Basic Mapping for Budding World Designers

I’ve been creating fantasy world for over 35 years, and I have made EVERY mistake that can be made… many have been made repeatedly... and, I hope I have learned from the pain I caused myself. This entry is dedicated to help those who are interested know just how easy it CAN be... if you LET it be easy.

I started with a Google map of a town in the middle of almost nowhere… Republic, Missouri. (https://www.google.com/maps/@37.1196114,-93.4711027,14.08z) I start with a new name... and welcome you all to Morlic (twisting the actual name around, "Mo" from the state abbreviation, "Lic" from "Republic," and throw in an "R" in the middle to make the name roll off your tongue)!

I then get a screen shot of the map version of the town, and decide which direction the local port is, and which direction the next major town is in – PURELY to orient the map in a different manner. Arbitrarily, I decided that Wassarfount (liberally twisted from HORRID German and imagination, it means, "Springfield". Pan out a bit on the map linky above… Springfield is just to the east of Republic), is to the north and the port is to the south - so I will rotate the map 90 degrees to the left, like this – all done to make it less identifiable to those that may know Republic.

Then, using a simple drawing program (Paint, GIMP, Photoshop, whatever), I create a simple line drawing of the town, with roads, river, walls (if any) and land-borders (if any), like this.

   Then I white out everything other than what I drew, like this.

 

My last step in mapping is to add some major landmarks and a legend... like this.

Now, I have an entire village - with a keep, one major temple (complete with cemetery across the river), two market places (arbitrarily, the one to the north has more food, the one to the south has more wares/goods), a wizard's tower, and a place for herd animals to be stored and auctioned. The village would be surrounded by farmers’ fields. Since I said that the major port in the area is to the south, we know that the river flows from top to bottom on the map, and Wassarfount is upriver. PLEASE keep in mind that the pics are drawn in at VERY low quality - totally crap quality - because this is for quick development!!

Now all I need to do is to populate the place with the various people that are sure to be met/known. Note that their names are twisted variations of the actors that portray the characters. You can do the same thing with relatives, teachers and others... just twist the names enough to make them unrecognizable.

1. Ruler: Easton Shine – Fighter/warrior, old, speaks in a raspy, throaty voice that sounds VERY menacing when he wants it to - and it's still menacing when he doesn't want it to be. White hair, very slender (he's Clint Eastwood!!).

2. High Priest: Rickala Alman – Cleric/Priest (duh!), speaks VERY condescendingly and seems aloof. Black, greasy hair and wears long robes (Professor Snape). He's got ONE acolyte (named Wenham Dav) that has tonsured hair and seems forever bumbling (priest/monk from Van Helsing). (all these guys need is a deity, and the temple is done!)

3. Smith: Duncan Clarke - A HUGE man, bronzed by the heat of the forges. Speaks very slowly and it's obvious that he has little formal education. Will NEVER take action to harm another. Makes armor better than weapons (John Coffey from The Green Mile).

4. General Merchant: Siyra'ah Billay - Middle-aged man, long hair and "soul patch" beard. He seems simple but has a big heart. Always wants to entertain visitors with a song about lost love. He'll never be rich because he just can't take advantage of people like rich merchants do. Has very pretty daughter of marriageable age (Billy Ray Cyrus - from Hannah Montana).

5. Wizard: Rappala Sint - Red haired wizard that looks WAY too young for the title. He's capable but his successes seem almost "accidental". Speaks of a beautiful goddess of a sorcerer that he wants to marry one day... if he can work up the courage to tell her his feelings. (Ron Weasley from Harry Potter).

6. Captain of the Guard: Davis Orusa - Older man with reddish blond hair. Speaks haltingly as if he's searching for exactly the right words. Continuously plays with his helmet visor (Horatio from CSI:Miami).

This has taken me just over 30 minutes - and that includes finding the map, and typing all this up... I could do it in less than 20 minutes without writing this out – and could have been done in about 10 minutes had I printed the map, traced it with markers, and then scanned it instead of using GiMP/Paint.

Keep on playing!!

World Building - Basics: Small fish/Large pond!

Background Info

After reading lots of threads and several different boards about how to establish a campaign world (or just a campaign!), I thought I'd wax poetic here about my methodologies that have developed over the years.

I went on forever about how I do the big background stuff in my first entry, so here's more of a nitty-gritty view.

My world works... that is as clear as I can get it. There are kingdoms that are foundering and failing, to either just disappear or be absorbed into another nation, and there are kingdoms that are doing everything right and are thriving as centers of commerce and knowledge.

The question is - WHY??

