Dungeon Master Inspiration
DMI is a podcast made to share the tricks of the trade of DMs with a wide range of experience levels, from fresh, new DMs to wisened masters of the position.
We focus on exploring topics within the world of DnD that consistently pose problems to DMs, such as developing characters, the use of monsters & NPCs, and combat. You'll hear from a variety of DMs speaking on a plethora of intriguing controversial issues in-depth.
No matter where you are in your DnD journey, we've got something worth listening to.
Dungeon Master Inspiration
The Importance of Cartography and Backstory in Your Role-Play World
Ready to become a master mapmaker for your next big role-play or political campaign? This episode will make you an expert, as Jay and I, Wyatt Cerulean, guide you through the intrinsic details of building your own immersive world maps. Prepare to set your campaign worlds apart as we delve deep into specifics, from the art of designing rivers and forests to the strategic placement of cities and fortresses. We also highlight the wonders of technology and how it can aid you in your map creation journey, whether you prefer digital or traditional methods.
But that's not all! We also unpack the importance of building a compelling backstory for your villains and how that can shape your world's geography. From the ruins of their past failures to the fortresses of their current reign, learn how to weave these aspects into your map for an ultimately engaging political campaign. We also emphasize the significance of naming and defending your regions, and how it can impact the smaller areas, such as cities. So, tune in as we embark on this cartographic adventure together, filled with practical advice, real-world examples, and exciting revelations!
Thank you for listening to our podcast. If you are interested in seeing more content like this check out our YouTube! We also post weekly game articles on our Patreon and have an active Discord community.
Social Links:
Youtube
Discord
Patreon
X
Instagram
All right, welcome back to episode seven of DMI. Today our topic is gonna be world maps, as we stated last week. So if you wanted to get into our theming episode, check out the last episode. Today we're really gonna kind of dive into how to build your world map and how to theme it to kind of fit and feel more realistic and immersive. My name is Wyatt and I am joined today by my co-host.
Speaker 2:Jay Cerulean.
Speaker 1:So when you're looking at world maps, there's a couple of ways to do it. I would say the most important thing is just to take your time with them. Don't try to rush this like a week before your campaign. Sit and stew on this for like a month. Honestly, I would say a month is what has worked the best for me. Have you kind of?
Speaker 2:found that, so I tend to come up with my ideas for my map before I actually like do the map, so I don't have an actual time frame.
Speaker 1:That's fair. Yeah, no, I start drawing my map usually like a month before my campaign starts and making sure that it's like in place and everything's planned. Do you tend to like to have digital maps or do you focus more on having like physical maps where you can touch them?
Speaker 2:So if I'm, there's a couple of softwares that you can use to make actual online maps that are like show elevation and stuff. If they were cheap I'd use them, but they ain't cheap, so I tend to do like hand drawn and like sketch on what details I need, where and yeah, for me, I'm in a very similar situation.
Speaker 1:I actually like to do mine as physical maps. That being said, I will use some online maps. At one point, I was taking a geology class, and I got introduced to a software that literally replicates the earth and how it was made, and you can change different variables of, like, different continent sizes, different plate sizes, whatnot. That one's a little more techy. It can be a lot of fun to play with, though, and you can find it pretty easily. You literally just look up world generation geology map and it'll pop up. It's actually kind of fun.
Speaker 1:There's a couple of different ones out there now. There's also your like fantasy generators that do it, but I've seen one that I'm going to be playing with from now on that I really actually enjoyed, and I did it from my last world map. Have you, by chance, seen the people that just chuck a bunch of dice on and then draw around the dice to make their world maps? I've never seen that. I absolutely adore the idea. I saw someone take like a pile of d20s and they just scattered it on there, and then they just roughly made the continent shapes around the dice, and that may be my new form of like random world generation from now on, because that just made me smile.
Speaker 2:I always make my maps a little more deliberately than that, based on what I need to happen on the maps. So we with like your theming of your campaign and everything your map is going to have. Your map should have a purpose other than just being a thing.
