big trick when we're making up mats just from our head for the sake of fantasy is that we tend to look at rivers we sort of think of them as like they come from the sea and then they branch out like veins into the into the wilderness or whatever you know we think of them like like like we use words that describe them like trees branching out or we think of them like veins that we see in ourselves and it makes sense but the language of it means that we think of them as coming from the sea inland and spreading out rather than the truth which is that water tends to start in mountainous areas high-altitude areas square it has rained and then they travel downhill and water tends to flow downhill it tends to flow together and it flows towards the sea which is something we all know but when we're drawing Maps it's not the thing that we're thinking about you know so like we we tend to see you know people will draw map and then they'll go and the river from here and it goes all down into this place and goes to the legs little Bluff that's not really there's not how it would work so what should be happening is the mountains here would probably be a leading rivers directly into the water at these inlets now having a lake out here it means that this is part of a big old basin because the water has to travel downhill but that makes sense because we've got this big ol ring a mountains sort of around the coast so the water that gets to the other side of these mountains is unlikely to you know climb up the mountain to get over to go straight to the sea no it's gonna go the other direction where the ground is lower because the tectonic plates have pushed upwards you see it you see how it all kind of fits together so the water from here is going to drain down from these mountains see if I can remember to use the freaking camera it's gonna travel down it's gonna end up in here dump it out see how it flows together and flows into the lake this branch of the river gonna be a similar thing let's say that it hits some some tricky ground so it kind of it it detours itself keep in mind when you're doing this that rivers will take the path of least resistance around stuff but they do kind of morph the geography around them so they will end up windy that means that this is probably also mountainous if we've got the river coming from here so let's do that that bow cool nice great we've got some major rivers happening and then they probably empty to the south that makes sense doesn't it see how messy this map is like you don't you don't got to worry about it looking neat don't worry about it looking neat this here probably means that there are small mountains northward maybe it's just talking about the high altitude up the hills that we got from this mountain range is it sort of petered out sorry you know these these this river maybe has an easier time coming up there or maybe you don't maybe you don't want that river I feel like we've got a lot of rivers happening so I'm gonna actually get rid of this dot about traumatic change what we do there because we can't we'll sort of leave it pointy because that indicates that there's a river emptying and what we can do is give it sort of a different little um fatty poverty that can be sort of a rough edge and keep in mind the distance of this map so this is a pretty huge area so that that lake is massive already those two things to keep in mind give you so much sort of reality to your map in terms of you've got your mountains they're formed by plate tectonics that often forms the coastline of a country cuz again water follows gravity it just comes together that's what coastlines are the combination of water following gravity it eventually leads to the ocean right because that's down and coastlines are often formed with the edges of tectonic plates because that's pushing the ground up above the water line so this is the kind of thing that you can start to end up with but that doesn't give you everything that you might want on a map so how do these things affect the rest of the kind of terrains are you gonna end up with let's briefly touch on that shall we so for starters we got coasts coasts are all gonna be pretty you know straight food but you might just want to sketch in your your beaches here you want sandy beaches they're probably gonna form in bays like this and you just kind of do a smooth a connection between whatever has happened in your rough coastlines because the rough coastlines a kind of where the rocks and stuff the maybe make that stretch yeah does that stretch it out does that stretch out into a bigger beach that could be cool this is gonna be a neat little Bay here yeah over here that could be cool have a little like rocky mountainous edge but down here there's a nice little sandy alcove cool up here this one's gonna be actually this one's gonna be tricky because it's between so many mountainous regions I probably wouldn't make that one um particularly sandy make it more craggy cliff II kind of stuff you might want a desert I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that you don't just plunk the desert down anywhere clunking a desert down tends to make it look unnatural which is what we're trying to avoid here so what causes a desert well some fun facts about deserts for you I have learned that apparently deserts tend to be on the western sides of continents something to do with air currents I don't fully understand you can follow that if you would like to go oh well with the desert in the West then because it will like ping in people's brains is realistic that's a fair call but also it's a fantasy map and you don't have to if you don't want to I just thought it would be fun for you to know what else causes deserts I