I recently started a new role-playing campaign with my group. It is set in my existing campaign world of Virana, so I already have some higher overview maps and maps of various locations, but as often is the case with new campaigns, they take place in a small local area somewhere.
So, instead of making the map up front, I decided to go for a slightly different approach this time, starting with a blank map and adding stuff to it as players explore. This gives me a lot more freedom to accommodate the various whims of players, and it gives them a greater sense of being explorers as they simply don’t have a complete map of the area.
I thought I should share some of my thoughts and experiences around this with you, maybe you can use this idea in your own campaigns?
Now, this meant I had to consider a couple of things before jumping into it to ensure I could convert it to a real authoritative map of the region at a later time and place, without ending up with a bunch of loose ends that didn’t fit properly together, so in today’s article, I’ll focus mainly on those, and not the actual mapmaking.
I wasn’t planning on mapping during the gaming session, I felt that would interfere too much with the game, although it is certainly possible to do minor updates. Instead, my approach is basically to update the map between sessions, so players can get a visual representation of what they did last session and aid with their planning for this session.
Map Style
The first consideration is the map style to use for a project like this. Now, of course any map style can work, but after some thought I found that the most logical in-game reason for a map like this is simply that the characters are drawing the map as they explore. Now, my players won’t be drawing this map, I am not that detailed in my descriptions as a DM for that to be feasible (would probably be quite boring for the players to listen to anyway), so the map is drawn by me, but that doesn’t mean it can’t represent a map drawn by the characters. This left me with the option of one of the hand-drawn looking styles in CC3+. Furthermore, a cartographer on the go (which isn’t even an actual cartographer, just whomever in the party most suitable for the task) is probably not going to bring colors and different types of pens and such along, so a black and white style seems most appropriate. It also felt reasonable to focus more on symbols than fills for the mapping.
Of course, there are tradeoffs here. Yes, I wanted it to be somewhat reminiscent of something that could be drawn in-game, but I also wanted to look visually nice as this is the map I will be presenting to the players at the table.
There are many B&W styles available, but after looking at a few, I found the Pencil Sketch style from the 2024 annual a very nice style for this. The symbols are pretty, and not overly complicated (although probably more complicated than a real map made on the go). Another important selling point with this style was that it was appropriate for making that local area map showing the starting area of the characters. Some of the other simple styles was mainly designed for larger regional maps, although this is not the only appropriate style for local maps.
Map Scale
Now, the next thing I had to consider was how do deal with map scale. I’ve always been a strong proponent of scaling your maps properly, because this allows a variety of the nice tools (like length along and area calculations) to work properly, and it is also much simpler to merge multiple maps into one later if scaling is done properly. But for this map, I decided to make an exception. I knew the players would never be able to measure distances accurately while traveling, and I wanted a bit of flexibility as well, I was not ready to nail down the exact distances between the different places in the area at this point. So, for this map, I simply dropped the scale bar altogether, and slapped a text label in the corner clearly saying this map was not to scale. I still try to have a semblance of relative scale, but for this map I mainly focuses on keeping the directions accurate. This allow me to do one nice thing as well, I can map interesting areas in higher detail, even if it takes more physical space than that feature should have on a properly scaled map. A good example of this is the area on the right side of my map.
Making a “Real” Map
At a later stage, I am going to make this into a proper map with proper scaling. But because I have clearly stated up front that this map is not to scale, it means I can move things around a bit, especially in terms of distances, without having to justify an apparent change of the world to the players/characters. I haven’t gotten this far yet, will probably be many play sessions until then. But for now, I am quite pleased with the freedom I have to insert locations and features on the spot, rather than having to make up everything up front. Anyone who has ever DM’ed a game know that players never do what we expect anyway, and this way I both save myself the work of making places up front that the players won’t even visit, while at the same time I can actually draw on the players own ideas at the table, often silently with them never even realizing that their discussion was the reason for adding said feature at all.
I hope this served as some inspiration for you. Since this is a rather new campaign, I haven’t made too many iterations yet, but you can see my progress down through this article. Click the images for full size versions.
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