Category: Volume 2

While this volume focuses on creating places, world building doesn’t need to start with the planet itself, or anywhere on it. We could start with inventing species, plants, animals, gods and other beings as described in Creating Life (The Art Read More …

This section talks about the available map generation programs users can create maps with.

For dungeon maps, we can use lined graph paper to draw hallways, doors, and rooms, each with a width determined by the scale we’ve chosen, such as a square on the grid being five feet. We need to decide where Read More …

If relative locations matter to your work, creating a map is a good idea, even if it’s just for your reference and never published. We seldom see a map of ships, lairs, or dungeons in stories, suggesting authors might avoid Read More …

Decide what the settlement’s water supplies are (lake, river, wells?) and draw this on a map, whether with pencil and paper or a program like City Designer 3 from Pro Fantasy. Then choose an area as “old town,” which is Read More …

For game designers who’ll have characters roaming within a settlement, the map is essential for knowing where everyone, and the dangers they’ll face, are located, but few if any books include maps of cities or towns, so one isn’t expected Read More …

Creating a map of the entire world we’ve invented can be a challenge. As mentioned in the section above, the Fractal Terrains add-on to CC3 can create an entire planet with the click of a button. However, while it will Read More …

I use Campaign Cartographer 3 (CC3) to draw my continent maps, which I also use for region maps by zooming in. There’s an add-on called Fractal Terrains, which can be used to generate continent shapes with the click of a Read More …

We should decide on our initial goal: are we intending to draw a continent or the region around where our story takes places? Continent First For a continent, we can base the overall size on an existing Earth one or Read More …

Whether it’s a continent map or just a region of one, we should consider the merits of creating a map and how to do so. We can create one ourselves or hire artists for a few hundred dollars, which is Read More …