will tell you the two biggest ones that I think are useful for making a fantasy map what's called a rain shadow this is where you get sections of mountain this isn't the best map for it because we've you know organized it a bit differently but for example if if we ignore all this River business basically a rain shadow is caused when you know how we get rain on coastlines because sort of the heavy water Laden clouds and air come in and they sort of try to move up the mountain and as they try to move up the mountain they drop all that rain and all the rain goes on that side of the mountain and flows down between the Matt limousine we've all seen those diagrams when we were in third grade right so what happens is all those water Lakeland clouds get to the mountain range and they've dropped all of their water before they get to the other side of the mountain so maybe the mountains are too tall maybe the air is fairly dry so it doesn't have that much rain to give up but basically what it leads to is that one side of mountain range gets all of the all of the rainfall it gets lush growing first and whatever and the other side of the mountain is left with nothing but dry air and it you end up with deserts on one side of a mountain range while the other side is all lush and lovely the other kind is when you do get rainfall on the mountains and it's coming in different directions or in high-altitude snow on the mountains which melts and becomes rivers during the springtime and those rivers end up feeding all of the land away from the mountains right so this this would be fairly sort of thriving ground because there would be quite a lot of water coming from these mountains but the tricky thing is that at a certain point after lots of flat ground and you're gonna run out of water so for example the Rockies water from snow fall on the Rockies in the United States that snow ends up being most of the water that goes to Nevada and Utah and New Mexico and even California and basically Utah gets tons of the water but then by the time it gets to Nevada and by the time it gets to New Mexico there's less water and by the time it gets to California there's even less and so that can contribute to very arid regions so you can already see how you would place it as if you were drawing a bigger map down around here you could you could put desert all up in this space that we haven't got because you know the water is all traveling away from it so you end up with an arid region up here it could I don't think I will be putting a desert on this map personally don't feel like you have to include every type of dramatic terrain on your map that becomes super cluttered and gets hard to sort of comprehend entirely and again it doesn't look that's realistic what I am gonna put up here is grassland grasslands can be a brilliant stepping stone between regions to make the terrain seem to naturally flow so if you would go from Mountain to grassland to desert that would be following that thing like I was just talking about with with the Rockies feeding into Nevada right you would have grassland for Utah followed by Nevada desert swampland now here's how swampland works as far as fantasy is concerned swamps basically come in two kinds you have your swamps the kind with trees and you have your marshes the kind with like grass mostly The Devil's Bayou the Dead Marshes you got I'm saying now wetlands happen when there's a lot of water coming in to an environment but there's not really an adequate drainage method for getting the water out again sound super obvious but you're not necessarily thinking about it when you're plunking uh swamp onto your map swamp swamps the kinds with trees more likely to happen sort of growing around rivers so they will often happen because there's tons of rainfall or lots and lots of water coming in around a river so the river is overflowing and you end up with kind of like a main current but then the rest of it is also covered in water versus a marsh is more likely to happen around sort of Lakey areas it tends to be flatter terrain so there's no clear path for the water to take out if for example there was source of water continuously pouring into a prairie that prairie would become the marsh because it's just it's just tons of land with no specific gravity can't do its thing it can't form the river because it's all just flat so now remember that this is water coming from these mountains down this direction it would be very possible for this area here to become swampy swampland see that you could suggest that there was just tons of rainfall in this area and this is the main line that the river takes but all of this space around it could easily become just overgrown with overflowing edges to rivers Billabong is that sort of a thing to the point where it just becomes one big Bayou up here where we've put grasslands alternatively you could turn this into a mush instead of grassland you could say that there's heaps of water coming in here from the mountains but that this is also super flat country that can't like get rid of it really easily and make all of this Marsh eat up here again you can see how grassland becomes the middle point between a marsh and you know you go mush grassland then there's forests and human settlements Arctic and put Arctic regions where you want it to be cold quite frankly there's a lot of fancy stuff that you can get into in terms of like do you want it to be cold in the north or the south or even the east where are your poles so if you want to play around with that go for broke have fun just make it cold where you want it to be cold remember that high altitudes tend to get more snow so the mountains are probably gonna be so no er if they're Mountain Mountains