Homemade fantasy settings and the map

[Joseph R]

For their homemade fantasy settings, how much of the world-map do GMs create in advance? I suppose this relates quite closely to how much of the regional/global politics the GM decides (is necessary) in advance.

I ask out of curiosity, rather than expecting a "solution". I find myself in the situation of being mid-campaign, and having created just enough of the map that was necessary at the time (national map plus borders), I now struggle to "expand" the region/continent, reconciling what I have created so far with all the things I want to include now (and might in the future).

[johndallman]

For my only long-term homebrew fantasy world, I always wanted to stay a size category ahead of the players. It started with a castle, a village, and some disconnected bits that you could get between by road, so then I needed the country, and its surrounding countries, Once the players started getting to grips with those, I needed a much rougher map of that face of the cube, and later some explanation of the differences in conditions on the other faces.

Mapping was always an exercise in integrating and rationalising things I already knew, and adding new stuff. The first I knew about the weird political system of one country was when its road network insisted on being straight lines across the map, ignoring the contours.

What you map first also matters: for me, contours and rivers are always the start, since they tell me where settlements are and thus give clues to borders and politics. It's probably different for others, but a map needs to feel plausible to me before I can imagine things within it.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Unwitting Pawn

For their homemade fantasy settings, how much of the world-map do GMs create in advance? I suppose this relates quite closely to how much of the regional/global politics the GM decides (is necessary) in advance.

I ask out of curiosity, rather than expecting a "solution". I find myself in the situation of being mid-campaign, and having created just enough of the map that was necessary at the time (national map plus borders), I now struggle to "expand" the region/continent, reconciling what I have created so far with all the things I want to include now (and might in the future).

I think a majority of my fantasy settings have not been homemade. Many of them are set in published fictional worlds: Middle-Earth, Zimiamvia, the Discworld, and the published game setting of Griffin Mountain. And a lot of my original fantasy settings have been in "the real world plus magic." The local map might be invented, but Gallia, or the Welsh Marches, or the present-day British Isles, are real places with real geography.

I used to create original fantasy worlds with large-scale maps and work down, in the style of Yrth. But my most recent original fantasy setting didn't have such maps, for several reasons: it was confined to a small geographic radius around a single settlement; it was largely created by the players, with my role being to weave their ideas together into a larger tapestry (or quilt!).

And there was a further reason, which also applied to my use of the Pearl Bright Ocean from GURPS Cabal as a setting: because these were very high fantasy, magic-saturated worlds, the "geography" was vague and fairly subjective, and measured distances were foreign to it. Oh, I knew that if you traveled a couple of days away from the Manse, you would get out of the ordered realms into the faerie wilderness, and that if you descended into the tunnels under the Manse you would eventually enter the realm of the dead, and that if you sailed east on the Pearl Bright Ocean (which involved "crossing the line" ceremonies in which the real Neptune showed up and impregnated one of the PCs), you would travel from the shores of myth to the shores of mundane earth, but I didn't draw, for example, a map of the Atlantean Empire.

What I did for the Manse campaign was draw a large-scale map of the Manse itself, with its five irregularly spaced towers, its outer wall, and its inner courtyard devoted to rituals. And I showed that to the players and used it as a reference for their characters' activities.

I do see a place for large-scale world maps. But they belong kind of in the middle ground, between "fantasy set on Earth" and "fantasy set in purely mythic realms where geography is uncertain." And I haven't done much in that middle ground for a while. Maybe I should offer a middleground campaign next time around.

Bill Stoddard

[Joseph R]

Thank you, johndallman. That sounds not a million miles different from how I do things; which is reassuring, as it sounds like you were able to make it workable.

On the matter on contours, do you mean that you use the actual gradient-line things on a modern map? Or just lines of hills/mountains (which seems the norm for fantasy maps)? I'm never sure how realistic my mountain ranges and rivers are, and whether the terrain/climate would fail a basic reality check. My players don't seem to mind though.

[Joseph R]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I used to create original fantasy worlds with large-scale maps and work down, in the style of Yrth.

I recollect that I used to do this, for fun, as a kid. It seems much more difficult as an adult, though.

Originally Posted by whswhs

But my most recent original fantasy setting didn't have such maps, for several reasons: it was confined to a small geographic radius around a single settlement; it was largely created by the players, with my role being to weave their ideas together into a larger tapestry (or quilt!).

This is closer to my current situation, but more by procrastination than design. How much did your players know that their input was part of the plan, at the time? Does this affect their verisimilitude?

