10 Rules for Believable Fantasy Maps

These are my eleven

rules

for making

fantasy

maps

more

believable

or realistic, but wait, isn't that an oxymoron? Let's talk hello everyone, my name is Nate and this is WASD 20, a channel about tabletop role playing games and

fantasy

maps

, and now in today's video. Let's cover my

rules

for creating more

believable

fantasy maps, creating worlds that will stand up to some scientific scrutiny. Now you might want to completely ignore these rules and I'm telling you, you have my permission, go ahead, I think it's totally fine. I started drawing maps not worrying too much about what was realistic, doing a little research here or there, but just wanting to relax, draw maps and have fun and I personally think it's great so continue if that's your thing because in Instead of the way things have formed here on earth, you may prefer that huge titans or ancient curses or dragons or fire or magic have shaped your world to be the way it is, but my goal for this video is to help you plan how to ignore the rules. of science and instead use magic with purposeful intent and not be caught off guard by some of the seemingly unrealistic elements of your world or your map and then have to go back and find a magical explanation for it now that you can It's not a big task.

I try if you're playing D&D with some friends, although some players may find the immersion broken if things aren't believable. However, it's much more important if you ever think you might want to publish something with this setup you've created as a novel. or an RPG supplement, at which point your work will be subject to much more public scrutiny and it's a good idea to think about some of these things. Well, with that out of the way, let's get on with the rules, the ten commandments of fantasy map creation. The first two tips have to do with water and specifically rivers, which are a very common place to see errors in fantasy maps.

Probably one of the biggest ones is that rivers don't split as they flow, but rather if you see a fork in a river. On a map, there will usually be rivers that join together into a larger flow, so that is an area I commonly see on maps. Rivers generally do not divide. There are exceptions to this, but it is extremely rare. One exception is that of a delta. What's actually happening with a delta is that you get a lot of sediment or silt that flows downstream and gets deposited near the mouth of the river, so what you see is not so much the river splitting up as it is splitting up. sees the mouth of the river widens and small islands of silt are deposited and formed there.

These small landmasses often change with the seasons, but it is not the same as a river dividing, so I urge you, in general, not to divide rivers, but to have them. come together when you see these paths that branch off into rivers, think about flowing from the highest points to the lowest points and joining together as they exit to a lake or the sea, one of the things to keep in mind is that the water It will always be flowing to the lowest points it can, it will take the path of least resistance and gravity will play a role in where the water flows and that brings us to our second rule, which is also related and that is that a lake is Generally there will only be one river draining it to another lake or the sea, perhaps now there may be some cases where a lake has no river draining it.

I think the Caspian Sea, for example, is only drained by evaporation and that is a factor in that there is this kind of balance that has been maintained due to water flowing in and an equal amount of water evaporating more or less , but when you have a river draining a lake, you only have one because it is extremely unlikely. that you'll have two equally low points or the water will go, you'll just pick the lowest point and go there and the last one which I don't see very often, but I've seen a little bit, is there.

There will be no rivers from coast to coast, say it with me now, there will be no rivers from coast to coast. I mean, really what's going on there is it's not even a river at that point, if you have a river from coast to coast, it's There will be two separate land masses that will be seeds there, you won't see the Costa COE river because the water It will start at a high point, flow to a low point, a great place to start when you're thinking. about where the river should go is to start with the mountains and then give them a path towards the sea.

You'll probably have a few tributaries into that main river here and there, maybe multiple types of streams coming off the mountain into a river that flows into a larger river. River and all that, so thinking about where the water will accumulate to melt the snow is a great thing to think about in the mountains, that's how I usually do it, if you have mountains that have a decent amount of precipitation, you'll see it coming some rivers. out of those mountains and I usually make them flow towards the sea, it can be a very winding path, but understand that when you make the path of that river you are deciding the low points of the land before moving on to the next rules.

I would like to take a moment to thank my sponsor for this video. World and city. One of the challenges for us world builders and game masters is keeping all this content organized and World Anvil is the best way I've seen to do it. the go-to place to organize world-building notes and story arcs and the ability to link content in wiki format gives you all the campaign and story information you need at your fingertips at any time, Whether you want to create an engaging timeline for your world's history, upload your map and add notes and tags or keep track of all your NPCs.

The global wrapper covers all of this and more. It's definitely worth checking out and you can try it for free right now at World Anvil Comm or just use the link in the video description and now the fourth rule is that there will be no lonely mountains, you won't draw a lonely mountain unless you have a very good reason and usually that will be magical in nature because naturally mountains are going to be created by factors that will tend to create many mountains, a mountain range, whether it's plate tectonics or volcanic activity or something else, the things that create mountains don't just create one now I know what some of you are thinking, what about the A Lone Mountain in Middle Earth is something like this actually possible in the real world, well the answer is pretty much yes , because when you get a fuller picture of Middle Earth you realize that the lonely isn't really so lonely, you have the gray. mountains pretty close to the Mirkwood Mountains and the Iron Hills so I guess it depends on how lonely we are talking here and something like this would technically in the real world be possible and would most likely be due to the volcanic activity that creates the activity. volcanic. mountains in a much more sporadic manner that can create a few more scattered peaks here and there, so the Lonely Mountain is possible, but it would probably have blown off its top at this point in the real world.

