If you want to draw a sweet custom world map for your next homebrewed world but aren’t sure where to start, here are five things to try!
Fantasy worlds and maps go hand in hand like chocolate and peanut butter, lemon and sour cream, cheese and rice – whatever iconic food pairing you can think of, really. You got a fantasy world? It wants a map. Having a good map can make even the most copy-pasted world feel like its own special little place.
But where do you get started? What if you can’t draw? It’s fine – you don’t have to be a super artist to make a world; all you need is a pen (or other drawing implement) and some dice. Or rice. Or what have you, let’s check it out.
Pen And Rice
You could use rice, lentils, or any other sort of easily scattered thing that if you threw a handful of it on paper would spread out in interesting shapes. You dump a handful on a piece of paper, shake it around just a little, and then use the grains to form an outline of the world. Trace some interesting lines around the edges of them, and figure out what’s land and what’s water. Then you have your world map drawn out.
Roll ‘n Write
You could also get a little bit more in depth with it. Get a handful of different kinds of dice (shapes or colors or what have you) and roll them across your map paper. Decide beforehand that, say, d20s are shoreline, d4s are lakes, d6s are mountains, and so on – and then you can populate the world with different features that feel like they’re there for the world.
Take An Existing Thing Flip It, Reverse It
If you don’t want to do that – you can also take an existing map, of like a country or a state, and then just flip it on its axis. Maybe spin it around. If you really want to go crazy, take two things and then flip them around and put ’em together, then look for places to put rivers or mountains or forests or whatever and you’ve got your world map into a workable shape.
That’s So Random
You can also use a handy random world map generator, like Azgaar’s or DonJon, to generate yourself the seed of a world map, and then you go around and put some various biomes and elves and dwarves until it feels like you’ve got a fantasy map. If you really want to go all in on random, you could get an oracle chart and roll up for each of the different features you want to add to your world.
Get *Extremely* Into Plate Tectonics
Or if you really want – the sort of deepest dive possible – you can model your world from plate tectonics up. There are a few different ways to do it, but you start with the idea of your oceanic and continental plates, figure out where they run into each other, which generates your mountains and trenches and seas. And then you put your biomes into place according to “simulated geology” and whatever else feels good. Also there are programs that can do this for you. If you really want to soothe the brain itch, this is perhaps the deepest way to do so.
What do you like to do when drawing your own world map?
Don’t Miss:
Read more at this site