The Goal
So there are any number of ways to draw up a map of the local region, or even a continent. You can start from many different angles, such as putting the city which is the main focus of the story at the center and then just building around it. You could roll randomly for where the deserts and forests and mountains are, or decide arbitrarily as the story dictates. Consistency is pretty important, but in a lot of stories, your players will meet you half way (remember that one?), and you don’t need to be perfectly geographically accurate
I mean… not unless you want to. Me? I want to. At the very least I want things to make SOME logical sense. There are a few rules for map-making you can keep in mind which will help tie things together, and help it look like a real living location map, rather than a fake map you found on a Denny’s coloring place-mat.
- Mountains are the result of tectonic plates moving together or apart.
- As such, over a very broad region, mountains tend to have a rippling look.
- Tall sharp mountains tend to be newer; pointing to recent geologic activity.
- Think of the New Zealand mountain ranges filmed in Lord of the Rings as an example of sharp dramatic mountains.
- Conversely, ancient mountains that have not been subject to geologic activity have been subject to weathering, so they are softer, shallower, more worn away.
- Water flows downhill, towards the ocean.
- Usually from high-altitude springs or glacial melts, rainforest regions, or volcanic lakes.
- Water may gather into low regions as lakes or swamps, settling there or maybe moving on as a new river.
- If you place a swamp, where does the water come from and where is it going?
- People live near the resources they need, like water and hunting grounds.
- There is no reason to live away from these things unless there is a commodity nearby that makes it worth the added costs and difficulties.
- Climactic events can have an impact on the landscape.
- Consider ancient asteroid craters, dried up seabeds being lower than sea-level, volcanic blasts that created wastelands.
- This is not just shape, but potential for mythology. How do people explain the strange formation?
All this being said, there are always weird exceptions and geological formations that are hard to explain. Don’t be afraid to put in something weird that might make no geological sense. As long as you are doing it intentionally, and not just because you’re lazy and don’t care.
A friend of mine used to live in eastern Washington, near a weathertop-like formation called Steptoe Butte. It is such a unique, unexpected, and hard to geologically explain Giant-Rock-in-the-Middle-of-Nowhere that the geological formation where it has been found in other places is now known as a Steptoe.
So if you want a giant chasm or singular mountain sticking up from a desert, or a 10 mile wide pit leading to the molten core of the planet… go for it! Don’t waste the audiences ability to suspend disbelief, either on unimportant details, or by being afraid to take advantage of it. In fact, the more detail and geographic accuracy you put into the rest of the map the more the unusual elements will pass, even when you can’t explain quite how they work. Like when you sneak one delicious brownie into a salad buffet.
The Dice Drop Method
So lets begin by looking at a really fascinating method of randomization you might have seen before:
As you can see, this is a really nifty idea for quickly and easily randomly generating an area. It’s a quick 15 seconds though, and a lot is skimmed over, so I have gone through and attempted to do this myself! Lets see how it goes…
Choose Your Dice
Alright, so I have a few concerns with what I’ve made here. The land formations aren’t bad, I actually really like the shape of that water area, but overall the randomness doesn’t work for me. Also, it didn’t seem like I was using too many dice, but there is still a lot of blank space.
I’m going to go over it a bit using one of my most important tools: A system called TLARTM, or That-Looks-About-Right-To-Me. I’ll add in some waterways, maybe fill out some of the empty space with other random dice draws… and always keeping in mind the guidelines I mentioned before.
So at this point I could start prettifying the map, clarifying the borders and the regions, but frankly, what’s bothering me most is the random placement of the settlements. That SW Island for example… that would basically require a port town to exist unless they were totally self-reliant. We’ve also got swamps next to deserts, and mountains every whichaway. I would share with you the list of what dice I used to represent each feature, but I won’t bother because I’m gonna toss this. It strikes me as a bit like that old Denny’s placemat, so I’m going to restart from the beginning, using a slightly modified process and incorporating more of those tenets I mentioned in the beginning.
The Modified Dice Drop
First, I want to establish a general aesthetic theme and a scale. I don’t want this to be the size of a continent, but I do want it to be a fairly large region, like the size of a moderately large country. Think France, or Germany.
As far as a Big Idea, that makes this world/setting kind of stand out? I’m not sure yet. I do know of one kind of monster and a habitat that I want to put in there, so we’ll see how it develops.
I’m going to make it generally alpine forests with mountains and lakes, and a few swamps. I might incorporate a desert if there is a good space for it. So lets begin by ONLY throwing mountains.
I should note that as I did this, I didn’t hesitate to utilize TLARTM to shift the dice just a little bit, and fill in some gaps where it made sense. The dice are YOUR tools, YOUR servants, and you are not bound to their whims. If you feel like they are pushing you around, just grab them up, eat one of them, and hurl the rest into the void screaming, “KNOW THY PLACE!”.
…Anyway, next I wanted to add in some lakes and bodies of water. For this I’m using d6s, but I’m using the actual number rolled on the face of the d6 to determine the size of the lake.
Next up is the forested regions. Here I’ll be using d8s, and, like the lakes, I’ll use the facing number to be determining the size of the forest. Now, I am assuming that trees grow throughout, in all the blanks spaces, but these are the large dense forests worth naming individually.
Next up is the swamps. There were SO MANY swamps in the last attempt, so this time I want to have there be fewer. I will be dropping a d8 in every water-logged low region where there COULD be a swamp…
And then I am going to just take away any potential swamp that rolled a 1-4.
So this brings us to the deserts. Now I had been thinking about the NE corner being so empty, and possibly the SW corner, though that got pretty well forested. Then I had it. Inspiration for The Big Idea. What if this was a high, lake-riddled mountainous alpine region that resembled a kind of a northern European fantasy… but was completely surrounded on all sides by a desert? A vast uncrossable sea of sand dunes.
There we go! Now we have what looks like a really interesting environment to play in! Using TLARTM and some dice I’ll lastly, place a few villages, towns, and one large city. I’m not leaving this up to chance, because unlike nature, its one of the major things that is NOT left to chance. People pick places to live in for reasons. I’ll place them in locations that make some sense according to the tenets at the beginning of the post: transport hubs, places with potential resources. That will bring us to the final map for this post:
So there you have it: the end of this map-making exercise, but probably not the last. My plan is to continue using this map and developing this setting with you as we go. What we know so far is that it is a strange location to find in the middle of a desert… mountains and lakes and fir forests, almost as if the gods plucked an entire country up and placed it in in a sandbox. A massive oasis. I definitely want to have more than one non-human race present, but humans will probably inhabit that large central city and most of the towns and villages near it.
Do you have any thoughts? And ideas for what else we might add to the setting? What we might call it? If you have any ideas or questions, or want to share some of your own experiences with overworld map generation, or bring up any worldbuilding questions specific to your current design needs, I’d love to hear them. Please feel welcome to comment and share!
See you next world!
—Charles