If you look at the Mount Kilimanjaro volcano, you notice that it appears. quite lonely depending on the angle of the photo, but in other photos we can notice that he has some friends nearby who, as evident from this map, are also volcanoes, so there is something romantic about a single mountain on a flat plane. and there could be a magical reason for that, for example some titans or giants that one builds once built a big tower there and it collapsed and these are the ruins of this mountain now, that's cool, I love it, but if you're trying to make things believable. naturally, so don't put a single mountain, create mountain ranges, most mountain ranges on Earth tend to form from north to south, we'll get to that a little when we get to plate tectonics, but your mountains can't .

To form a line, they can form a group in any way, group your mountains together and look at the shapes of the mountain ranges on the land when deciding how you want to place yours. It is also related to mountain rule number 5, consider the rain shadow effect. In most places in the world you see that one side of a mountain is usually very lush and rains a lot and the other side is quite arid and you can't see this everywhere in Western Washington, we had the Cascade Mountains, so on the coastal side of the Cascades it is very humid and on the east side of the mountains it is comparatively quite dry.

If I try to explain the science, I'll probably mess it up, but what the hell is going on here so what! what you generally see is that the wind blows in one direction, there is a predominant wind direction over a mountain range on the side where the wind blows, you see a lot of moisture building up in the air and releasing as it goes higher and higher over the mountain range on one side of the mountain range and therefore on the other side, as the wind comes down, there is not much moisture left in that air and therefore it will be much drier.

This is seen in the Cascade Mountain Range, it is seen in the Himalayas. Look at it in Hawaii and in most places you will find that the coastal side, the side closest to this sea, will be the wet side, but not always in South America, for example the east side of the Andes mountains is the wet side. humid and the coastal side, the west coast, is actually much drier and that is again due to the direction of the prevailing winds, also the east side of the Andes mountains, yes that is the Amazon rainforest side , so what that means for you and your worlds is that you're generally We're not going to see lush forested areas on either side of a mountain range.

Okay, now let's get into this sordid plate tectonic territory. Rule number six is ​​to consider the shape of land masses. First of all, I want to say that I have a lot of the information for this video from a book called The Magical Society's Guide to Mapping. It's actually a free pdf and has a lot of good information. The design and art leave something to be desired, but it serves its purpose and is chargeable. whatever you want or free, I think in Drive Thru RPG, so I will definitely put a link in the video description, pick it up if you want more details or if my explanations seem insufficient to you, this book will probably have you covered.

I should do it too. Keep in mind that sometimes when drawing fantasy maps we are not drawing a complete globe and that is usually the case for me when I draw a fantasy world. I'm using world in the sense that the inhabitants would use that word that the creatures that live here would call this area is their world this is their known world but I generally don't draw a planet or an entire globe and I think that's perfectly fine to some. People like to start with the big picture and build the whole world. I'm not one of those people who Generally, I like to start with an area partly because I feel like it makes the stories a little more up close and personal when you're not talking about an entire globe but about yourself and if you're doing the effect of the entire globe then it is very important Think about plate tectonics, how did these land masses fit together if this is an older world?

Imagine that they used to fit together and shaped their continents. So, think about how Earth's landmasses used to be one in Pangea and are now separate. but you can still see evidence of how they used to fit together. A curious observer may notice this by looking at a globe and saying, "Oh yeah, I can see that it probably used to fit in there," so do the same thing in your world and understand that. There are also tools available to you. I mentioned one in a video a while ago. You can see that this web app is really good at simulating plate tectonics for randomly generated land masses and it's really cool, so if you're not very good at it.

There are tools to do that, but understand that you can also usually create landmasses any way you want and sort of modernize your tectonic plates and decide, okay, this is the way it used to fit here. and then use this to fit here and these. the plates are moving in this direction and you can do that within reason with many existing maps where you already have rule number seven to consider how plate tectonics has shaped your mountains and this one again you can usually modernize it after the fact and decide where your mountains are. But in general, again we see mountain ranges going from north to south on Earth because of the way our tectonic plates have shifted and we often see mountains forming in coastal areas.

Think about the Cascades, the Appalachians, the Andes Mountains, these mountain ranges were. formed by a mix of volcanic activity sometimes but also by plate subduction where one plate passes under the other. I'll show some pages from a magical society so you can see this illustrated a little better, but subduction means that a plate sinks. another as they come together and usually form mountains where it's not subducting, some of the biggest mountains on earth were actually formed by one tectonic plate that just slammed into another completely and that's India, that used to bepart of Africa broke away and then collided with the Eurasian tectonic plate, that collision resulted in some massive mountains.

