Are we just making world maps because it’s
tradition to, or can we design them in a way that they actually add something to our games?
Today, we’re talking about the one type of map that your players are going to spend the
most time staring at. Let’s get started. There’s a lot of videos out there which will
tell you how you can make a map as realistic as possible. They’ll tell you that only one
side of your mountains should have trees, that sea currents depend on latitude, and
that your children will spit on your grave if you ever have a river that splits in half.
This is all solid advice mind you, but if you’ve watched some of my other videos, you’ll
have probably picked up that for me, at least, when it comes to maps, form follows function.
And all of this advice about realism is about the form of your map - but there’s a reason you’re
making the map realistic in the first place. In this case, you’re creating verisimilitude
because if your world follows a consistent internal logic, then it’s easier for your
players to get themselves immersed in the story. And by doing that, you’re
making a promise to your players: that their actions and decisions matter,
and will have an impact on this world, this realistic place, that they’re
living in for 2 to 4 hours a week. We do a lot to get our players immersed in the
story. For example, if you have a parchment-style map, it immediately tells your players "this is
a fantasy world". And you can adapt this to all kinds of settings: for example, the Banner Saga
also has a parchment map, but it has a typeface which looks like nordic runes. Cyberpunk 2077
has a holographic map of the futuristic city, and Planescape Torment has a map sewn together
from pieces of flailed, tattooed skin. Hmm... But immersion is only one function a world map
can serve. And a good map can do a whole lot more for you than just this.
So let’s take a step back, forget about realism for a second, and I swear
it’s not just because some other youtubers have already talked about that more good-like
than this stupid little flying eyeball ever could, and instead we're gonna focus this
video on other aspects of your world map. And, full disclaimer, we’re about to go over
things that might feel like the absolute basics. But I think these are the kinds of basics we
tend to take for granted, and then we forget to actually think about them. And then we regret it
6 months later. I know I did... Multiple times... So my hope with this video is less to teach
you anything new and huh… game changing? And more to make you think, and get you to
ask yourself the type of questions you might otherwise skip over.
Starting with… Map markers. Map markers are all of these little annotations
you see on world maps. And they might seem innocuous, but there’s actually a lot of thought
that goes into how to annotate a world map well. First, how many map markers should your
world map have? If we take a look at the official map for D&D’s official setting, there’s
approximately 447 of those map markers here. This is a lot. For comparison, Skyrim,
a game notorious for how you probably still have yet to visit about half of the
map after making fifteen stealth archers, has 338 map markers. That’s 25% less than D&D, a much slower paced game where exploring just 10
locations will probably take you about two years. Which gives me an excuse to talk
about probably one of the nerdiest game design concepts I’ll probably ever get to
mention on this channel: the Freedom Fallacy. It’s a theory coined by behavioral scientist
Scott Rigby, which goes a bit something like this: even though people tend to think of freedom
and autonomy as mostly the same thing, there’s an important difference between the two. Freedom is the ability to do whatever you want.
Autonomy is the state of wanting to do things. Games are an interactive medium, so we need
the players to experience autonomy. We need them to want to do things within the game.
But freedom doesn’t actually add any value to the game if that game doesn’t give
the players autonomy in the first place. It can be tempting to just put
this map in front of your players, and proudly tell them “you are free to go
wherever you want”, but until your give your players a reason to care about any of these
447 map markers, they might as well not exist as far as your players are concerned, and to
them, this is what your world map looks like. But, let’s face it, worldbuilding is fun, and
me telling you not to put too much stuff on your map and not overwhelm your players
is probably not going to stop your from spending an entire weekend coming up with lore
which you swear will become relevant someday. So, that brings me to the
second aspect of map markers. When should you reveal a map marker?
What the official map invites you to do is to just kind of just reveal all of its -way too
many- map markers at the start of your campaign. The game kind of assumes your players have read
a bunch of novels set in the Forgotten Realms, and that you’ll know exactly what a Luskan is.
So, one option is to reveal a map marker during session zero. But this is something that you
should probably keep for locations that are especially important to your campaign,
to show your players that they might want their characters to have a backstory
that's tied into that location's lore. Skyrim shows us three other options: in that
game, map markers are revealed to the players when they hear about a location, when they get
a quest which asks them to go to that location, or when they stumble upon that
location while traveling. So, basically, the map marker appears as soon as
the location becomes relevant to the story. Doing things like this is really convenient for
tabletop RPGs, because with this dark forbidden power, we can control the pace of the game better:
if we need an extra session or two before getting to the next big city, we can just kind of plop
a hamlet on the way to that big city, and have some kind of weird monster in it for the players
to deal with. It’s definitely not that we just came up with the town of Obleham three seconds
ago, it’s that it was always on your map but your players didn’t care about that little village
until they ran into the Oblex that occupied it. If your map has a fog of war, or
maybe you're running a hexcrawl, it kind of all falls into that category. You're
basically just creating stuff as you need it. A third option, which was popularized by
the Assassin’s Creed games, is to treat map markers as a quest reward. The way they do it is
usually that you have to climb some sort of tower, or big monster, or hot hair balloon, to get
a vantage point on the area. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that: instead, you could
have the players steal a map from a wealthy noble, rescue an NPC who knows the region very
well, or maybe meditate at a shrine and getting a revelation from the gods.