Simple - it's the rulers! I personally know every king and queen. Don't get all excity (It’s a word! Look it up.) and think that I've lost my marbles (they are in a small bag next to my computer monitor!!) – I don't know the characters, I know the PEOPLE!!! King Eustain of Elbac can be described as if he is sitting right in front of me... because he used to. Mr. Eustis Kempter was my sixth grade science teacher in my home-town. He's heavyset and has nearly no chin and most of his hair has escaped (but he obviously fights to keep the last of it – his comb-over is the stuff of LEGEND!), he was one of the quickest people to I've ever known to holler and shut kids up, but he laughs quickly as well. As a King, he is much the same – quick to anger but quick to smile and take mercy.

ALL of my big movers and shakers are of the same cloth – I met them or knew them some time during my life. Some are former PC's and NPC's from campaigns that I've run – and it's kind of funny, but I think that I know them better than the people I knew in REAL life!

The Kingdoms in my world that are failing will leave a history around to eventually be discovered by adventurers, whether those Kingdom sinks into swamps or are overthrown by rivals.

I've gone in and done calendars for my world – and I know that one fief over here will fail in 22 years after the present leader dies and has no heirs. I know that that one Kingdom over here will suddenly become a world power when they find a huge vein of gold and platinum in seven years time. That's all long-range planning, and most established GMs do that stuff.

The short range stuff has more of an impact on the PC's.

Do your PC's become movers and shakers in the world, or does it go on without consideration of them? In my world, it's a mix.

When I start a new campaign, I ask the players, "Okay, your character is nearing the end of his/her days and is sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of Ye Olde Adventurers’ Home. A small child approaches and asks, ‘Who are you? Are you famous? What did you do in your life?'" It's up to the player to answer.

Oh, sure, some default to, "I was famous/rich/powerful," and those are the easy ones for which to GM. Some are the campaign movers, though... they're the ones that say, "I slew the great Dragon of Antioch" or "I became the King of Saltania."

I then start coming up with a campaign for the ones that gave me concrete dreams of greatness. I merge storylines for slaying the Antioch dragon and becoming King of Saltania into one campaign. I map out milestones for both story arcs and begin to flesh it out in my mind.

Then I go back to the calendars that I have. I know that the party should be in Smallsville in late Octember or Septober and my calendar says that Smallsville will be attacked by Orcs late in that year and the townsfolk will all be slain or enslaved. Whether the party is there or not, the attack will happen – if they are gone, they'll hear about it – but if they are there, they may change the outcome of the battle or slaughter.

This is what makes them movers and shakers in my world. When the party hears that there was an attempt on King Andar last week, they know that there is a much larger world than what surrounds them.

It's just something else to keep those pesky players interested!

The Play's The Thing!

I've changed my gaming style several times since I began playing D&D in late 1980, with the original edition (lower case, as it wasn't an "official" title!!). Those six stupid, little books changed my life. I have been told that my first character was a Dwarven Fighter, but I don't remember... it was all a haze...

It began earlier that year when I began my life at college. I quickly found a couple of friends and began doing what all college students did when the drinking age was 18... drinking copious amounts of alcohol, and looking for women of loose morals (not necessarily in that order!!). I began pledging a fraternity, Tau Kappa Epsilon, and one of these friends began pledging a rival frat, Sigma Tau Epsilon. Of course, as you may expect, for the next month, we kind of lost touch.

And then the magical day came!

I went to breakfast one day in early October and there sat my friend, looking like something the cat had puked up. I sat next to him and asked if the Sig Tau's had started "Hell Week" already – and he just shook his head in the negative, in a daze. I asked what he had done the night before, and if she had been cute, and he related the most amazing story to me on that cool, fall day.

"We were traveling in the forest and these wolves attacked. I've never been so scared in my life! I pulled my battle axe out and started hacking at them, but they were too fast! I got bit twice, but they weren't solid bites, so they didn't do that much damage. The whole group was hacking and slashing and it seemed like we were going to lose, but the damned things started going down. I killed two of them, myself! And about a half-hour ago I had just finished skinning one of the wolves and stood up, and I saw this huge, white wolf that breathed frost – even though it wasn't cold enough for it. The damned thing was watching us from on top of the ridge. We had to break and I came straight here..."

It wasn't so much the fantastical story he had told, but his EYES. The expression on his face was one that showed that he wasn't just telling a story, he was reliving it! In an awed voice, I asked him what woods he was in and what he had done with the pelt (keep in mind that this was extreme northern Wisconsin, so woods, wolves, and pelts were commonplace).

He just looked at me and said, "We were in the Sig Tau [Sigma Tau Gamma fraternity] house."

That night, I broke all fraternal bounds and entered this mystical Sig Tau house and played my first session of D&D. Needless to say, I was hooked.