One last thing I will say is that mountains are often formed by volcanic activity, there may be a thin part of the earth's crust for example where magma or melt is found. The rock has arisen and formed some islands and often mountains and volcanoes. This is the case with Hawaii and these form really cool island chains that are often quite rugged and mountainous and sometimes volcanic, so we could go into a lot more detail. About that, but again consider how plate tectonics may have formed some of its mountain ranges. Well, our next two rules will relate to Rule number eight of settlements is that settlements will generally be found near water.

Water has traditionally been a very important part of life for humans, elves, dwarves, or those fleeing the deep, so think about where it would be advantageous for life, places that would be good. ports are not important and places that have enough water to support agriculture and other ways in which water is necessary for life. I often make exceptions to this for dwarven settlements that are in the rockiest mountains possible because dwarves aren't rocks or maybe there are underground rivers down there, I don't know, so place your settlements in good port areas that they can access. We'll get there at number nine and rivers and lakes and things like that will be fantastic places for creatures to try to build civilizations. water sustains life, there are certainly other factors, so consider why people would build a settlement here in this place and rule number nine, let's talk about port cities, ports will usually be found in places that are not right on the coast , right in a very exposed area but rather a bit like a bay or a harbor or an area protected from wind and rough waters, so instead of placing your port cities on these precipices or the edge of a peninsula, think of a little more protected area and it could even be a little inland so to speak, it could be on a river or lake near a Great Sea, but certainly a harbor or a small inlet will be a great place for a port city.

Another thing to consider is that it will generally be very deep water and maybe don't think too much about that when you're building your world, you know that if there is a reef it may not be the best place to spawn our bure so ships can come in and come out easily without having to fear scraping the bottom and the ports will usually be found in places that are ice free all year round, so if you have a very cold area and there is a place that is not ice free fairly close, that will be a more likely location for a port city if your world is a frozen wasteland like the state of Michigan right now then it will be a bit of a challenge, these people will still build ports somewhere but if given the option in the Most likely place will be rule number ten without ice all year round.

Let's consider the weather now. I'm not going to get into a lot of climate science here because it's really very difficult and would just take a lot more time than we have. but I would recommend that, in general, you keep things similar to what you've noticed on Earth, so that very, very hot areas are not right next to very, very cold areas and there will be some rhyme or reason that is usually will find. The polar regions are colder and closer to some type of equator. They get warm. Use common sense and personally on my maps I tend to narrow down the climate zones beyond what you would actually find on Earth and I'm okay with that, but generally I keep things.

Very similar to Earth, keeping your world at a 45 degree tilt and about the same size as Earth will just keep things simple and ensure you don't trip over the weeds of climate science anyway, on this again, not too much. Science just uses common sense and thinks about how things are on Earth and certainly this is a place where you can become magical if you want to go while the witch is in the closet, always in winter and never on Christmas, you can do that. some kind of ancient curse that keeps an area particularly hot or cold or the presence of some magical being or artifact, these can be fun things to play with, so go ahead and that brings me to rule number 11, breaking the rules, I think that's it.

He pointed out several ways that there are exceptions to the rules here and there and there are also ways that magic and magical beings can play a role in shaping your world and you don't have to get too caught up in real world science. if you don't want to do it if it's not something you enjoy and you don't see that it serves a great purpose, break the rules like crazy, just understand that it can be immersive for some people and if you ever hope to share this world with the public it's going to be under scrutiny that could cause them some pain.

Okay, eleven rules is where we're going to leave it all. There's a lot more we could say and I'd love to hear some of your rules for worldbuilding or Matt comments in the comments that some of you have a lot more experience with this than I do. I'm kind of a tourist when it comes to delving into the science of worldbuilding and I'm very new to this, there are still some. I've picked up little bits here and there and certainly A Magical Society was helpful as I read it recently, so I hope you found this useful in helping you create worlds that are more believable.

Hey, if you like drawing maps as much as I do, let's go. Go to the WASD 20 Discord server, where there is actually a map channel where people can share maps and get feedback. I'm posting there, other people are posting a lot of great map threads, so check us out on Discord, there are a lot of great RPGs out there. There is a discussion about the world building game master. It's just a fun place to hang out before we leave. I really want to say a huge thank you to my sponsors for their support of this channel.

These people make these videos possible and I'm very grateful for their generous support, there are also some cool rewards and you can check them out for yourself on patreon.com WASD slash 21 of those rewards is a quarterly encounter map right now now I'll probably make a video about my first quarterly encounter map which is a shipwreck in a desert oasis, what a great idea. It was an idea that one of my sponsors came up with and then all of my sponsors voted on many of the ideas. We just hit 50 patrons and when I hit 100, I'm actually going to start making the quarterly encounter map a monthly encounter map, so I'd love for you to join as the newest member of the patron army.

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