The Campaign Map and How to Make One Like It

It took about fifty hours of work, but I finally finished the region map for my current campaign. Fifty hours is a pretty steep amount of time to dedicate to something like a map, and I readily concede this. I certainly don't think that such an investment is required to create a visual representation of your game world. As I discussed in an early post here, the important thing is to characterize a place through the map, and depending on what you're trying to say, it may be worth it to spend plenty of time refining that characterization. For this map, it was worth it to me to create something that was visually striking, and I'll go into why shortly. First, though, the map:

This is a massive image file, and it's shrunk down pretty small on this page. You can see the full-size version here.

The region in question is called the Eastweald. It is the densely wooded area in the eastern central part of my main homebrew continent, Evanoch. As you can see, there are a great deal of settlements scattered throughout the Eastweald, and the majority of the land is thickly forested. Each of the settlements has a fairly unique appearance, which I intend to illustrate that each of the cities and towns was built in a different way.

A city like Whiterose in the northeast is composed of wooden expansions onto one large structure. With limited space to expand without clearing large swaths of forest, the citizens of Whiterose chose to build up rather than out. Over time, the superstructure has taken on a bizarre shape as each subsequent addition was built. The region's biggest city, Woodhearth, on the other hand, grew from ornate stone structures into the forest itself, building homes and businesses onto the side and into the branches of large trees.

Whiterose (above) and Woodhearth (below).

Other settlements are characterized to show that they depend on different industries. Splitaxe, for instance, is a city in the southern part of the map which is represented by a smithy with a forge. This is because Splitaxe is a mining and smithing powerhouse, despite its small size. Cloud's Landing, another small town in the south, is shown as a lumbermill, which reflects its dependence on forestry and processing lumber.

Splitaxe (left) and Cloud's Landing (right).

Part of why this map took so long to complete was that I have fairly limited artistic skills. (Remember that first map I showed back in this post?) At a loss for the ability to just draw the forests, the settlements, and the paths by hand, I had to find images that would achieve what I wanted and then adapt them for my purposes. From here, I'd like to explain what that process looks like, using the Eastweald map as a case study.

Note: I use Photoshop when I create maps, and I think that the variety of tools it offers are perfectly suited for the kind of work I do when creating a map. The advice I'll be giving is all based in Photoshop, and I recommend using it even if you're unfamiliar with the program. I taught myself how to use Photoshop several years ago, and I think that most computer users can do the same with a little bit of time and effort. There are always guides out there for learning, and it's a useful tool to have under your belt for lots of purposes.

Step One: The Rough Sketch

The first thing to do with a map is to get a sort of thumbnail of where things go. This doesn't need to be pretty. The goal is just to have a framework for what will be where in your image. It's especially important to have a sketch ready when you use reference pictures to create the bulk of your map; otherwise, the references will be more or less useless. Features to consider when making your sketch:

• Scale - How large an area are you mapping? How far apart should settlements be? How long does it take to get from point A to point B on foot / mounted? I think it's generally fair to assume that towns are separated by about half a day's journey on foot (so that people can make the return trip after visiting a town; remember that non-adventurers usually make the trip from their home to a neighboring settlement in order to get supplies and then go back home). You may use a different gauge, but be sure to consider distances when developing your map.
• Geographical features - Where are the bodies of water? Where the rivers and streams flow? Where are the forests / deserts / mountains / hills / canyons / valleys? How will these impact the people living around them? How will they influence where and how people build settlements? 
• Settlements - Where are they? How big are they? How do they interact with one another? Why might a settlement have popped up at a particular location? Along bodies of water and halfway or so between major settlements are the likeliest locations, but be creative with this. It's always fun as a player to encounter a town which is thoroughly bizarre or geographically improbable.
• Roads - What kinds of roads have people built between settlements, if any? Are they paved, cobbled, or simply worn down from travelers' journeys? If the road cuts through a forest, why would it be worth the time and energy for people to chop down trees for a road? If it crosses a river, stream, or canyon, why would people put the effort into building a bridge? I generally rule that if a road or bridge connects towns to major cities or trade routes, it's likely that people would work to create one. Similarly, if a few small towns are relatively isolated or have friendly relations, they probably share a route to connect them. 