Originally Posted by whswhs

I do see a place for large-scale world maps. But they belong kind of in the middle ground, between "fantasy set on Earth" and "fantasy set in purely mythic realms where geography is uncertain." And I haven't done much in that middle ground for a while. Maybe I should offer a middleground campaign next time around.

You definitely should. If your players go for it, I'd be interested to hear the results.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Unwitting Pawn

This is closer to my current situation, but more by procrastination than design. How much did your players know that their input was part of the plan, at the time? Does this affect their verisimilitude?

In that particular campaign, I told the players right at the outset that each of them would play a big part in creating the world, by making up one of the noble houses of wizards who ruled the Manse. I gave them the larger framework—one small area of order surrounded by magical chaos—but they got to define the order. It seemed to intensify their commitment, if anything. It probably helped that I had two published writers (neither a major success, but writing anything that gets published takes a certain something) and two serious fanfic writers.

Bill Stoddard

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Unwitting Pawn

Thank you, johndallman. That sounds not a million miles different from how I do things; which is reassuring, as it sounds like you were able to make it workable.

The method evolved, rather than being pre-planned, but it seemed to work OK. The players didn't make all that much use of maps, apart from "what's really there? Shall we go and find out?"

On the matter on contours, do you mean that you use the actual gradient-line things on a modern map? Or just lines of hills/mountains (which seems the norm for fantasy maps)? I'm never sure how realistic my mountain ranges and rivers are, and whether the terrain/climate would fail a basic reality check. My players don't seem to mind though.

Contours for maps that show small areas, lines of hills for larger areas. The large-area maps miss off a lot of detail, of course. Players don't seem to worry much.

In terms of Bill's classifications, this world had had a highly mythic past, but its modern-day was rather more mundane. There were all sorts of marks of the mythic past on the landscape, and just a few mythic things surviving in dark corners, but most of what the PCs dealt with was human-scale, with reasonable motivations. Looking backwards at it now, I suspect that this was unconsciously influenced by the similar "fading" in Tolkien.

[Irish Wolf]

Well, I can say that with Aathe, my AD&D world, I had an idea what the world looked like, but since nobody had made any real maps of anything outside the boundaries of the Second Aathean Empire in five thousand years (since the end of the Chaos Wars), there was lots of room to fudge things, especially with the characters sketching in maps as they went. (I was trying to organize a group that would be posing as fantasy-standard adventuring types in it for the lost treasures, but would in fact be agents of the Second Empire spying on the other kingdoms and re-exploring the Lost Lands, but that never quite came together.)

I had a pretty good idea of the smaller continent, Aath, which was comparable in size to Australia; the larger continent, however, had the New Kingdoms on the west coast, in an area something like Europe and Africa only without the Mediterranean in the middle, and the rest of the continent cut off by the Worldsedge Mountains. There were, of course, passes through the mountains - five thousand years ago... Today, the mountains are overrun with barbarian orc tribes and monsters of various sorts, thus explaining why none of the locals feel that great an urge to cross them.

I tried to do my worldbuilding in broad strokes, leaving room for the players to cooperate with me on the details. It worked out in the few adventures I actually managed to run there (thank heavens the players worked out the magical field around the ancient elvish wizard's tower in the Outmarches before it killed the half-orc warrior...).

[jason taylor]

What is the social position of the players? How large a scale is their game? Ask questions like that.

If they are the inhabitants of a village with mysterious and magical wilderness around them(in other words the world a lot of people in history thought they lived in) you don't need any map. In a game centered on nomads or on a viking-style adventuring society then you need more. If it is a Gormenghast-like game centered around a palace, you need to explore that palace. If it is a High-Fantasy with the fate of the universe depending on it you need a larger map but you need not start right away; even that kind of story tends to start with the protagonist actually knowing very little about his world.

[Grouchy Chris]

Originally Posted by Unwitting Pawn

For their homemade fantasy settings, how much of the world-map do GMs create in advance?

In my case, not much. In my GURPS fantasy campaign, the world of Mond is notionally a spherical planet with the major land masses being fragments of a supercontinent that has just broken up. But on paper, most of the world is represented by mere blobs. So far, all the action has taken place in the kingdom of Lodea, and I have a map of that on one 8-1/2" x 11" piece of paper, two more larger-scale maps of the western and southern parts of Lodea, and a smaller-scale map showing Lodea's position at the isthmus connecting two continents, but that's it. It suffices for most purposes to simply say that there are mountains to the north, where dwarves lived before they were driven out by dragons and orcs, and that the homeland of the lizardfolk is across the sea to the south, without having to specify exactly the locations or boundaries of these places.

I love maps, and I had grand plans of drawing the entire wold in rich detail, but it seems that for actual use in the game, creating characters pays off much better than creating geography does.