General Mapmaking Tips

I have a passion for making maps for my homebrew setting. But I'm not an artist--I can't draw a beautiful map by my own hand. Instead, I've learned to use photoshop to create maps that achieve the look I'm going for. This does have its own challenges. I've described the general process before in my guide to making campaign maps. That guide, my most popular article on this site as of the writing of this, covers the step-by-step process of how to start with some reference images and end up with a cohesive map. But recently, I grew frustrated with the world map I've been using for the last fifteen years. I decided to revamp that map, and I'm happy with the outcome. 

This map is a recreation of my main continent, Evanoch. When I first started DMing in a serious capacity a decade and a half ago, I had created a very basic map of the continent which I was almost immediately unhappy with: 

The thing is, this older map achieves what I needed at the time. It's functional. It was easy to make. It allowed me to (1) know how to picture my world in a concrete way, and (2) communicate the basics of the location to my players. I don't regret making this map, but it made me sad because I conceived of Evanoch as a beautiful, thriving, diverse place, and the map doesn't show that. It only shows outlines. I wanted something that would capture the feel of my setting, hence the updated map. 

So in celebration of creating this new map, I thought I would share a few general tips on how to make maps like it, things I learned in the process of making this one in particular. I would say that the original region/campaign map article is still the best place to start for learning how to use photoshop to make a map, but this guide will help you take things further and offer some insights on how to focus on a continent map. 

One thing I am very pleased with is the borders of the continent. In the old map, I used just smooth lines to outline the continent, but real coastlines don't look like this. Real coastlines are rough and choppy. When I created a continent map for my wild west setting, I used a real island map and rotated it around to give me a basic shape: 

But Evanoch already had determined boundaries, and I was never going to be able to find a map that looked enough like it to really have a map that looked like Evanoch. So I improvised. I took a coastline map I found online (I searched for "coastline map") and made many duplicates, editing the copies into the shape of Evanoch and erasing overlapping segments. Here's what the process looks like: 

A single fragment of the coastline reference.

An edited addition to created a peninsula on the map.

A mirrored addition to continue the coastline south.

I continued this process for all the map landmasses until I had duplicated the approximate shape of Evanoch as I had already designed it. This is basically an extension of the process I used to create the tree shapes in the campaign map, copying and rotating the reference image until I had the shape I wanted. 

My favorite thing about this is that this new map makes Evanoch look a lot more like a real place. The wavering coastline gives the appearance of a realistic location, and the coastline process was genuinely one of the easiest parts of making this map. I would argue that hand-drawing a realistic coast is difficult, frustrating, and not terribly rewarding for people without the gift of being artistic; duplicating real coastlines to create the borders of your continent is relatively simple, easily customizable, and has a lovely finished look. 

Perhaps my favorite part of the new map is the forest appearance, particularly that of the Liggen Forest in the northeast of the continent. I took a very different approach than I did with the region map because this map's intention is not accurate depiction of geographical features--instead, it's meant to give a sense of the actual appearance of the land there in terms of plant life. So you may notice that each of the several forests in the map have different looks--that's to reflect the different types of trees in each location. Let's talk about the forest appearance. 

 

 

To start, I searched for "forest silhouette" and found this set of similarly-styled depictions of an evergreen forest skyline. I separated each into different layers so that I could work with them individually. This was done so that the look of the trees would be varied and not a repeating pattern that would be visually repetitive or bland. I then selected the pixels of each layer, created a new layer, filled the new layer (still the original's pixels) with black paint, used the "select->modify->contract-> 3 pixels" option, made sure I was selecting the new layer, and deleted the smaller shape. I then deleted the original layer and erased the bottom of the resulting shape, leading to just an outline like this:

This was the process to create individual treelines. But obviously the entire forest had much more, so I repeated the process again and again, adding more treelines on top of the existing one so that the layers together would create the impression of a dense forest. Here are several treelines together to show the collective effect of even just a few:

This is the process I used for all the forests. The northeast for this sprawling evergreen forest, there are rainforest silhouettes in the southwest, the northwest got deciduous forests, and the elven islands of Mishara are signified with mangrove trees, which are genuine to their location.

One thing I did in the map for Ramsey, my wild west location, was created different color schemes for what was land and what was water. In the first large chunks of time I spent on the new Evanoch map, I hadn't done that, and as a result, the map did not look very good. I wasn't sure that I would differentiate the water from the land with a color scheme--I wanted the map to look like a sketch. But this was something I realized needed to be done. Take a look at the difference between the flat one-color map and the water-darkened design: 

As you can see, this is a big difference. In order to create this effect, I did some steps which were simple and others which were more difficult. For starters, I used the eyedropper tool to select the color of the land and then chose a darker color in the same palette (simply picking another color in the same field without moving the color spectrum slider), creating a new layer to hold the darker color and using the paint bucket to fill in the new layer. This was simple. The harder part was getting the actual oceans, rivers, and lakes to look darker than the land. Had I created a design where the rivers attached directly to the other geographical features (like connecting the mouths of the rivers right to mountain ranges, I would have been able to use the magic wand tool to select just the connected water areas. Honestly, if I had created a layer cutting the rivers off (using a copy of the rivers, not the original) with a brush line, I could have achieved that effect. But I was enjoying the detail work process and chose instead to hand-erase all of the water areas from the land color layer, which was labor-intensive and time-consuming, but it allowed me a lot of control over the look of the water borders. Either approach would work and be valid, so it's all about what you prefer. 

