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Mapping Your Realm
33 Plays1 year ago
In the fourteenth episode of Tabletop Tune Up, Mark and Ben tackle the art of world mapping—an essential aspect of crafting immersive RPG settings. This episode offers practical guidance on creating maps that support every kind of adventure, from fantasy realms and superhero cities to futuristic sci-fi worlds.
We’ll explore how to start with a broad, “low resolution” overview of your world and gradually add detail as your campaign unfolds. Learn how to incorporate geography, points of interest, and the impact of historical and mythological events on your world’s layout. Discover strategies for making travel interesting, whether it’s seafaring, superhero commuting, naming conventions, subjective cultural perspectives, or navigating hazards in deep space. We’ll also discuss the value of player input, such as having them contribute points of interest or even create their own maps.
Join us as we dive into the practical aspects of mapping your world and enhancing your RPG setting with dynamic and engaging geography!
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Transcript
The Mercator Map and Its Impact
00:00:00
Speaker
The German cartographer, Mercator, originally designed this map in 1569 as a navigational tool for European sailors. The map enlarges areas at the poles to create straight lines of constant bearing or geographic direction. So it makes it easier to cross an ocean. But? Yes. It distorts the relative size of nations and continents. Are you saying the map is wrong? Oh, dear, yes. ah Look at Greenland. Okay. Now look at Africa. Okay.
00:00:30
Speaker
The two land masses appear to be roughly the same size. Yes. Would it blow your mind if I told you that Africa is, in reality, 14 times larger? Yes. Ooh.
Science Fiction Maps in Gaming
00:01:06
Speaker
Alright, welcome to Tabletop Toon Up. As always, you're joined by Mark Lehman and my buddy Ben. How you doing, Ben? I'm doing well. How are you doing? Not too bad. Hey, Ben, you just started up a ah traveler game. Oh my gosh, I finally got it off the ground. Can you tell me a little bit about this dream of yours to play a traveler?
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, science fiction has its attractions that are very unique and distinctive. And so Traveler was kind of one of those old school games that's been around forever. But then recently, it's had quite a renaissance under Mongoose Publishing. And so we are actually not just playing Traveler in its kind of house setting of the Third Imperium, we're actually playing the 2300 AD variant where we're the first humans that are sort of working our way out into the galaxy and and it's very early in the in the period. So this specific campaign is even a little bit of a variant of that. We're going out with the very first humans that are moving through space in faster than light travel.
00:02:08
Speaker
Man, I tell you what, as we podcast here, when those as weeks go by, I do want to check in to see how that game's going. Because um as a player in it, I'm finding some of the stuff kind of interesting. We haven't really gotten into a whole lot of like actiony elements where we can really see that ah kind of like the grid of the game and how the dice interact with those things. So I'm excited. But I think it might be something to kind of come back and and talk about the system and what things we like about it.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely think that's in the offing. So I'm excited to see where it goes. They'll been early. So I'm looking forward to it.
World-Building with Maps
00:02:43
Speaker
Well, this week we're not talking about science fiction as such, although that's always one of the tools in our bag. This week we're talking about maps and maps are important in traveler. They're important in your fantasy game. They're important in just about everything, and there's all kinds of different maps you can make. But you know what we're not gonna do? We're not gonna teach you how to build maps. This is not gonna be a class on geography, meteorology, astronomy,
00:03:08
Speaker
Or if you're planning on mapping cities like urban planning, we're not going to do that stuff. But we're going to tell you what you need to know about your maps in order to have a great game. And if you listened in our last episode, our interview with GM Randy, he started with his entire game. That was the first thing he did was was but build a map. And I think in our our episode on religion,
00:03:29
Speaker
I thought, you know hey, you could build you could start with religion or you could start with maps. You could take your pick. I went ahead and started with religion. But mapping is a wonderful place to start your game creation. That's right. So this is part of our overall world building series. And yeah, start with this episode. Start with the Powering Up Your Pantheons episode. Either way, you can use those on your way to building your own world.
Creating Effective Game Maps
00:03:52
Speaker
So Mark, where are we going to start this week?
00:03:54
Speaker
Well, I'll tell you what. As we always stay, we want to start big. Oh, wait a minute. We don't really say it like that, do we? No, we usually say start small. So should we start big with maps? i think I think you kind of want to think big. You want to start big. So you want to do it or like your draft. You want the general scope and size of the realm. You don't necessarily have to detail it out a high amount. We'll call this a low resolution. So we're going to start big, and we're going to kind of get the general mass big land masses and shapes and sort of the the gross features as you would say, and then not so much super detailed place names and cities and economies and all of the things. You could really go down a rabbit hole with that. but
00:04:37
Speaker
just as everything else. You don't want to throw work away and your players aren't going to be all over every part of the map. Not every part of the map is going to be as significant to them. So just include the detail you need to start where your players are. And you want to expand as you go. So it's like you want to get running with your game. You know, you want to zoom in on that area that your game is going to start and just kind of work there. You could kind of pick at it as the weeks go by as you start filling your imagination, your ideas and the kind of factions that are going to inhabit this world.