For the Eastweald, I first took a zoomed-in image of the region from my continent map (the ugly one I keep posting a link to for some reason). Then, I outlined the forking river and drew in where settlements would appear, followed by the roads and bridges linking them. 

Continent sample (above) and rough sketch (below).

In this image, three of the four biggest cities occur on the river, and the fourth is roughly equidistant from the other three. This allows all four to thrive as trade cities. The smaller settlements around them are scattered across the region, none too close to one another, and many as the half-day's journey between larger cities. The settlements which are not connected by roads are bandit and barbarian camps, which have strategic interests in being near cities and roads, but not too close. Bridges only exist next to major cities and to cross the river in the southeast, where there is no nearby route to another bridge. 

It's worth noting that I've placed several of the smaller cities just off the main roads, not as stops along them like the major cities are. I did this to show that they either sprung up after the roads had been built or that they were not important enough at the time of building to have been included along the road. I also made sure to include roads that go off the region map in the direction of major cities, in this case to the north, west, and southeast. These details are minor, but I think that they reinforce that the Eastweald, while a fairly large geographical area, is still a part of a larger world. 

Step Two: Reference Pictures

Obviously, I don't want to give my players the rough sketch. It's basic and not very pretty, and it certainly doesn't characterize the area like I want this map to. This is where I find a workaround to my lack of artistic ability: I find reference pictures that have the kind of feel that I want to work towards. I'm going to present the images I found as references for my map and then show how to turn them into something I can use for my map.

[Note: I'm going to begin with the forests on my map. Not every map needs such a detailed process to create a forest, but I use the same method to create rivers and roads, which I discuss in Step Four below. Use this section on forests as a detailed guide for the process, since I just refer back to here to explain later.]

The first image I tracked down was the one for the forest. Since the Eastweald is mostly wooded, it was important to me to find an image for the forests that felt like the region. I found that inspiration in a "how to draw a map" search on Google images. This is what I started with:

The starting point for the Eastweald map.

I knew as soon as I saw this map that I wanted to use its forested areas for my map. I copied and pasted this image into Photoshop and began the long process of forming the fragments of treetops from this map into the shapes of forest in my map. I made a great deal of copies of the shapes of trees in this reference picture and placed them alongside one another in the shapes I needed my forests to take. To get the exact curves and angles of my forests, I would place the treeline where it needed to be, then selected the portions that needed to move with the lasso tool. Then I rotated the treelines so that they took on the shape I needed, taking care to make the small curves and bends in the reference have a smooth, natural-looking edge. After several hours of this process, I had an image that looked like this:

The basic sketch was the guideline for where the forested areas needed to go. 

As you can see, the basic shapes are correct, but the space in the middle of the forests is missing. The places where the pasted treelines meet are also choppy, matching in shape but not in color or texture. Still, this is the first (and very necessary) step in achieving what I was looking for.

The next step was to merge all of the forest outlines, making them into one large shape rather than many small ones. This allowed me to perform the next step, which was to smooth the color and texture of the edges and fill in the open spaces. To smooth the edges, I used the spot healing tool, which automatically blended the color and texture where necessary. The spot healing tool is a fantastic resource, but it doesn't always do exactly what you want it to; to this end, I added a green that matched the most common shades in the tree reference image (via the eyedropper and then brush tools, respectively) and used the spot healing tool again to smooth it. To fill in the empty spaces, I highlighted the empty spaces with the magic wand tool (which selects all of an area that is judged as identical or close enough to matter) and then used the content-aware fill tool (which borders on outright magic). Content-aware fill samples an area's color and texture and makes educated guesses on how to fill in open spaces. This tool works perfectly for something like filling in the forests, and I used the spot healing tool again along the edges where the treelines met the new filled-in areas. That process gave me this:

The forests are almost finished, but still have some cleaning up to do. 

