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GameMastery Guide / Creating a World / Geography

Creating a World Map

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 146
The first thing to accept when you sit down to draw a map of your campaign world is that it doesn’t need to be beautiful. As long as you can understand your own scribblings, you’ll be able to maintain consistency and verisimilitude when running your game. If you don’t think of yourself as particularly artistic, buy some tracing paper and crib shapes and designs from maps you like. Try reproducing a favorite map by hand, or extending an existing map beyond its edge in the same artistic style.

When creating your world, you can use color as a handy way to keep track of forests, deserts, or oceans, or develop your own system of simple cartography symbols. These symbols can be extremely simple: inverted “V” shapes for mountains, crosshatching for forests, scattered dots for deserts, etc.—whatever makes the most sense to you. Some GMs prefer to draw their world maps on blank paper, sharing them with players as “in-world” handouts. Others prefer to use graph or hex paper, the better to precisely track distances and travel times. Still others use professional cartography software. The “right” method is the one that feels most natural to you, and the following advice applies no matter what media you use.

Archives of Nethys

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Creating a World Map