1. Draw in the ridgeline

Draw in the ridgeline of the mountains. Add bumps and wiggles and allow the path to wander.

2. Add Slopes

With the ridgeline in place, take lines off from the angles in the ridgeline. Basically anywhere your ridgeline changes direction you can draw a ridge ciming off. These should be steeper near the crest and smooth out towards the edge to show sharp peaks.

3. Add Shading

Here I’ve laid in shadows with some basic hatching. Use lines far apart for a lighter shadow and closer hatching for deeper shadows. Keep your deeper shadows to the top of the ridgeline (where it’s steepest) and in valleys and crevasses. You can also skip the hatching and import the lineart into a digital editing program and shade your mountains there.

For more tutorials, check out the Tutorials section.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now.

A map shouldn’t be pretty.

I know what you’re thinking – those posters of Middle Earth are gorgeous. Of course a map should be beautiful. But for worldbuilding purposes a pretty map is a Very Bad Thing. Beautiful things are precious, and we tend to want to leave precious things pristine and untouched. When we’re building worlds we need to break things, and often. So, out with any thoughts that we’re making a pretty map. We’ll be making a functional map. In fact we’ll be making many maps, one after the other. In exactly the same way that your notes are not the final manuscript, a map isn’t the final world. It’s a visual notepad, and you should be crossing things out, erasing sections and rebuilding from scratch as you go along.

So we won’t be needing photoshop today, we need a pad of scratch paper and a pencil. Right, let’s build a world.

First of all, think about the ‘world’ you need to build. In many cases this is a defined area that’s much smaller than the planet you’re on. Very few stories truly span a globe, so let’s begin by cutting down to the area that the story explores. This keeps the work focused on a reasonable area, and means there will always be distant and mysterious lands to explore down the line.

In your tale there will be nations, city states or power centers of some form. Start by making a note of their relationships to one another. Are they at war? Are they aloof? Do they feud over resources or are they closely allied? Think over the things that make them stand out. Are they famous for their expansive grain fields? Their iron? Their navy? I’m sure you can see the theme here. Nations are defined by the geography they inhabit as much as we define the geography by the nation. A nation with a large navy needs sea access, but it should also have natural defences like a mountain range that allows the nation to neglect other military forces in favour of it’s navy. Two countries at war need to be close, and need to have a means of attacking one another.

Focus on major terrain at this point – how much coastline and mountain ranges. Make notes about other terrain that comes to mind – the tulip fields of Alak’tor, the salt mines of Keshel – those will come in useful later.

1. Rough shapes – these are six interconnected nations

It’s now time to start our map. Grab a pencil and faintly draw in circles where your nations are. Nations that are allies or at war should be close. Those that rarely interact should be further away, or will have an insurmountable natural barrier between them. Drawing circles on a map may sound easy, but this stage can take a few tries to get the relationships right.

2. The coastlines. Keep them broken and random

But circles aren’t really a map. Let’s draw some coastlines. Think about which of your nations need large coastlines and which should be landlocked. Then let your pen wander. Really – avoid straight lines. Coastlines are jagged and broken things. If your line doesn’t look like it was plotted by a drunken ant, you’re doing it wrong.

3. Mountains – they shouldn’t be pretty, inverted triangles do the job just fine

Now let’s lay in some mountains. Mountains tend to form ridges. Avoid the temptation to fill in whole blocks of land with mountains. Instead, lay them out in wavy lines. They often follow the edge of a coastline (think the Andes). From a story point of view, they form obstacles for your heroes and they create natural boundaries between nations, or between nations and the great unknown. Mountains also create boundaries between climates. So if you need a desert in one area and a jungle in the other, you’d better place a mountain range between them to stop the rain from the jungle getting to the desert.

4. As rivers run to the coast they only join, they never branch

Next up, we have rivers. Rain falls on mountains and runs downhill to the sea. It always flows to the lowest point – and there’s always one lowest point. This means that rivers don’t branch as they flow to the sea, they only join. So – no rivers going from coast to coast. At some point that requires water to flow uphill. No lakes that have two separate rivers leading to the sea – remember, only one lowest point leading out. Think of a river like a tree. There’s one trunk where it enters the sea, but a panoply of branches reaching towards the mountains.

Rivers are also strategically important. There’s hardly a rivermouth in the world without a town on it and most great cities lie on a river. If you know where your cities are going to be, make sure there’s a decent sized river flowing through them. Equally, rivers make great defences. It’s hard to build a wall all the way along your nation’s border, but it’s almost as hard to get an army over a well defended river as it is to have them scale a wall.

5. Hills and Forests, add them wherever you see fit. These are easily moved.

Add some hills to the edge of your mountain ranges. Lay in some forest and see how it looks. Remember, don’t be precious. If you don’t like it – start on a new sheet of paper. Sketch another coastline. Turn it upside down.