Finally, to finish the forests, I did a bit more cleaning of textures and made sure the general colors of the forests were consistent. The last step in creating the forests was to carefully erase the extra color that existed outside of the treelines' outline. This was a very long, arduous process. The magic wand tool will often eliminate steps like this, as it can select everything outside of a fairly solid line. But in this case, the outline of the forests was relatively small, and the color on the other side of it was basically identical to what was inside of it, so the magic wand tool couldn't help me. In any case, I finished erasing and had my finished forest image:

Crisp, clean lines and uniform color. Lots of time, but I think it was worth it.

For a map that doesn't include so much forested area, finding a reference and going through this process probably won't be necessary. But because it's important to me that the Eastweald look like a lively area, choked by thick forests and full of greenery, I wanted to use the lovely woods from the reference picture I had found.

The more valuable use of reference images for most fantasy mapmakers comes when drawing in settlements. It's fairly easy to draw a box with a triangle on top to show that a house is somewhere, but it's not just the trees that thrive in the Eastweald; there are bountiful, rich communities scattered throughout which flourish in the bounty that natures offers here. I wanted images which show the wealth and variety of settlements in the region. And so I found a handful of pictures, again on google image search, that looked like what I was aiming for. I generally use phrases like "fantasy town" or "medieval city," and there are countless beautiful pictures that come up, but specifics always help.

[Side note: I recommend that game masters who find themselves in a creative rut do searches on google image search or specialized gaming boards for images of towns, characters, monsters, etc, and saving anything that strikes the imagination. You can find things which inspire you and add something special to your campaign, and those images can come in handy the next time you're putting together a map and just don't know what sort of settlement to put in it. I used to worry that looking for inspiration in this way meant that I was failing to be creative or that I was cheating my players by taking others' ideas, but I find that I'm more often inspired by just an image with no additional information, as I have fun filling in the blanks with what truly is all my own creation.]

So, when it came to settlements, I tracked down about 25 different possibilities, ranging from the very small (just one building) to sprawling cities (the image for Feirmor comes to mind). It's important to note that it doesn't matter what art style or level of detail the image is fashioned in. You're just looking for pictures you like. The next step of the process will take care of all the other details. Here are a few of the reference pictures I turned up for this map that I was the most excited about:

Reference pictures for settlements. From upper right, clockwise: Feirmor, Ragnir, Mason's Ford, and Blackleaf Falls.

As you can see, these images are each drawn in very different styles. Some are pencil sketches, others illustrations, and some are fully-rendered computer images. The important thing, though, is that they characterize the settlements in the way that I wanted them to. As I described above, I chose these pictures based on how they would represent the towns and cities (and bandit camps, for that matter). In the case of Feirmor, the walled castle in the upper left of the image above, I wanted an imposing, densely-populated city. For Mason's Ford, the small town in the lower left, I was looking for a small, friendly, content little place. With Blackleaf Falls in the upper left, it was important to find a building that looked sharp and kind of sullen (which is for story reasons which will become clear in time). And Ragnir, the warehouse in the lower right, was chosen because I liked the idea of a barbarian tribe taking over an industrial site and using its tools for terrorizing and torturing unfortunate nearby people.

Once you have your reference pictures, it's time for the next step, where we'll turn each reference picture into a settlement with the same art style.

Step Three: Tracing

One of the beautiful things about Photoshop is that it makes tracing an image incredibly easy. Keep your reference picture in one layer, create a new layer on top of it, and start drawing on the new layer. In no time, you've got a reproduction of your reference picture that removes all of the shading, linework, and coloration that make the source picture look so unique. Now, I know that what I just said in that last sentence basically sounds like the opposite of what you might want to do. Why be excited about taking all the personality and defining features away from the image that inspired you in the first place? I have a very easy answer:

Because this is ugly. 

As great as the source images are, they don't work together. But the solution is simple. You trace the outline, which keeps the shape and character of the town. Later, you'll color it in (if your map is multi-colored, and it certainly doesn't have to be), which will give it a chance to regain some of the unique look it lost during tracing. And tracing gives you another benefit that's easy to miss: you can simplify or remove parts of the original image that might not work terribly well for your purposes.

Tracing is simple, but I'll give a quick explanation of the process I use. In the example pictures below, I've kept an untouched copy of the original next to the traced version so that comparison is easier.