Speaker 1:That's fair. That's fair For me. What I like to do is I like to get random shapes for continents and then I place my rivers, my forests, my mountains a little more deliberately to match the plot. But for for my personal thing is like I would rather have a random world map and then choose specific parts of it to use than to have this really deliberate one, just because I don't usually spend that much time on like designing it. If I'm going to like have a really intricate world map, that's where I go more into, those like generators where you can put in all the variables different size of the oceans, whether how many continents there are like I'll even go in and be like how many tectonic plates, and then I'll run it and I'll run it through the years till I like it in a certain way. That's more of my like. If I'm going to run a lot of campaigns in the world just to kind of get a rough like design that feels realistic, and then I'll put the rivers in myself. Does that make sense? Yeah, so like what?
Speaker 2:I tend to do is I tend to pick a part of a map if I'm going to like, focus on it, and then I create that chunk. So each chunk might have some smaller like continents or islands, or even if it's like just solid land. For the most part, I'm going to deliberately design that and then, on the grander scheme, have a position for it across the planet. That's fair.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I usually start with my planet and my world map and then, for my campaign specifically, I'll take like a little snapshot of where I want them to be and where I want them to start, and that's that's going to be my more intricate.
Speaker 1:One Part of the advantage of the more online generators versus doing it by hand is the fact that you can actually zoom in on the planet and they'll, and you can literally just take pictures like it's a globe, like it's our globe. But if you're doing it by hand, definitely just like, take an area, make a couple copies of your world map, circle it, zoom it in, draw it, do it by hand. But basically, if you're going to do it by hand, your best friend is really going to be your computer. Just take your go to your printer at your local library If you don't have one, if you do have one, just scan into your computer and just zoom in to where you're going to be, print out a copy of your map zoomed in there and then trace it onto paper before you start doing the rest, like the little details, like the islands, the rivers, whatnot. That's going to be your most helpful way of doing it if you're doing everything by hand.
Speaker 1:And I think I would say most people would have a pretty easy access to that kind of method.
Speaker 2:The biggest issue for like, producing maps for like, especially if you're gonna give each player one is how big you want it and how much detail you put onto that map, especially as we get further down and like, get into like building your stories and stuff. Sometimes your map can be a little telling of your story, based on what is included on it. So you might have an area where it's like oh yeah, that's an area we're going to get to later, and it's like an important area, but your party is supposed to think it's just like an abandoned area where nobody is anymore.
Speaker 2:So then, by having those areas it can become a little revealing of. Oh, this is gonna be important.
Speaker 1:And definitely that's fair. It is very challenging to make those choices and that's gonna depend on your campaign and how much you want the players to know. I will say one of the harder things to do, especially as a new DM, is picking where you should have towns, especially important towns, on your map. Especially when you're building the world map, which really is only gonna show your major cities at first, until you start zooming it in and like printing out those smaller, more in depth portions of the map, you really wanna focus on just your major cities and picking those. You really want them to be kind of realistic.
Speaker 1:So if you wanna look at, for example, a great one for those of us who are here in America, look at a map of the United States. We are a huge continent. If you look roughly, you're gonna get an idea of where you can have your big cities. Usually they're gonna be coastal, just a little hint. The coasts are gonna be where you're gonna build most of your large towns and cities and then from there it gets kind of challenging, but really a major staple, especially because of the fact that D&D is a historical, more of a historical, setting. It's very fantasy and a lot of the times they have some technology, but it's not like our current technology. A lot of your stuff is gonna be based around a body of water. Is there a body of water there, yes or no? If no, then you're probably not gonna have a town there, because people have to have a way to drink water.