When you’re happy with the terrain, go over the pencil lines with pen, and erase the pencil – including your nation boundaries. Scan and photocopy the map. Go away and have some food.

When you come back, try the following experiment. Ignore your previous nations. Look at the virgin world with a new eye. If you were founding a country in the world, where would you start? What would be the key strategic choke points? Look at the world as if you were playing Civ. Where are the resources you need to defend, what lands would you try to annex? Use some coloured pencils to sketch in different nations and boundaries. Edit the rivers if you need to, move things around. You’ve got lots of copies of the map, experiment.

Once you have a layout you like, we’ll add cities.

Cities are where they are for a reason – they don’t just appear up in the middle of nowhere. Population centers need food, water, trade and security. Rivers can provide all of  these, which is why towns and cities tend to spring up at river mouths. Locate your capitals in places that are easily defended and that have good transport connections to the rest of the nation. Place smaller cities in key locations, whether that’s in the heart of a mining community on the edge of a mountain range, at a key strategic river crossing, or a market town in the middle of leagues of prime cattle ranching land. At this point, also mark in major fortifications.

6. Place cities, towns and fortifications

With these indicated it’s a simple matter to place the roads. These will connect the major cities, the main food producing regions, and any other major trade routes.

You now have a perfectly functional map! But remember, nothing is set in stone. Each time you run through this process your map will be better. Each time you sketch the map you’ll have new ideas. As you continue to write about your world you’ll come up with new thoughts on what terrain you should have, how two countries relate across their border, where a great wilderness needs to be. Redraw the map – it’s there for you. Both your mapdrawing and your text will be better for the relationship between map and story.

And when your manuscript is ready to go from draft to final, your map will be ready to go from sketch to illustration. But that’s a post for another day.

This is a long post, but not as long as an article I wrote on a similar topic for the Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding. If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, then definitely consider picking up the book – it’s got lots of good stuff along these lines. 

To give you an idea of how a map like this evolves, here’s an intermediate stage. At this point I was happy with the style of the mountains, but I still had a long way to go with the colour palette and overall styling:

However, this provided a good overall view of the map, and could be signed off before the styling was finished up. To see more of the world, check out the Heroes of the Jade Oath book in pdf and print, or the poster map on Cafepress!

1. Hatching

This just looks great. There’s no doubt about it. If you want to see a great example of this style, check out matt jackson‘s work. When I’m doing hatching I tend to do loose hatching first – with each set of lines blocking out a square of space. Then I go back in and fill in the remaining space with lines. The hatches are 2-3 blocks deep around the walls.

After hatching the walls, I go back over the wall lines again to make them darker. Or you can do what Matt does, and use a heavier weight pen for the walls than for the hatching.

2. More basic hatching

In this case I’ve gone more simple. This is a simple shading with 45 degree lines. I then go back over the region closer to the wall with another set of lines at right angles to the first set. This helps darken the region close in and lends a sense of depth. The main advantage of this is speed.

3. Circles

This style lends itself to dungeons in loose rock or earth. Draw dots around the walls, with a higher density close in and fewer dots further out. This can be very time consuming but it gives a nice effect. It’s also the easiest style to encode in a photoshop or Gimp brush which speeds things up a lot.

A map is a complex image. We want to be able to access the important information quickly. To do this we can use three things the human brain does very well – identify things that don’t fit the pattern, notice detail and focus on contrast. By giving out featured buildings interesting shapes we break any pattern of regular rooftops, and by detail and tonal contrast, we help the eye focus on them amongst the sea of buildings.

1. Design the outline

Historically, the most likely shape for almost any building is a rectangle. But that’s pretty boring on a map. How do you know that a building is special from overhead if they’re all rectangles? Here I’ve drawn three outlines for three featured buildings.

Inn

The Inn has a main building, a stables and an outhouse/privy. The whole area is surrounded by a wall or fence, and the central area has a courtyard. The negative space (the courtyard) will stand out in a top down map.

Temple

Temples are fancy. They’re meant to impress, and they’re meant to dominate. This means buttresses and spires. I’ve avoided anything that might look like a cross – as that’s always going to break any sense of disbelief – but the same principles apply. Add off-shoots and extensions. If it’s a lawful god, make the building symmetrical. If it’s chaotic, make it a rambling sprawl, if it’s militaristic, add towers and gates. Circular buildings and domes are a good choice here too, especially when using graphics tools that make perfect circles easy.

Castle

There’s a lot to be written about castle design, so I’m not even going to try here. I’ve gone with a simple keep/fortified manor house and a curtain wall. Tower guard the vulnerable corners, and there’s a hefty gate guarding the entrance.