00:05:08
Speaker
Let's talk, Mark, about what makes a really good map. And so there's a few different points we want to make. The first point is, good maps need to support every kind of adventure you're going to want. A map is the context in which you're going to play your whole campaign. So if you've got ideas for all kinds of different encounters and different locations, make sure your map has a reasonable way to bring all those things together in some kind of a sequence.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, you know, a good map will will support your adventure. It'll support the type of story you want to tell. A great map will not only support your story, but your other players' ah adventures to come. Alright, so when we're thinking about what a good map looks like in, let's say, fantasy settings, superhero settings, science fiction settings,
00:05:53
Speaker
to support all of these different kinds of adventures that we want to have in them. Maybe the first thing to say is fantasy maps, Mark. What do you need to make sure is on a fantasy map if you're going to support lots of kinds of adventures? Aside from the fantastical elements of a typical fantasy map, that you wanted to accommodate any modules or adventures that are in your head. So if you have a particular module you want to run, let's say you're going to run a curse of Strahd. You'll need an area that resembles that module, right?
00:06:22
Speaker
somewhere you can get to a Barovia. Yeah, exactly. so you know Think about the types of adventures you want to tell, and if they include modules, think about where you're going to put those modules.
00:06:34
Speaker
Ben, talk about real quick how superhero cities, cause I feel like when we're talking about superhero games and a lot of modern games, the city is maybe more important than the realm, right?
Designing Superhero Cityscapes
00:06:45
Speaker
Well, I mean, we remember from reading comic books and seeing, let's say the Christopher Nolan movies or others, like the city is very much its own character. It's a part of the superhero story. And so, you know, when you're thinking about, well, wait, what about a superhero city? If I'm doing that, you need cities that have all kinds of neighborhoods that are run down. They need neighborhoods that are upper crust. They need downtown districts. They need industrial districts. They need that port where you know things are going to get smuggled in and out. They're going to need all these kind of standard things.
00:07:15
Speaker
You need lots of shipping crates that you could pick up and throw. That's right, the perennial warehouse. They're going to need zoos and train station parks, all kinds of things. So those are the kind of things you need to start thinking about with respect to a city. And as always, there's a lot of great resources out there. They're kind of almost like sets that you want to have for action set pieces.
00:07:38
Speaker
so Yeah, you know, what's interesting is a city is different from a fantasy map in mainly the sense that you don't have to travel as far for things to happen. That's true. So what about science fiction? how How do we accommodate for how is science fiction different than some of the other ones? Science fiction is interesting because most of the time we have these kind of planets as these atomic units, right? Like you have basically a planet, a space station or some sort of interior space.
00:08:04
Speaker
And then you've got your ship. And those are the kind of three archetypal things you're going to experience in a science fiction setting. At least the kind of space opera ones we think of. It's also kind of interesting when you think about like some of the the the classic books and um movies and stuff. You know, Tatooine is, all you know of Tatooine is this kind of like Dust Bowl. I mean, as far as I know that the whole planet's like that. I don't know if that's the case, but that's all I gather from Star Wars. Hoth is just a giant iceberg, right? I mean, is it anything else? I don't know. But it feels as though planets are an environment, right?
00:08:40
Speaker
Yeah, it feels like a lot of science fiction settings have planets being like one single kind of biome. And so it's so weird, unlike Earth, right, where we've got a bit of everything. And so that means we can do any part of it. i I think part of that, though, right, is that when you look out at the forbidding nature of the universe, you're either too close to your star or you're too far away from it or, yeah you know, there's very a narrow band of conditions you might think under which you can experience life. So there's a lot to think through with those. And there's a lot of great generators out there. If you're looking at travel or if you're looking at other science fiction games, they'll have a lot to offer with respect to generating these things at random. But the point about all those is having a map in those cases is not really needing to map a whole planet, but it is needing to map points of interest. And maybe this is a good time to bridge over to that point. So good maps need to support every kind of adventure you're going to want, and they need to have good points of interest.