One thing I had forgotten about the mapmaking process was how much time is spent re-doing some things. It had been a while since I went for a hand-drawn look with a map, and I had never created a map like that starting from an established design like my original ugly world map, but this map meant lots of finessing. I stretched river and forest boundaries well past the edge of the continent's edges in order to give myself leeway to create borders later on, and that meant that once my coastlines were in place, I needed to do a lot of erasing to make the lines all meet up. With a passion project like this, that's part and parcel of the game. It's better to have to erase a too-long line than to have to extend it later in the process, so know going in that you'll be revising throughout the process. 

One decision I really labored over was showing the lake and river lines. My first draft of this map prioritized forests, which meant that I would draw river lines up to the base of tree shapes and then have the river disappear, reappearing beyond the treeline. But as I continued, I realized this was (1) not realistic since the trees would not grow in the rivers, and (2) fairly ugly because it looked so busy. I ended up redoing most of the rivers in forested areas to address this, and I'm happy with how it came out. But this is another way that revising will enter the equation. I spent about an hour and a half redoing something I spent two hours doing that I decided I did like. I mention this because committing to the finished project, even if it's frustrating, it a part of the process. 

As I did with the campaign map article, I drew up little city icons for each of the ten most important cities in my setting so that the cities weren't just dots on the map. With the campaign map, I was still developing the Eastweald, and the look and feel of cities wasn't already established. This meant I could just use interesting designs that looked good and rationalize that that's what those cities look like. But with this map, I've been building and playing in these big cities for fifteen years. There's a determined character to each one. So I wanted to do something that really fit the city individually. Here are a few examples:

This is Talon Gorge. In my world, Talon Gorge is notable because it was the site of the first serious campaign I ever ran. Talon Gorge is characterized by a high clocktower at the center of seven independent districts. So for the image representing Talon Gorge, I found an image that had a tower, and I added a little clockface while tracing it like I explained in the campaign/region map article. The original image only had two other buildings, so I pulled up another reference image on medieval buildings and traced five more in to represent the seven districts. 

This is Vestry. Vestry is the gnomish capital and the most populated single city in my setting. To represent this, I wanted a really bustling, dense city image. I scoured references for fantasy cities until I found one that looked really populated and architecturally diverse, and I was pleased with this result. I really like the look of this massive city in the middle of the Liggen Forest, suggesting how much space it really takes up. 

This is Torga, another city very important to me--it was the site of Listen Check, the podcast I did in 2010, back when D&D actual play wasn't really a thing yet. Torga is a thriving port city, so I made sure to find an image that had a dock (which I expanded from the reference) and a ship that I could have in the ocean beyond the city. Seeing this simplified dock system and ship with the little city reminds me of all the time spent in Torga's waterfront, not to mention Aurora, a character in my now-current campaign who spent time as a sailor stationed there.

Finally, here's Kruush, the orcish capital. It's worth noting that Kruush is not one of the biggest cities in the world. Even smaller cities which lie between the major cities on the map have more people than Kruush. In my world, a massive elven-orcish war decimated two-thirds of the orcish population, after which a huge diaspora sent most remaining orcs away from the homeland to seek a more peaceful life elsewhere. But Kruush is still the most politically important orcish city and the only real major city in the southwest of Evanoch, so I wanted to include it. You'll notice that the city design is basically just huts and shacks around a campfire to represent the continued tribal tradition of the orcs who remained. 

The finished product of this mapmaking process makes me happy. I spent a decade and a half using a rough, unrealistic, and ugly map whenever my players wanted a sense of the world, and I really hated seeing it whenever I would need to reference it for some geographical issue. Taking the time to really nail down a better version will serve me for a long time, and I'm glad I committed to making this map. Here's the finished version with city labels (they obscure some of the land features, but it's the sort of thing that adventurers might use to get settled in Evanoch):

As always, my big advice here is that spending time working on your homebrew setting always yields rewards. I know that having a visual reference for geography and city feel has helped me connect more with my world, and there's some worldbuilding I got to do as a result. I also realized how dense populated the eastern half of Evanoch is compared to the west--I had kind of vaguely known this, but seeing how tightly packed the east is and then the huge stretches of no cities in the west has cemented that and given me some ideas about how to run things in my world. In any case, having a pretty map to share with my players will make me happy for years to come, and I'm proud of the product of this work. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: guides to clans amongst the Faninites, dwarves, and orcs. Until next time, happy gaming!

Back to the homepage (where you can find everything!)