Speaker 2:If you pay attention, like across the planet, pretty much anywhere there's a body of water, a city has formed and like, especially those early cities, all of them are in the exact same like geographical spot of a river valley, because there's water there and there's all the nutrients there. So we're gonna build here so we can survive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, rivers, lakes, oceans those are where you're gonna look for your large cities to be. Now there is this fun little thing that a lot of people have started to kind of play with, which is Easter eggs on your map. And I really like having Easter eggs on my maps of like, oh, where should my hidden dungeon or ancient ruins be? And you don't have to put them in every single map, but they make the map feel more realistic. Society doesn't stay in the same place forever and it won't. So maybe having some ancient ruins in the center of the continent Well, why would these be here? It's a desolate desert now, with no trace of water. Well, maybe it wasn't always that way. And you can kind of spin those stories that way and add some cool like lost magic items, and that can be a fun way to give your players magic items where it doesn't feel like oh, I just killed this random goblin and now I have a plus three sword.
Speaker 2:Like I don't like the term Easter eggs for him, but like including these like artifacts from previous either, like adventurers, society, cities, and making sure the world actually feels lived in kind of helps building that world map up. So just because there's a spot where a city should be doesn't necessarily mean that city has to be there anymore. So like you'd have a place where it'd be great to have a city and all that's left there is ruins From some ancient city that was there a bajillion years ago. That has then has since either moved, died out or just fell to ruin somehow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you can even write reasons why that could be something that that area is still facing. One thing that players don't think about is what could have happened in there and with ruins that can be a lot of fun to play with, cause like even here in the real world. You would know this better than I do. Aren't there like diseases and stuff that we have found in, like ancient Egyptian ruins, that affect people who are exploring them?
Speaker 2:We sometimes find that kind of stuff Like just there's sometimes things that are we might not find the live disease, but we might find the remains of a disease on a corpse or something like that, throughout them.
Speaker 1:Correct me if I'm wrong, but a couple of years ago didn't they coin that like the quote unquote, mommy's curse and the reason people were dying after taking out these sarcophagus's was, a lot of the times, because there was a fungus that people were being infected with that they didn't know about.
Speaker 1:I haven't seen that personally, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like I was seeing something like weird about that on the news one day and I was kind of interested in it, but like half paying attention cause I was cooking. So there are there's things where, like you could have secret old traps or maybe a disease and it could plague one of your characters and all of a sudden, and now it's this grandiose little side quest to save your friend and that can be a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:And we do also tend to like in the real world, find these now ruins around weirdly dangerous things Like. There's a set of ruins in Greece. Outside of, essentially, a gas trap, it's just a room, a cave, full of poisonous and explosive gas, which was because it was believed to be like a gateway to somewhere that the living couldn't go. So therefore, we're building here.
Speaker 1:Wasn't a great spot to build there. Yeah, and there's lots of fun things that you can do with that and picking places on your map, for that is always a good use of your time to take the time out of your day to really go pick those ruined cities and have some fun with it, cause I mean, find a reason to destroy a town. It is wild and crazy, and it doesn't always have to be this major demon king or a lich that came in and destroyed the city. It can be a natural disaster and that can be a lot of fun, because players oftentimes don't think about huh.
Speaker 1:Maybe I should wonder why these people left. They just go to explore it because it's old and they don't think about it.
Speaker 2:And sometimes, depending on how you set up your villain, those ruins could be because of your villain and reveal something about them, like oh, they were here 200 years ago and they're a human. Something's off there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and with your villains there's this big component of should they be statically in place, and the answer to that is almost always no. Like your villains, if they're really this world ending issue, they're not going to be in one place. That's just not realistic. If they're trying to destroy the whole world, they're not going to just sit up in their castle and wait for the world to be destroyed by their minions. They're going to be out there on the front line prepping recruiting.
Speaker 2:They're going to be doing something, and sometimes that could be consolidation into one location so you could even if they're not like you know your biggest evil like we're going to destroy the world, but they're like that, we're going to take over. They could be consolidating all a lot of their forces to take out a neighboring kingdom and they're going to be there or somewhere where they can oversee what's happening, as opposed to sitting back 100 miles away in a castle some way. Then they're just a emperor trying to expand an empire, as opposed to a villain who's trying to enact some dark plan.
Speaker 1:And you can have the emperor be your bad guy who's sitting back in their castle. But if that's going to be the type of campaign, you're going to run, and you're going to run this old fantasy style.