The important part here is, your players don’t just get the map
markers, they earn the map markers. But there’s a third aspect to map
markers that we need to talk about: what do your map markers represent? And
there’s really two ways to go about this. The first is to do it a bit like Skyrim, where
your map markers are icons in the shapes of caves, ruins, lone strongholds, etc… These markers tell
you what you will see if you go to that location, but not anything beyond that. If you see a
cave icon on your map, you have no way to determine what you’ll find in it: what kind of
rewards to expect tnere, what kind of enemies to expect to fight, or whether this cave is part
of a quest or just some random location that’s entirely disconnected from the rest of the plot.
The map actively hides all of this information from the player, and you’ll have to actually
go there to find out what it’s all about. Doing this reinforces one of the core themes
of that game: exploration. The game teases your curiosity as much as it can, and gets you to
decide, by yourself, with your own autonomy, to take a six months long detour on your
very urgent journey to save the world. On the other hand, you’ve got games like Cyberpunk
2077 or Mad Max, where the map markers aren’t really about the location itself, but more about
the quest that you can do once you’re there. So instead of an icon showing you that this location
is a construction site or a parking garage, it tells you that the Night City Police Department
has signaled criminal activity in that area, and they’ve offered a bounty to any merc who
will help pacify it. So just from the map icon, you’ll know exactly what type of quest this
is going to be. And once you’re done, the icon disappears from your map, because that location
has now become irrelevant to your story... Until, three days later, some other quest brings you
back here to do some other cool cyberpunk thing. It’s not even that Night City
has no interesting locations, but the point of the game is different:
where Skyrim is about exploration, Cyberpunk is more about earning street cred,
growing from a nobody to a legendary merc, and helping your friends in a city where
nobody cares about them except for you. Different games are going to appeal to different
types of players. Skyrim chose one type of player, Cyberpunk chose a different one. So, you’ve
gotta ask yourself, who are your players, and what are they going to respond
better to? And depending on your answer, your world map might look very different from the
official Faerun map and its 447 towns and cities. But of course, there’s a third option.
So far, we’ve only talked about markers, but those are not the only
annotations a map can have. For example, in Mad Max, the map is divided into
5 territories, each sub-divided into about a dozen regions. By completing different missions, the
players can reduce the threat level of an area, and make it go from red, to orange, to yellow,
to white, which mirrors the narrative of the game which is that you’re having a turf war
with Lord... Scabrous Scrotus. What a name... Another type of annotation we see in that game are
those red paths, which show you the patrol route of Lord Scabrous Scrotus’ war convoys. So instead
of having a quest take place in a location, the quest now takes place all over an entire
region of the map. So you can make it easier, by first attacking nearby snipers’ nests,
and raider hideouts before you attack the convoy itself. Otherwise, you might have to deal
with every single enemy in the region at once. With paths and areas. you can express
so much more with a map. For example, this is the official map for Pathfinder’s setting,
Golarion. But if you ask any Pathfinder player, they’ll tell you that this is the
real official map for Golarion. And granted, this map is a bit of a meme, but to
a new player it’s still so much more useful to know this part of the world is about Vive la
Révolution than to know it’s called... Galt? Now, let’s talk about the
layout of the world map itself. The first type of layout I’d like to talk about
is one that I don’t think has a standard accepted name, at least not that I could find in my
research for this video, but that I like to call the tree-shaped map. You find that kind of map
in a ton of different games, but let’s just take one for the sake of having an example: Fallout.