1.   Create a new layer and put it on top of the reference picture. (Remember to do this, or you'll be forced to do all the tracing again when you realize you're working on the wrong layer. I promise it will be very frustrating.)

2.   Select the brush tool and set the size to the right thickness for the line you want. I try to go about as thick as the biggest lines in the image go, but you also don't want to go so big that you can't do relatively fine detail. It's also important to remember that you should trace all of your reference pictures using the same width of brush so that it looks consistent. Begin by going over the main lines, especially outer edges and bold lines. I find it very helpful to click on a corner to place a dot, then shift-click to draw a perfectly straight line to the point I've clicked on. I would estimate that about 98% of the lines in the Eastweald map were drawn this way. Here's Blackleaf Falls with the major lines traced: 

The tracing for this example is very simplified. That's because you don't want to get too hung up on the details of reference picture. Part of why you can't use the original is that it's too unique to mesh with the other images, and the some details are just too different to work well. With a few more lines in for detail: 

3.   Adding color is the last step, if you wish to do so. For this example, I'm coloring the image with different colors than the region map uses since Blackleaf Falls has a history. (It was burned to the ground in a tragic and mysterious raid, then rebuilt by the paladins who helped save the small handful of survivors of the raid. The colored image will represent the town before the raid.) So with the paint bucket tool, the final image looks like this: 

One of the unfortunate side effects of coloring in Photoshop is that outlines become much more faint. That's why when I colored settlements for the map, I went back over the image, redrawing the outlines. It make for a much cleaner, crisper image. 

This image is much better, but still rough-looking. That's because at some point between saving examples, I started coloring over a different layer, making the color from the paint bucket a little wonky. This is exactly what I was talking about back in step 1; be careful of which layer you're working with. Since this was just an example for illustration of the process, I didn't bother cleaning it up much more, but you can see what the end result is when you pay attention and focus on the small details in the map image of Blackleaf Falls (the newer, rebuilt one): 

This image still has the original's character and unique architecture, but it has the uniform art style of the rest of the settlements on the map. Both colored versions are somewhat distinct from the original (and certainly from each other), which shows that you do really get some choices when it comes to tracing; it's not just a matter of reproduction so much as it is making something inspired by the original. 

Step Four: Filling in the Rest

For the Eastweald map, this step consisted of adding the rivers, bridges, and roads. The rivers and roads followed the same process as the creation of the forest: find a sample, make copies, shape the copies, and clean up the colors and textures. For example, see the image below. I found a sample image of a path that I liked, made a bunch of copies, and shaped/curved/bent those copies until they followed the trails of my original rough sketch. 

After I had the shape I wanted, I smoothed the textures wherever the pieces of the road met, making sure that the colors blended well. Then, to make sure the paths would appear well on the larger map, I took a very small brush and outlined the paths to differentiate between the path and the grass next to it. [It was especially important for me, since I am colorblind and the green and brown in the reference image look almost identical to me.] After smoothing and outlining, the path looked much cleaner. To fill in the area on the ground, I took a color sample with the eyedropper tool from the grass and just filled in the whole map with it. To give that some texture, I added little bursts of darker green where the grass was visible between the paths and the treeline. 

Left: Not very pretty, but you can see how it looks with everything else visible on the right. 

So for the river and paths, I used the same process as the forest; for the bridges, I use the same process as I used for the settlements. Find a reference picture, trace it, color it. Once you've done it a few times, it's just a matter of putting in the time and effort to get it to look the way you want it to. 