Enhancing Maps with Points of Interest
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah. So
00:09:36
Speaker
I wanted to introduce you to this concept I learned from a friend of mine. He was telling me about Walt Disney and Walt Disney used to walk his dog. What he would do is he would keep the dog attentive and following him around with a hot dog, a weenie, he called it. And so when he came to develop the parks, the Disney parks, what he would do is he would put what he called a weenie in every one of those parks. So if you're in Disneyland and you're in Main Street, you look down the end of Main Street,
00:10:01
Speaker
And you see the Enchanted Castle. That's the wing. That's going to draw you further into Disneyland. When you're looking ah back at the day at Tomorrowland, you can see this rocket ship in there. and You'd want to go see what that was and it would draw you further in. And so just like there's those concepts in the theme parks, we also need to make sure your maps are drawing players into those places that are interesting. And just by the side of them on the map, you go, oh, man, I want to go there.
00:10:25
Speaker
the wingy concept. right i okay How do we generate these, Mark? like Let's talk about this in terms of what it is that makes points of interest. If you're thinking about how to make points of interest, what do you look to? i mean You got to think about what causes the geography to be what it is. Could it have been ah ah a major flood? Could it be you know a god coming down and and throwing a lightning bolt? and A meteor could have hit. All these things could have history. They should have history. ah Like something like the Grand Canyon. There's a history there. Why did this thing form? Same thing is with your game. When you look at your these fantastic places you want to put in your realm, you want to make sure to include some history to it.
00:11:13
Speaker
give it some thought because that'll make the entire experience more rich for your players and they'll feel like they're in an actual living, breathing world. And that history combined with your imagination is going to create some wonderful stuff. Fantastic. Yeah, I think about like the Great Wall of China, for example, right? An amazing thing you might see on a map a very specific moment in history for a very specific reason. ah Also, there's the mythology of your world, right? What stories do people tell about why it is that the world is the way that it is? um Are those mountains over there, the bones of giants? Is that really the spine of the ancient god that makes the spine of the world? I don't know. But these are the mythic elements you can start with that help people make sense of their world and the way its features come together.
00:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, and it just adds it adds some beauty to it, it's some lore. I was thinking about a stay I had up in the Pacific Northwest at this place called the Sleeping Lady Lodge. And we were wondering why they kept calling this the Sleeping Lady. Well, we would look up at this mountain this mountain range, and it was the silhouette of a lady you know sleeping. And so that's where they drew that name. And and it added ah kind of a neat mythology to that, just that little region.
00:12:31
Speaker
First point, you need to support every kind of adventure you want. Second point, figure out points of interest. You want to draw people
Travel Considerations in Map Design
00:12:37
Speaker
in. Use the history of your world. Use the mythology of your world. And then think about travel for a minute. What's it like to travel around? How do people travel around? Something to think about is that the more effective the modes of transportation you have, like in a modern setting or a science fiction setting, you can travel across the world quickly.
00:12:55
Speaker
That means that all of the places between your starting point and your destination are going to pass in a flash. It's going to be less important for you to detail those because your players aren't going to spend any time with them. So make sure that you are thinking about what kind of travel there is when you're thinking about how much detail to put into your world and that travel that journey.
00:13:14
Speaker
It should be interesting. What's that route going to be like? And keep in mind that this may not be the first or last campaign or group to travel this exact same route. So if you make a boring route, you know, you might want to think about how to liven it up for future games. Yeah, that's a good note. Don't neglect seafaring. There's a lot of really interesting things you can do with waterways, with travel across oceans and seas by ship, river boats.
00:13:40
Speaker
all of those kinds of things that can accelerate travel and it can help you move quickly. Sometimes it's also something where if you think about the sea as its own kind of adventure, there's a lot of great underwater adventures you can do and a lot of ways that you can use the sea as a risk and a hazard all on its own. Yeah. So let's now think about superhero cities, too. We talked about superhero cities before and how they need to have all these different kind of zones and locations and settings for these kind of encounters that you might want.
00:14:09
Speaker
When you think about the superhero city, there's a lot of interesting stuff about travel there because, remember, superheroes travel fast all over the place. And so it's important there to think about how everybody else travels. What are the mass transit routes like? What's traffic like? The reason that might be important is because I think every superhero movie I can remember seeing in recent memory Somebody's got to stop a bus. Somebody's got to keep a plane from falling. The plane catch is kind of your archetypal Superman moment. yeah So having those travel modes in mind is is a really good idea.
Science Fiction Map Features
00:14:42
Speaker
And of course, remember, the superheroes also have sometimes their own special travel methods to move around the globe. They might have quinjets or rockets or whatever they have. Yeah, poor Hawkeye. That's right. He's going to just run. What about science fiction, Mark? What about science fiction travel?
