Draw Your DnD World!!

Draw your DnD World Map for your homebrew game!! We learn about game design from Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and a 16th century map to make a hexcrawl map for Dungeons and Dragons and convey our worldbuilding!

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[mapcrow]

Draw your DnD World Map for your homebrew game!! We learn about game design from Legend of Zelda Breath of the wild and a 16th century map to make a hexcrawl map to help our Dungeons and Dragons and convey our worldbuilding!

Sign up for the email alerts to make sure you here when the project goes live!

[juca]

This type of map (Carta Marina) is called pictorial map for those who want to search more maps in this same style.

[Repicheep]

I think I needed this. A campaign I was running fell apart because my players didn't seem to want to **do** anything. I had a map, with a bunch of labels, but each hex was just a generic biome tile. They'd poke their head into a couple dungeons here and there, but never ventured very far into them. We've discussed what they liked and didn't like, and they're willing to give it another try. But, I think I'll try more gameified maps this time around, and see if they find them more entising.

[melinnamba]

Oh... This explains why my game world map feels so unfinished despide being super detailed.
The map you drew at the end reminds me of a world map I had as a child. It had all these whimsical little illustrations on it marking famous landmarks, showcasing flora and fauna and even folk tales and historical events. I do destinctly remember that there was a little cartoon marking where the Titanic sank. My sister and I would often look at that map and talk about all the places we wanted to travel to someday. It was kind of an adventure map.

[doingboing]

My current campaign’s map was canonically drawn by a kobold with… questionable cartographic skills. The world is almost post-apocalyptic, so the players don’t really have much other choice than to use it. But, since the kobold is so lacking in academic training, the map has all sorts of little drawings and notes all over it, and this has been quite effective in getting them to want to visit different locations. I think flavoring your map as having been drawn by an actual character in the world can be very useful.

[DanaHowl]

As someone who is currently drawing a map for a brand new city in my campaign setting and finding it a bit overwhelming, this was exactly the video I needed this morning! Thank you, Map Crow!

[honorableintent]

I feel like this is more a lesson in scale than it is in anything else. Having a zoomed out world map can be useful in certain settings, but I also create region maps that include the local landmarks, anything exciting that could be there. I only usually give the players access to the local map, leaving the world map for my personal planning and tying the world together.

[yotan]

This is such a cool approach to map making, and it makes it seem far more accessible to me than everything else I've seen online. I've always thought of maps as spaces things are set, never pieces of a gameboard, and this really helps! Also, I absolutely love the new intro and ending credits, that potato is such a good little guy!

[thecadaver]

I'm definitely guilty of trying to draw accurate or pretty maps vs useful ones just because I love the aesthetic of old maps too much. I've found a good middle ground is drawing my nice little old fashioned map and then having the map be marked and annotated by an NPC.

I especially like doing it where players can pick up multiple versions of the same map and learn more based on who had the map before them. Gives a neat way of drawing attention to places later on you don't want them investigating earlier AND it can be a neat way of slipping in some character building/background info they wouldn't have gotten otherwise

[tobormax]

This reminds me of another type of map I love: theme park maps. I used to collect the maps from every theme park or water park that bothered to make one. I loved the way they could guide you to whatever attraction you wanted to visit even if they didn't have realistic scale or proportions.

[douglasbrown]

It took me a few hours but, long after I finished watching this video, it occurs to me that what you've reinvented is the TOURIST MAP. This is exactly like the maps look you find in tourist info offices: roads drawn (more or less) to scale, but with attractions drawn in a vastly magnified scale.

[DungeonMasterpiece]

Thank you for articulating the words I need to hear to fully understand why I had been so frustrated with any realistic looking map I put on hex paper.

[lostinmymind]

Honestly after listening to this video the first map that popped into mind was eldin rings map. The base map without having explored the world is filled with hints about locations, caves are marked as orange and black holes, ruins and towns are drawn on, important buildings like magic towers also have their own markings. It made exploring so much more interesting when you looking for a weird building or structure in an empty map, of course there are things that you stumble upon but they are almost always around some sort of interesting marking on the map

[Web_Warrior_Geo]

i took that one step further and made the map look like an advertisement for a specific tavern, cause that's what it canonicaly was, it even had a legal disclaimer on the side saying that it shouldn't be used for traveling

[RikkiGibson]

I realized the game Pyre does exactly what you’re talking about. Whenever you make a travel decision you get a choice of a few different routes which pass through distinct and evocative places. You have some ability to guess what it means to go through each place.

[ASquared]

If you aren’t an artist or don’t wish to draw an immensely detailed map, a good substitute for this is narrative details. Rumors, quests, information and such about various portions of the map and landmarks you’ve set up. This has the same effect as drawing interesting details on the map while only requiring some descriptions from you.

[raymondcarter]

Ok quick tip for DMs.
Use your environment. I ran a campaign using the mall as a dungeon. Sears was a goblins den and the king was on the second floor in the Santa seat thrown.
My players knew exactly where everything was so when the big fight in the food court my players all ran to Panda Express because of how defensive it was and they found leftover items like oil and used it to make the ground slippery.
At this point everyone wanted to see what their favorite store was hiding.

[RibbonRoulette]

Really helpful advice on how to make the map more intruiging to players! Realistic doesn't mean exciting.

[JacobYaw]

Reasons why the map in Fallout 76 is my favorite map of all time in a video game. Especially since you can't always trust it. The map says there's a huge lake in the middle, so when you get there and find out a dam has exploded and wiped out the entire city nearby, leaving the lakebed barren, your brain goes "WTF HAPPENED HERE???"

[joshmargolis]

Being specific is always the key. Sometimes that means narrowing down the scope and scale of the world, having a large map for yourself but then making a more zoomed in version of the area the players are exploring