for me personally I like to stick to cold in the north because of the shorthand that it provides because fantasy is I mean basically born of Tolkien right we have this sort of medieval Europe analog going on with most fantasy settings and as a result we associate north with cold in fantasy and while that is absolutely not an essential point of any fantasy world I think it is handy to have those short hands because it means that people can your players can just assume they will look at this map and they will go like oh yeah it's snowy in the north that makes sense even here in Australia where the North is tropical rainforests and you're gonna die from the heat Queensland we still look at a fantasy map and we kind of assumed to see cold north and forests as superfreak easy because back in the day we had Forrest's sort of everywhere trees are real good at growing you guys so I would go so far as like the farts are gonna grow around the rim is that you've got you know you're gonna grow around the lake I would go so far as to probably make most of this forested plus forest the other thing with them is that they grow on other stuff so they grow in a swamp and they grow on mountains and things like that so you know it's it's not something to stress yourself out about too much might make this one huge forested region sort of growing up to the edges of this lake that would be cool far as far as forests again just sort of squiggles to indicate that there are leaves here they're just slightly more rounded than the mountains were make sure that you get them in different sizes though cause otherwise it starts to look like I don't know not good there's one huge forest I'm going to put another forest here that will be slightly smaller [Music] neat chunks of forest here and there all over the place this is where it gets to be more you know swampy here now down so this is more forest e that's more swampy and the borderline between them is kind of blurry you don't know I think to indicate the difference between a swamp and a forest you just make the lines a little bit more tangled make them longer make them yeah see that then up here you get more forest again in her a first two trees on the mountain mm maybe some coastal forest down here cool great you know we could say that this gets to be sort of them savanna getting a little bit more arid here in between because all the water here is is getting sucked into this flat swamp area right and all the water from the lake is draining out around the edges here so this would be much much more grassy and then this would get sort of a little bit drier and drier and drier as it gets further away from sort of that space touch on human settlements and where we tend to set up shop this is of course only speaking of permanent summons and to put an island there I like it let's give it an island maybe another tiny little one here yeah good I would simplify it to probably humans set up towns where there are resources that they can use for survival cities where they can set up major places of trade easily fortresses where things are super defensible and major like hubs of civilization where you get combinations of those where you can enable trade and there are resources and you can defend it really easily those are where like the big capital places end up right human roads order follows gravity and takes the path of least resistance humans take the laziest path they will take straight lines where they can but they would rather go downhill will stay on flat ground from and take a straight line over hill you know what I mean so often human roads will follow rivers now if you wanted to divide up into kingdoms you would divide along river lines mountain lines those are the major things that divide nations because they form natural borders they're more easily defensible in terms of a war and you can sort of hold the line in those places that's how I drew a map after this just to show you very briefly because everyone asks what program I use there are tons of great programs that people have mentioned to me in the past everyone constantly recommends in carnate everyone has seen Matt Colville do his hex Agra format those are great programs but when people ask me what I use I use a pencil and paper and then I use Photoshop I'm sorry but it's the truth but I'm gonna show you what you can do if you want to do it this way [Music] color it all and got you sketch underneath you end up with something looking like this and people like ooh la la that's a fancy what program did you use and you say I didn't I used my hands and a pencil hopefully you found some of that useful hit me up on Twitter showing me the maps that you drew if you drew maps with me I want to see what you got did you include a desert is it in our rain shadow let me know this is gonna be held to wet it a from that I do believe that's it I'm done email this to your grandma and I will see you some other time oh good I'm hiding you can't see me you [Music] this is why when you asked me to start a stream where I played the indeed this is I'm not lying when I say I don't have this setup

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 49,773

Rating: 4.9838781 out of 5

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek & Sundry, Geek & Sundry Vlogs, Geek and Sundry, Geek and Sundry Vlogs, Geek, nerd, australian, australia, vlogger, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dael, Kingsmill, Dale, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, story time, funny, d&d, dnd, dungeons and dragons, map, draw, drawing, guide, tips, how to, realistic, fantasy, program, pub draw

Id: ur5MIPDicko

Length: 31min 54sec (1914 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019