00:14:59
Speaker
And science fiction is also interesting too. You got to think about all that empty space. you know It can't just be empty space. There needs to be you know navigational hazards, nebulas, cosmic you know entities or things they need to avoid. Or maybe there's just territory that's dangerous or or something like that. Think about that area. Think about those spaces and why people might take different routes and and stuff. Don't just neglect because it's space. There's interesting stuff out there, folks.
00:15:28
Speaker
I think Traveler and Star Trek both did a pretty good job with the amount of time people have on their hands as they're traveling around. The other thing I would say is um I think you need to sort of think about what kind of travel you want. And if you really do want it to just be like, yep, we're moving from planet to planet, and that's what it is, then that's fine. But you want to make those choices consciously.
00:15:47
Speaker
And think about like Firefly, that revert territory, like my how nail-biting that was. They're creeping slowly through this territory. They they they knew where they had to they had to get through it, but it wasn't safe. Hey Ben, as ah as a person who loves language, what are your thoughts about naming conventions? Two thoughts.
Naming in Game Maps
00:16:08
Speaker
Yes, I love language. I love etymology. I think the guy to study here is obviously Tolkien who loved languages. He invented languages.
00:16:16
Speaker
I don't think you have to invent languages for your maps, but think about the names, the naming conventions, the kinds of cultures that might have produced those names and languages. And so you want to try to fit your names to that, to evoke the kind of pictures that you want to make in your player's heads because names, maps, all of these things that we're doing, they're about spurring the imagination. We need to be careful about naming also because it's very easy to make common names for words that are going to make your players giggle and make fun of those names and so on. so not Not that dissimilar from naming your NPCs. You know you got to be careful, folks. Your players are, at the end of the day, they're all junior hires who just, you know, they devolve into this laughing at your names. So be careful. They're going to do it. So don't make names you're going to regret. Well, Mark, you've also kind of, speaking of names and cultures, you have a little bit of a thought here about cartography and how that's really something that people make and cultures make.
00:17:15
Speaker
ah Maps are made by people, really, that cartography. And and what kind of people made these maps in the world that your players you know want to see? So they might be incomplete in that ah thought. um Maybe this is the map that you present to the players may be incomplete. You might have your own behind the scenes kind of map. And that's kind of like, I guess, one of the pro tips is to have a player map and then have a GM map. you know You want to have those two to play between.
Player vs. GM Maps
00:17:45
Speaker
It'd be interesting, friends, listeners, if you go look at the maps around your house, if you look at the maps in your book of the world that you're in, what country is in the center of the map? That tells you a little bit about where the map was made. And that's kind of Mark's point, I think.
00:18:00
Speaker
And we're talking about that player map that can also be used as a convention to kind of tell stories. You know, as we kind of you know heard the very opening of this episode, they're talking about a map and how the size of Iceland is is way too big. why Why is it drawn so big? So there could be stories in relation to that that could be fun to play with in your map as well. Well, and like we said, maybe there's lots of maps people make. You can do maps that look more like their parchments and drawings on those parchments as opposed to kind of a big journalistic-looking atlas, like you might get out of National Geographic, if that's still a thing, I'm not sure. ah Anyway, the point is, um there's a lot of approaches to how you give that information to people. Yeah, and and guys, you know as GMs out there, don't be afraid to ask your players for inspiration. you know A map is a lot of space to fill. I would assign each player maybe once a week. I want one point of interest that you would you would add to my map.
00:18:56
Speaker
And they could throw out ideas. You could learn a lot about your players in this way, too. ah What type of games they like, what kind of things they might like. I found in a game that my players were all really kind of gravitated toward like a Harry Potter esque kind of um world. And I was like, maybe I'm running the wrong type of game for these guys. You know, yeah I had a similar experience recently where I realized that, ah you know, the the kind of the vibe of the group was wasn't really related to
Balancing Detail and Storytelling
00:19:24
Speaker
maps. But, gosh, once this kind of clicked into place,
00:19:26
Speaker
And I learned that the vibe of the group was really going to have a great time in the farewell, where you could kind of be a little more whimsical. Things kind of took off in that last game session. What kind of things are we going to avoid? Yeah, let's talk about that. What kinds of things are we going to avoid? Well, first thing is over detailing. I have to confess, I got some map software at one point, and I thought, oh, I'm going to make a world that's going to be so great. And I went down the rabbit hole, and I just started figuring out everything to do with climate cycles and geography and geology and everything and I realized after you know several hours of this with no map in sight that I was like, I'm working too hard here. This needs to be a fantasy map that people need for storytelling. It doesn't have to be phenomenologically sound. What are they saying in that in Tolkien, Ben, the the map isn't where the adventure is or something? I came around the line.