2. Add Detail

Here we add some lines to give some sense of the detail. Our eyes are drawn to detail naturally, so if you add more detailing to your featured buildings, they’ll stand out in a map. Here I’ve added lines to indicate thatching or tiles to the Inn. The temple also gets some tiles, as well as a turret or bell-tower at one end, and some little roof elements. The castle picks up walkways on the walls, detailing on the keep’s roof and some internal buildings in the castle grounds (well, we all need somewhere to keep the foot soldiers, hawks and the horses).

3. Shading

So this is going to be different depending on the medium your using, but it’s the point where the building stops being a flat sketch and starts to take on some life. Pick a direction for the light, and shade in blocks away from that direction. Note that buildings cast geometric shadows, and that shadows have different depths. The Inn gets simple geometric shadows, and a lighter shadow on the right side of the roofline. The temple i more complex – I use the shadows to emphasise the height of the tower, and the height of the buttresses. The castle gets the most work – each tower gets a long shadow, and I also added a set of battlements to indicate the crenelations on the walls. Deeper shadows here and there help to call out specific architectural features.

If you’d like to see these techniques in a finished map, check out my Iconic Town pack.

As always you can find more tutorials in the Tips and Tricks section.

The town that started as a very rough sketch has now been turned into a full blown map pack, and is for sale on RPGNow and Paizo.

Here’s the rough sketch that started it all:

Rough sketch of the town map – laying out ideas

From that sketch I picked up some great ideas for locations in the town from the community on Google+, facebook and the Cartographers’ Guild. Armed with that list, I dug in, drew the featured locations, all the individual houses and finally added the tone and colour. This is the result!

The map pack contains both labeled and unlabeled high res jpgs. There’s also a muti-page pdf designed for printing at home (in colour and light greyscale, and in letter and A4 for maximum ease of use). When printed out, the map will cover 33″ by 25.5″ – which is a lot of town for players to get lost in.

In addition, the pack includes 33 buildings as individual pngs with transparent backgrounds for use in any personal non-commercial project. So you can extend this town to the north into the fields on top of the cliff, or start anew in another map and build your own city.

Contact sheet of buildings for the Iconic Town

As you can see, the town map contains a waterwheel – powering a stone elevator, multiple temples, guildhouses, inns, a stone mason, smith, mysterious stone circle and a lighthouse. What more could you want for a base for adventure and skullduggery? Grab your copy here.

1. Add your first ripple
First, draw the coastline in a nice dark brush – or press relatively heavily with your pen (this was a ballpoint on sketchbook paper). Then, pressing more lightly to get a fainter line, draw a parallel line to the coast. Where your coastline is ragged and fractal, this line should be smooth and flowing. Follow the edge, but smooth off the sharper edges. Try to keep the same distance from the coast as you draw.

2. Add in the rest
Now repeat this with successive lines. Each time you add another line, increase the spacing slightly. Also, smooth off the sharper corners of the line inside. If you have an inlet (like I’ve got here), don’t cram the lines in to get through – smooth over the inlet, and draw another set of disconnected ripples within.

This looks good with a light blue wash around the coastal edge, so this doesn’t have to be just a black and white map technique.

Journeys, © George RR Martin 2012, used with permission

The characters in A Song of Ice and Fire certainly cover some ground. In this map all the named characters get a path and we can follow their progress (and often their untimely end) by following their lifelines. Each line has a colour that corresponds in most cases to their house. So the Starks are in shades of blue, the Lannisters get golden yellows, and Melisandre of course is a deep red. The paths in these maps were all researched and charted by Elio and Linda at Westeros.org. This map could not have been created without their thorough and painstaking work.

If you’ve not read to the end of Dance with Dragons, don’t look too closely as this definitely contains spoilers.

Some locations act as natural hubs in the books. Obviously the Kingsroad looks like a multi-lane highway, and as I mentioned earlier in the week – everyone stops for a drink and a bite of food at the Inn at the Crossroads:

Harrenhal and the Inn at the Crossroads © George RR Martin, used with permission

I cheated a little here, and the parade of characters from Winterfell to King’s Landing that begins the books is a single golden yellow. However once things go south in King’s Landing, the lines burst forth in a multicoloured web of intrigue. You can also see here that when two characters travel together they get a dashed line. Can you guess the colours heading over the Mountains of the Moon?

Winterfell is another hub throughout the books, and the convergence of lines tells the story of the hands it passes through in the course of the books:

Winterfell © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

There was some discussion about adding a legend to this map with each of the character colours. It was decided to drop it, as the colours themselves give the hint as to the character, and there are labels on the lines regularly to help you pull out which character you’re following. The background on this map was faded intentionally to make it a little easier to pull out the lifelines.