Speaker 1:We're trying to save this nation that is being attacked by an unjust empire. That villain isn't going to be the. The world is ending, so it's just about fitting the theme of your plot then, because not every campaign has to be a earth shattering, world ending situation. Now, as the game goes on, yes, it's going to have to be larger and larger scale issues, but that doesn't always have to be the case. You can end a campaign before you get to the world saving portion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially if you look at those like if you don't plan to get hit level 20, if you're only going to like 12, maybe 15, your ending to your campaign doesn't have to be we stopped the world from being consumed. It can be something as simple as well. We defeated this villain who was destroying people's lives around him. And was he going to destroy the world? No, he was just going to make it an unfun place to be.
Speaker 1:And like you can have. So really fun campaign I ran once upon a time was the whole goal was to stop an evil empire that was expanding, pretty basic, pretty lackluster, and they freed the nation, but none of my party stayed behind to help rebuild the nation. They just dipped and went into retirement and that's where the campaign ended, because that's where my players wanted to end. That's where they felt satisfied with the ending. Well then I could put I got to play a second session a couple years later where there was a completely different problem because of the political things, where the nation fell apart after they crushed the emperor, so there was no form of power left and so the nation fell into anarchy. And now the players got to again run it a generation later and they got to rebuild a nation, which can be a fun campaign. Idea is building a nation. Having a political themed campaign can actually be a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Especially if you're going for like a political vibe. I would almost advise for your campaign. If you're going for political, the world map is less important for it but include something else. So because usually if you're doing a political campaign it's not going to be as much fighting, have something for there to be a little bit of that like feel of competition, or you need to do stuff right without just being a little combat.
Speaker 1:So if you're going to do a political campaign, I would I would highly advise still building out a full world map, and the reason behind it is you need to know where other nations are. You need to have an idea of the tension where the ruins are things that people might fight over and then have reasons why your players are trying to defend those areas, because sometimes, if another nation's trying to push them off of the water, they're not going to survive without water, like that's another thing. Or there might be these ancient ruins where they just discovered an, a lost magic. That's going to be something worth fighting over and your players need to keep that in mind. But my favorite thing with political campaigns is that you can gear them more towards the skill monkey classes. Like you can have your clerics that are healers. They're going to be loved by the people because they're helping people. You can have your rogues to kind of steal information. You can really just kind of go into it and have a political campaign.
Speaker 2:The biggest thing with that like making sure, especially if you're doing like non-traditional campaigns is you need that big picture map. You don't need, as like, specific pictures like, oh, the little town 20 miles away, that town don't matter that much and the grand scheme of it. What's going to matter is oh, there's this giant body of water another group is trying to encroach and untake. That's what's going to be your big deal on your maps, as opposed to any specific like small details type of thing. Any detail on those maps has to be impactful to the world, as opposed to just your party.
Speaker 1:And if you're building a campaign that's around a political setting, definitely, whenever you finish a campaign with players, keep the old maps. If you keep the old maps and the specific maps, if the players have to go to the western coast of the country that they're in to stop an invasion or to help with a monster crisis or a food crisis, if you're doing a political campaign, that could be a town that they experienced in their last campaign and then it's a nice little nostalgia thing Cause for the character aspect. Be like oh, this is the city where the ancient heroes had their final face off. You can keep those kind of intricate little towns and use them in a different way. That feels a lot more rewarding and it's going to add a nostalgia piece to your campaign that is going to keep your players coming back and interested in that political campaign without having to have combat.
Speaker 2:When you do like a one world map for multiple campaigns like for me, the Easter eggs you're going you should try to include, is not in that like first campaign, it's in your second or third, where we're then making those nods back to our previous adventures through this world of oh, the heroes were here, they destroyed some evil. And what can also be fun with that is if you do something a little sneaky and you make it so our heroes have been like vilified or deified or any of those. So then your party, if it's the same place, we'll be like. That seems wrong, what, and kind of curious about what's going on in that like out of the town realm, like maybe the heroes showed up, they beat the villain and then a plague hit. Oh, those heroes brought the plague with them.