00:20:14
Speaker
Well, yeah, there's a bit that Gandalf says to to Bilbo when he's trying to, you know, he's kind of chiding him from being kind of old and fat. And he says, um you know, I remember Hobbit that used to go outdoors and he used to know that the adventure was not what was on the maps, but it was what was out there. Yeah, you fell into that trap. I i might have. and So I think another thing is to say is ah don't answer all the questions in your map. That's kind of the corollary of over detailing, right?
00:20:42
Speaker
yeah don't Don't get into it more than you need to. Leave some ambiguity for the players. and ah Any other notes? oh Ben, I was just going to say, if you did fall into that trap, you're in a good company, okay? I expect so, yeah. Don't blow, it's right there with you. so well Okay, so Mark, let's say we're going to do all of those things. We're going to avoid those things. um you know Don't make a boring map. That's an important thing to avoid too. But then once you're going to sit down, and you're going to make this thing. What kind of resources do we need to think about?
Map-Making Resources
00:21:10
Speaker
You know, i I'm not the most knowledgeable on all this. I know of a few. um I've used a software called incarnate, which I thought was quite wonderful. It was fairly easy to use. I think it was web based, but you used campaign cartographer. Have you not? I did. I actually drew a curious map with campaign cartographer.
00:21:31
Speaker
And it's really good. it's It's one of those kind of software packages for this. It's been around since the 90s and they've improved it over time. I'd say give that a look because you can make not just all kinds of maps, but all kinds of different style map.
00:21:43
Speaker
If you're lacking in inspiration, I can recommend recommend a website. I think it's called the Cartographer's Guild. I could probably Google it. you know It's just a ah really inspiring website because you see these people who've created their own homebrew maps and maybe they've they've run recreations of some of the literary works and um just the artistry is inspiring and and it gets should get you inspired too.
00:22:08
Speaker
Well, the other thing to do is also to take note of real life. What we know about maps and how they work has a lot to do with what we see in real the real world. So use the real world to inspire you. Think about places like the Grand Canyon or some of the great cities that are really old cities ah in Europe or in Asia, in all kinds of different places. Yeah, absolutely. You can't tell me Devil's Tower isn't magical. So, you know,
00:22:33
Speaker
That's true. Well, Mark, I think we are on to our tune-up segment for this week. Our friend Captivator sent us ah a question. She asks, how do I plot adventures? I'm working on a lighthearted mystery game that should be a bit of a lark, but I'm starting to take the task more seriously and plan um and plan how the encounters and the NPCs are going to work. What advice can you share with me?
00:23:01
Speaker
The mystery thing can be great or can be a slog. A lot depends on how you parse out information to your players. The way that you're going to parse that out, of course, is over time. So the first question is, how many sessions is this going to be? It's going to be like a one shot in an evening? Yeah. It's going to be three or four you know sessions. What's it going to be?
00:23:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good that's a good point. you know I gotta to be honest, Ben, I don't have a lot of experience running a mystery per se, like a legit mystery. I've run games which had elements of mystery in them, but when I think about like mysteries, yeah, that pacing is is really important, isn't it?
00:23:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I mean, think about the rate at which people are going to get information, how they're going to get that information, what stunning moment is going to happen when the lightning crashes and all of a sudden we realize, yeah, wait, that was the diary from the so and so or the special locket that so and so had when they died or whatever it might be. Yeah, it's kind of like that roller coaster. You want it to kind of go up and down at the right, that right moments so it can reach the heights near the end.
00:24:06
Speaker
The other thing to do is think about the NPCs, right? Agatha Christie's great at this, and this is where we want to borrow from the tropes of the mystery genre and novels. NPCs all need to be fleshed out and be credible with respect to whatever the mystery is about. If it's a murder, then you need to have more than one credible murder suspect who could have done it.
00:24:26
Speaker
Yeah, that is exactly why. If you only have fleshed out one or two NPCs, the players are really going to think, like, it's got to be one of those two. So it's important. But how do I know it's not so-and-so? Exactly. If you think about, like, the movie Knives Out, it's kind of like a bottle episode. Every one of those characters is fleshed out for that exact reason, because any one of them could be the murder.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, so I'd say look to pop culture for ah the education on this, and I think there's a lot out there. Ag the Christie, Sherlock Holmes, um so many great resources to dive into. And of course, players are ready for that, and they're super interested in playing out those tropes. So, Captivator, thanks again for your question. That is our tune-up segment for this week. Mark, any other thoughts as we wrap it up? No, i'm I'm good. I'm content. I hope everybody has a great week, and we'll see you next week, okay?
00:25:22
Speaker
Sounds good, everybody. Until then, keep those dice rolling.