Fallout 4’s main plot is about you, the player, picking one of four factions which really
can’t stand one another. Each faction gets a different ending, usually resulting in the
destruction of one or more of the other factions. And what’s interesting about that game’s world
map, is that it’s designed in a way that you will naturally stumble upon every single
one of those factions. So the map itself helps introduce that very important choice
that is at the center of Fallout 4’s plot. You start in the top left corner of the map,
in a town called Sanctuary Hills, and the game sends you on a quest to retrieve your infant son
who was kidnapped. As you follow the one road this town has, you pretty much inevitably find yourself
in the town of Concord, where you cannot help but meet the Minutemen, the first of the four
factions. They tell you to go to Diamond City, in the center of Boston, but pretty much smack
in the middle of your path, the game's developers have put the Cambridge Police Station, where you
get to meet the Brotherhood of Steel, the second important faction of that game. Eventually, you
do reach Boston, and when you do, every single person in all of Diamond City is talking about
the Institute, the game’s third major faction. Just walking in a straight line, you’ve already
gotten to meet three of the four factions of the game. And it’s only when you reach Diamond
City that the game really starts to throw a bunch of quests and plot hooks your way, and
suddenly empowers you to go wherever you want. That’s why I call it a tree-shaped
map: you’ve got a trunk of exposition, and then it branches out into an
actual open world type of game. This type of layout works very well for
Table-Top RPGs in my experience. Because, well, we like to ask our players to make big decisions
like this. The entire idea is that first, you give your players the exposition they need so they can
make an informed decision, and at that point the story and the map are both pretty linear, but then
you ask them to make that choice, and the players become the driving force of the plot, and they get
to choose where the story goes next. Literally. The second layout that’s pretty common in
world maps, is to have one or more sections of the map inaccessible at the start of a
campaign, and then later on the heroes go on some kind of quest and they open up the path.
This could be, totally random example here, a tall mountain range that’s filled with
monsters, cuts the continent in half, and is somehow strangely square-shaped.
But it could be different things. A sea of mist that you can’t navigate unless
you can find your way without looking at the stars. An ancient forest enchanted so
that whenever someone tries to traverse it, they fall asleep and wake up outside the forest.
A portal to a different plane of existence. Or it could be something perfectly mundane, like… the
sea, which would force the players to find a ship. There’s pretty much no limit to the
variety of obstacles you can come up with, especially in a fantasy game like D&D. And
with each obstacle comes a different plot hook for your players. Bonus points if you
give your players more than one option for overcoming that obstacle you put in your map.
This is a type of map where you kind of need to plot a lot ahead. You're putting an obstacle
on your map, but it might take your players a couple of years before they actually
get around to overcoming that obstacle. The third type of map layout that
I find pretty interesting is when a map itself evolves as you play,
to reflect the events of the story. For example, in The Banner Saga, darkness slowly
swallows the world map as the story progresses, showing you what’s at stake. In
Inkle Studio’s Sorcery series, you have these beacons of past light, and wherever
they point, the map changes to a different era, turning the entire world map into a giant
puzzle with many different possible states. One last aspect you’ll definitely want
to consider, is your map’s scope. What does the map represent, and where does
it stop? When we say “world map” within the context of a game, we usually don’t
mean the actual map of the entire world. Skyrim just shows you one country, Fallout
covers a small region around Boston, and Cyberpunk covers basically just one city. This is a difficult balance to nail down,
especially in tabletop RPGs. On the one hand, this map of Faerun is so big that you probably won’t
ever get to visit more than just a thin slice of it. If a player makes a character from Chult,
and your campaign happens almost entirely within Icewind Dale, you’re probably going to have a
hard time tapping into that character’s backstory. On the other hand, this map is, itself, only a
thin slice of the Forgotten Realms as a whole. By using it, you might be sending the message to
your players that they shouldn’t make characters from Zakhara, Maztica or Kara-Tur, and you’ll
be missing out on some of the lore of all time. There’s mainly two ways games tend to solve this.
The first is, you have more than one world map: you have one that covers the entire world, but has
very minimal information on it, and only exists to give you a general first impression. And then
you have a second one which only covers the actual region of the game, which is much more detailed,
and that’s the one you’ll use most of the time. The second option is that you don’t actually
see any of the markers on your map until you zoom in far enough. That way, you get pretty
much the same effect of having a big map with low detail but that’s easy to use, and a small
map with high detail that’s also easy to use. So, normally, I end every video on this
channel by giving you some kind of a free thing. But as I’ve been spending basically
this entire video saying… Every campaign is going to need a different map, so if I give you
a setting map for some homebrew setting of mine, you’re probably not going
to get much use out of it. So I decided to do what I thought would be the
next best thing... And I've made an entire website where you can import your world map, annotate it
using the techniques we’ve talked about today, and make it as interactive and
useful to yourself as possible. By default, when you go to this website,
WorldCanvas, you are greeted by a fully annotated map of the Forgotten Realms, which showcases
the different features you can use for your own maps. Or, if you do want to play in the Forgotten
Realms, you can just crop the map so it focuses on the part of the world you actually care about.
This is entirely free - I don't run ads, I don't save anything on my server, nothing like that.
So, come give it a try, and if you end up liking the result, come over to my Discord
channel to share your work with others. Outro
That’s it for today’s video. World maps are a pretty big topic, but
they’re such an important part of running a game that I really wanted to do the subject justice
and give you the tools to make a great one. If you’ve liked this video, and you want to
see more like it, make sure you subscribe, and leave a like and a comment, that’s
currently the best way to support this channel. I want to make good videos, and your
feedback is the only way I can make that happen, so please keep it coming.
Until next time, have a good one!