Step Five: Finishing Touches

The last things to take care of with the Eastweald map were pretty simple. First, I took a good look at everything I'd worked on and made sure it still looked good with everything else. I checked to see if there were any details I'd missed. Then I set about labelling the map. Each settlement and general landmark got a layer of text with its name, and I added a few labels for the rivers and one for the whole region. Adding names seems like an easy thing, and it really is, but there are a few considerations I advise taking when you do:

• What kind of map is this? If it's a map you're designing to be purchased by a player, or it's been designed by a character in the game, that's a much different map than an authoritative out-of-game map. In-game maps may include details about settlements, a signature from the mapmaker, or even advice (perhaps the mapmaker thinks you should stay away from a bandit camp, so they add a skull and crossbones next to it). An out-of-game map shouldn't reveal anything about the area that you don't want your players to know, which might include certain roads of hidden settlements (I strongly considered keeping a couple bandit camps and the ghostly site called "Clfdrlph" off this map for similar reasons). 
• Do you need to include map features like a scale or compass rose? If you do include a compass rose, is "up" not going to be "north" (because if not, you probably don't need it). If you are going to add a scale, remember that it adds a lot of consistency that you need to maintain when making other maps in the area or of the larger area that this map exists it. (As you can see in the Eastweald map, I didn't include either a scale or a compass rose because north is up and I prefer the "day's journey" standard over a discrete distance value.) Maybe the side of the map should include a note about what significant features or settlements lie outside its boundaries (I almost added notes about where the roads going off the map headed to, but decided it would be unnecessary clutter). 
• What names might a settlement go by to different people? When I created the map for Ramsey, my western D&D setting, the players began in a very small town called Hart Springs. But when they left that town, they found that other Ramsey residents don't call that town Hart Springs. Instead, they call the town "Fool's Landing," since it is the first point that many sailors encounter when sailing to the island, but it is not a major trade hub and it functions as a small commune with little place for travelers. Maybe the mapmaker uses one of these less-universal names when referring to a settlement, especially if it's a rival settlement to where the mapmaker lives. 

Finally, I'd like to add a note about the appearance of the labels. I'm more than a bit obsessed with fonts (I have somewhere over 600 installed on my computer, if that tells you anything). I think that the shape of the letters are just as important as what they spell out. I highly recommend both DaFont and 1001 Fonts for starting your own collection; both offer a wide array of easily-installed fonts in categories, and both offer those fonts for free (you may be surprised just how expensive some can be, many selling for upwards of $40 and many more for much larger prices). I have a great many that look like handwriting (which will prove their usefulness when I put up the first post about creating in-game documents) and quite a few which are medieval in appearance. 

I mention fonts because I think that they can just as easily characterize a map as building appearance and other aesthetics do. For the Eastweald map, I chose a simple, elegant font which is vaguely medieval. I think that it suggests something mythical about the region while still retaining some simplicity to make it seem earthy and natural. For the sake of illustrating why I think fonts are important, here are several different appearances for "the Eastweald." 

Six different fonts, each displaying the same words in unique ways.

When it comes to placing text in Photoshop, there are plenty of features which make changing the appearance of the text fairly easy. The only thing that I find really lacking about Photoshop's text features is the relative difficulty of adding an outline around the letters. Here's my shortcut to nice, clean text outlines:

1. Type your text. 
2. Right-click the box in the text layer (the one that has the uppercase "T") and choose "Select Pixels."
3. Create a new layer.
4. Go to "Select" in the menu bar, then choose "Modify," then "Expand." 
5. Choose the number of pixels you want the outline to be. I generally go with somewhere between 3 and 5, depending on the size of the text.
6. Choose the color you'd like for the outline, then use the paint bucket to fill the expanded text outline.
7. Place the outline color layer under the text layer.
8. Highlight both the outline layer and the text layer and choose "Link Layers."

That's the process that gave me the outlined names for all the settlements in the map. It's a little tedious when you have to do it repeatedly, but it creates a very nice effect which helps the text stand out from the rest of the map. Here's the finished product again: 

So there's everything it takes to make a map like the Eastweald map. As I said at the beginning, this map took me about 50 hours to make. But the sheer size of the map, the level of detail I insisted on maintaining, and the little nitpicky things like using only one color (but various shades of that color) for the roofs in each settlement are what led to that time investment. And especially that forest, which was probably a full half of all time spent on this project. But I'm very proud of the result, and I hope that for those of you who want to make something you're proud of, even with limited artistic skills, these tips will be helpful.

In a future post, I'll describe the process I use for making city maps, which have a much different feel, look, and purpose than regional maps do. I've also expanded this guide with some additional tips aimed at overall setting maps. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!

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