Speaker 1:Now yeah yeah, and vilifying your players can be a lot of fun, and adding those little throwbacks to your former campaign is honestly, just a great way to keep it spiced up. I will say, though, all of this is really useful whether you're building your own world map or you're using a preexisting one. If you check out the Sword Coast, where a lot of the forgotten realms campaigns take place, most of the towns are built on lakes, rivers, things like that, and they're used in very similar ways, and it's it's really beneficial. So when you're really digesting some of this information, make sure that you're paying attention to it, because it is already prevalent in a lot of D&D stuff. Um, and, regardless, it doesn't really matter that much if you use a preexisting map or not. It's really good. We've gotten to this point where it's super flexible.
Speaker 1:Wizards has put out what at this point? Seven different world maps that you can use. It's it's getting to be quite a bit, so you don't have to make your own world map, but, regardless, all of these principles kind of play into each other a little bit. For new players. I really struggle, especially for new DMs, to give the five most important things to pay attention to, and when I've given advice to DMs in the past. I've told them because I've literally been asked this question. So the five things I would say are most important are nations, oceans, mountains, rivers, and then, like your dungeons and your ancient ruins. Those would be the five things I would tell new DMs to look at when they're building a world map.
Speaker 2:So I think because of the ancient buildings and ancient stuff can be kind of in a separate little spot for now, right Because you can add in later as you decide to build and spice certain areas up and add some things in when originally generating.
Speaker 2:To me, the most important are your rivers. That's where your big nations are going to start and they are going to survive there, like you can see that in the real world with like China, which has been there since the start, india has been there since the start, egypt's been there since the start, like the only one who hasn't is like Mesopotamia and every other one has been there. They might have moved a little bit but they are still existing. So, kind of keeping those like where are my rivers and where are my origins? Then another one that's odd is any major geographical feature, whether it be a desert, a mountain. All of those matter to where you are building your cities. And then cities are obviously important because that's where all of your people are going to be.
Speaker 1:And then, kind of those are those three biggest ones to me as making sure you have your cities, your major geographical obstacles, and then your water sources and where these places are starting up out of Okay, that makes sense Things you mentioned that are just really useful in the Indian general lakes, rivers, deserts, mountains and the challenge really is and I think it may depend on what campaign you're in I disagree with that slightly. I would say it is important to name all of your mountain ranges, your major rivers, your deserts before your campaign starts, because then you have something consistent that you don't have to come up with on the fly to kind of base everything off of. I've seen people and I've even tried to do it myself where you do it as you're going. It's not worth your time. It takes way more time and puts you way more on the spot than you need to be. Who needs that stress in their life? Just have it written down beforehand. That would be a big piece of advice from me personally.
Speaker 2:I think it's important to have those specific regions named and marked as these are important spots and this is kind of a thing with how your world impacts your small into the smaller areas when you shrink down towards, like your major cities.
Speaker 2:One of the things you want to pay attention to is how are they? Because all of your cities are going to have walls or something to defend them. Different cities, depending on where you're placing these on the map, are going to have something different to protect themselves. So, for like, using the real world, for an example, a country like Egypt didn't have any major walls because they were covered by a desert and a body of water. So you need to, you can pay attention to these like details as to how these different regions are defending themselves in the real world, to then portray it onto the outside world. And you can even have something silly like, if you know Greek history, sparta never built walls because they were like we're too scary to need walls. No one's going to try to touch us. And you can include those like quirks of your nations into your design of their cities and as you're shrinking down from your overall world.
Speaker 1:And I would say, definitely an important thing to remember when you're considering that is the larger the city, the more likely they are to actually have walls.
Speaker 1:All right, and that's all we have for today. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you're checking out our YouTube, where we post exclusive content, including some reviews of certain books and other products, as well as we give some more insight and talk about, like characters that we've built, things that we've enjoyed in D&D and, overall, just provide more content. Also, check out our Patreon if you'd like to support the show. We also released there articles that are kind of in the same format as a D&D book, at least appearance wise, that kind of talk about elaborations from what we go over in the show.