Off to the West we have Pyke – another family seat, and once Theon goes home we get a lot of points of view from the Iron Islands:

Iron Islands © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

Finally, the paths aren’t just confined to Westeros. There’s a parallel tale taking place across the Narrow Sea. Daenerys gets purple, and her line travels East – followed by an ever increasing number of lines as the series progresses:

Daenerys © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

The routes are complex but they tell the story of intrigue, alliance, capture and ransom. And, like a transit map, often the end of the line means the service has terminated. The parallel to a transit map is unmistakeable, and for fun I quickly threw together a version of this in the style of the classic Tube map. It’s not the best parallel (this still places lines at their actual locations – more or less – rather than prioritising connections) but it’s amazing how much of the story you can tell just from the lines:

Character Paths

As with the other maps – you see the full resolution images in twelve 2 foot by 3 foot posters in the Lands of Ice and Fire map folio.

Westeros, © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

Westeros is the beating heart of A Song of Ice and Fire. In this map Westeros gets its own official map in the form of a 3 foot by 2 foot poster.

As with the maps of the Free Cities, Slaver’s Bay and the Dothraki Sea, in this map each settlement is illustrated rather than being marked with an icon. I had a great time trawling the references (mostly westeros.org) to pull out the distinguishing features of the different towns and castles.

Each major family has a castle, and those castles are often distinctive – so here’s a quick tour.

The Eyrie © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

The Eyrie sits at the heart of the Vale, perched atop the mountain. The road to the Eyrie is guarded by the three towers of Stone, Snow and Sky before reaching the castle itself. They Eyrie watches over the Vale of Arryn – a patchwork of fertile farmland locked away from the troubles and tribulations of the rest of the Seven Kingdoms by the Mountains of the Moon.

Harrenhal © Goerge RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

Harrenhal is a monster of a castle, with multiple keeps and towers that bear the scars from centuries of depredation and war. It looms at the top of the Isle of the Faces, near the mouth of the Trident and straddles the Kingsroad. It’s key location makes it strategically key, with many major players based here over the course of the war, but it also holds a curse. Those that hold Harrenhal tend to come to bad ends.

North of Harrenhal lies the Inn at the Crossroads. “Of all the Inn’s in all the world…” – everyone seems to stop here. Westeros is a big continent. And yet many of the main characters can’t but help running into each other here. As a result, it gets a work-up as a classic courtyard inn with stables in one of the wings.

Casterly Rock © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

Casterly Rock is an odd case. The Rock stands over Lannisport and is the family seat of the Lannisters. However, with their land grab for the Iron Throne, Casterly Rock becomes more of a retreat for the family, the place where those who fall out of favour are banished.

Winterfell © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

And then, of course, there is Winterfell. This is the first castle we explore in the books, with it’s two curtain walls, great keep, first keep and the Godswood. The Wolfswood crowds in close against the castle to the west.

Westeros © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

North of Winterfell we reach the limits of the Seven Kingdoms – the Wall. This is a smaller scale than the detail we get in the Beyond the Wall map, but we still see Castle Black, the Shadow Tower and Eastwatch-By-The-Sea, along with the ruins of Queenscrown, the Gifts and Mole’s Town. And then there’s the Wall – a ribbon of ice locking out the wild that lies to the north and protecting the lands of men. As winter is only just looming on the horizon in the books, the lands north of the wall are still green, but the first snows are falling.

Dorne © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

At the other extreme we have Dorne – a dry arid Kingdom that sits on the edge of the wars of the Seven Kingdoms. The fertile lands tightly hug the rivers, and the people are an exotic bunch compared to the standard knights and ladies of the rest of Westeros. Here we have the castle of Sunspear and the Water Gardens located to the north of the Greenblood.

The Paps © George RR Martin, 2012, used with permission

And I couldn’t resist this little detail. The Fingers were clearly named after their resemblance to a grasping hand. And the paps, well let’s just say they also bear a striking resemblance to their namesake.

To see the rest of the castle details (Highgarden! King’s Landing! Storm’s End!) you’ll need to grab the full poster map folio.

On the left I’ve shown a section of a mountain range pretty zoomed in. Here you can see the individual peaks, and the slopes and crests of the mountains. They take up a large amount of the map and we know we’re looking at a detailed map – similar to the kind of map you might get when exploring hiking trails. This is perfect for a detailed map of the environment around a town, perhaps showing the location of some nearby monster lair or other location of adventure.

On the right I’ve shown a similar map, but the mountains are now just a range. You can’t see the individual peaks, and all you get is the overall sense of a barrier. This is closer to what you might see if you look at the Andes zoomed way out. The lack of distinct detail tells the viewer that you’re looking at a large expanse. You can add a scale of course, but ideally a scale should reinforce the impression the viewer has of the map, rather than being a necessary tool for interpretation.

You can also vary the amount of detail in the coastline. Coasts are fractal, so that’s not strictly going to be a good measure, but it can trick the viewer into thinking that a map is of one scale rather than another.

As always, check out more tutorials in the Tutorials section or follow along on G+ or facebook where these originally appear.