In retrospect, those first characters were pretty sad. None had names, and since the Monk class was hardest for which to qualify in the original system, we all figured that it was the best, so we all rolled up Monks every chance we got, and that was several times a night, as PC mortality was legend. We would have entire parties of Monks, one opening doors, two with bows covering the doors, and one or two more to dash in and engage whatever horrific monsters the early books allowed. Essentially, we could have made Xerox copies of our character sheets and nobody would have known, outside of differing amounts of treasure that we had collected.

It was only two weeks later that I began my career as a GM, running a campaign based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter from Mars series. I am being very generous when I say that it sucked, but such is the life of a new GM. I still played heavily back then at the same time, and each day was nearly the same.

Fridays would start at about 4:00 in the afternoon – and we'd game until 5:30, dash to the university dining hall, then dash back to continue until 11:50. Then we'd sprint down to the local 7/11 to get OJ and those little, white, powdered donuts before the store closed (no it wasn't 24 hours!!). Then we would game until 3-4:00 in the morning before crashing in the dorms wherever we happened to be playing. Someone would wake up about 8:00 a.m. and we would start again, playing all day Saturday, then all day Sunday. Monday through Thursday were alternating between playing until 1 or 2:00, or drinking and looking for girls. We usually did better playing, so there weren't many drunken girl-hunts. Oh, yeah, the Play's the Thing!

Is there any doubt as to why I got a 1.11 GPA that semester?

Anyway, it took about three years before my gaming philosophy began to evolve. I was stocking a newly drawn dungeon with monsters out of the tables in the back of the Great Tome of Creatures, and it suddenly dawned on me that it didn't make any sense. Why are a horde of hobgoblins in a room right next to a small crew of goblins? According to the descriptions in the Monster Manual, hobgobs ENSLAVED gobs... so why didn't these do that? With no good answer, I did exactly that.

I left college after that first year (you know that agreement some parents make with their kids, get good grades and we'll pay for college? Well, mine kept their side of the bargain!), and had enlisted in the Army. Just a year after that, I got caught in a RIF (reduction in force, read: downsizing), and was sent home. I spent a year cooking at a Louisiana prison system (now THERE are some stories I could tell!) before I eventually made my way back to the same college I’d originally attended (University of Wisconsin at Superior).

With the new philosophy, I had my very first acknowledged TPK. Sure, it used to happen all the time, what, with encounter tables saying 10-100 gnolls at a time? It happened ALL the time!! But it had never happened to a group like this before... or at least one of MY groups. The players were aghast! "What the hell was that?? The bad guys were working TOGETHER!!!" Well, like many times before, they all took five minutes to roll up new Xerox-worthy characters, and they were off again - but this time they were cautious.

Cautious and victorious! *cue crowd cheering*

Shortly after that, I began to think the same way about my characters. Why were they all carbon copies? Why not any variation? Were all PC's just Conans and Grey Mousers and Gandalfs? Why not a short, fat wizard that hated pointy hats? Why not a giant that was also a thief? Why not a Les Nessman-style fighter? (for those not in the know, imagine a tiny weakling that is scared of stuff more powerful than cotton balls)

That was the last major shift. From there, I just kept thinking about the game itself – and always asking, "Why". When drawing a map of a continent, I would wonder why I wanted a cliff right there... and a river over there... it drove me to distraction! But I think it helped.

I began researching geology, and from there I planned an entire planet for my campaign world. I know its elemental makeup, I know the directions that the various continental plates are moving – and how fast – and I know where the civilizations are located. I know where the ruins are – and who lived there before... and before them – and I know what is there to find for loot.

Why do I do it? The HUGE majority of crap I've designed and planned will never be known by my players... so WHY??

The PLAY'S the Thing!

You know the feeling when you watch a good movie or read a good book, you get pulled in, and you forget that there is a REALITY out there? Suddenly a baby howls or you have to pee, and you snap back to this realm... and it almost hurts, and you can't wait to get back to that alternate world... That is what I call "playing"!

When a new person rolls up a character for my campaign world, it will make sense. There won't be moments of disbelief as to why there is a river flowing in one direction here, and a quarter mile away a river flowing in the other direction... There won't be moments of confusion as the player asks, "Why," something is happening... at least why something didn't make sense in a gaming sense. If they have to stop and ask, it will be a plot device... just like REALITY.

When a person wants to become a part of my campaign world, they become a mover and a shaker in my realm. They may avert a great war... or they may start one. I have calendars set up for things to happen – that, unless foiled by the characters, WILL happen. They may never know – until hearing it from a town crier – or they may be part of it. Why? Why do I do this?

It's all about the playing. The Play's the Thing!