How to DRAW Fantasy Maps | D&D Map Making

When you look at a complete fantasy  map, it should inspire wonder: What’s in that forest?  What’s under those mountains? Who lives in that town… or that old ruin nearby? But you do not need to be a professional  cartographer or even have much skill with drawing to make a fantasy map  that instills a sense of wonder! And I’m going to show you how, because I’m  Bob, this is where we learn how to have more fun playing RPGs together, and this video  isn’t necessarily about roleplaying games, but if

you like that sort of  thing, be sure to subscribe :) First, gather your tools! A pencil and a  few pieces of paper will do the trick! Sure you can buy more professional pencils,  special erasers, and later you may want some decent pens or markers to ink it up,  but we don’t need to worry about that yet. The most important part of ANY creative  endeavor is to just get started! So put that pencil to paper and start… listing out some  cool things you may want to draw on your map! Yeah, we don’t a

ctually want to begin drawing  immediately. We’re about to, but it helps to know what we want to draw first, so we can  practice or warm up! So call me old fashioned, but I do believe every fantasy map worth its  parchment needs a mountain range with a volcano, a river and a coastline, at least one  castle and some villages, a dense forest, a cave, and some ruins like an old  watchtower-- all that provides a healthy habitat for most iconic  fantasy peoples and creatures. Now speaking of ICONS, w

e begin  drawing by practicing these icons! There are many ways to draw each of them, some  way more complex and detailed than others, but this video is going to focus on the simple  versions that anyone can draw without even needing much practice, by breaking them into their  fundamentals: straight lines, curved lines, angled lines-- whoa! Slow down! That’s just  too straight lines together! And don’t even get me started on dots and cross-hatching! It’s  all easy stuff that you can totally hand

le. But this is a good time to get some artistic  inspiration from professional fantasy maps, like those from today’s sponsor: Czepeku! The Czepeku Patreon is a library of over 4000  RPG maps that you can access for only 5 bucks! They have classics like the blacksmith and  thieves guild, but they also have train stations, remote observatories, eldritch elder brain lairs,  infernal contract offices, hanging gardens, royal courts, and zen monasteries, AND  animated versions at high membership tier

s! Czepeku maps work on every major virtual tabletop,  you can use them for whatever rpg you want to play, and there’s new maps coming out every week,  so check out their Patreon through the link below! And last thing before we start  filling our map with icons: it’s helpful to outline the land we’ll  be filling in! Most fantasy maps at this regional scale will have a mainland that covers  two or three edges of the paper, a coastline, and one or two major islands simply because this  combo provi

des a variety of landscapes to explore. But your fantasy map could be oops-all-islands,  be totally landlocked, or be anything in between! Then the first land feature icon we want to  practice is mountains because mountains further define the very landscape itself, and help us  determine where to place the other features! The most simple mountain icon is this upside  down V shape. If you put enough of them together, varying their size and steepness a little bit,  even this very simple style look

s pretty good! One trick that I’ve found helpful for any mountain icon is to start a mountain range  from the top and work down your map. Then try adding some detail: a third  angled line in the middle gives each peak some dimension on the page, especially  if you shade in a sliver, and there and a few simple ways to do this shading: solid  fill, hatch marks, dots, maybe a combination! And you can always vary the shape of your  mountains by adding secondary peaks, ledges, round tops - which is h

ow you make hills  by the way - snow caps, or of course, active volcanoes! Which looks just like a  snow capped mountain peak with a curve for the caldera at the top and dots, wisps,  or clouds of smoke coming out of it! Now with our mountains and hills in place, we have also defined the low lying areas of our  map where our main water features should go! Real quick, there’s a weird misconception I’ve  heard before that rivers always flow North to South, but I can assure you, rivers flow downhil

l  whichever cardinal direction that may be! So we just want to make sure we have a few streams  coming out of our mountains and flowing into each other as they head toward the coastline  or a lake or off the edge of our map. And the most simple way to draw a river  is one slightly wavy line, then a second slightly wavy line parallel to it. Trying to  keep the distance between them consistent, maybe widening around some bends or as  the river approaches its destination-- anywhere the water would

be slowing down  or where the land becomes low and flat. Then if your map has coastlines I think  it’s cool for the rivers to literally breach that coastline and become part of  it. And then draw a second line wrapping the coast either solid or dashed,  perhaps layering up dashed lines, or using horizontal hatches to make the  coast even more distinct as a boundary. You can use similar methods  for the interior edge of lakes, then throw a couple classic wave tips in  the water, and you’re done

with this part. Now we gotta stop drawing for a minute to plot out  our major points of interest like towns and roads, by leaving some faint markings and blank space on  our map. On this note, you don’t need to write in names for all these features, but if you want  to, leave or make space for those as well. When it comes to cities, they’re almost  always going to be along a river or coastline, and realistically, most of the smaller settlements  would be clustered right around them. But at this

scale, you probably only want to include  one to three cities tops, and just assume there are villages or towns nearby, so you  only draw those in if they’re more remote. Drawing a village is pretty simple. I like  to use one or two of these little hovels: just two parallel vertical lines with a squat  curved roof, and a rounded door. Making it taller and more angular gives it the appearance  of a cabin or larger cottage in my opinion, which is also fine, and this is basically  how to scale up f

rom village to town: adding taller, or even more castle-like towers. Then a proper city is depicted as a castle’s keep, combining more of those icons, while  other points of interest like ruined forts or towers in the wilderness use  just one or two elements of a castle. At this point we’re almost ready to start  just filling in space with finer details, so it’s time to toss in some  weirder points of interest… Caves can be curved openings in the side  of mountains or hills, shaded solid, or wit

h dots or hatch marks. Strange dark obelisks  in the countryside are simple black spikes jutting from the ground… or the water! Chasms are  jagged lines like a crude lightning bolt shape, with vertical lines and some shading  on the interior to give it dimension. You can add a waterfall spouting from a mountain,  tiny windmills and cross-hatched farmlands around towns, curved bridges over rivers, and simple  dotted lines work well for roads, but I try to keep roads to a minimum. Fantasy adventur

ers  should have to decide which lands to traverse and which to avoid, and building in multiple roads  kind of takes away that trailblazing opportunity. Also, you should always keep an open  mind what this map depicts and what it does not. Just because something is on the map, doesn’t mean it’s there for all of time, and  just because something is not on the map, doesn’t mean it did never or could never  exist. For example, in a roleplaying game, a party of adventurers crossing the wilderness  s

hould be discovering new or long-forgotten sites that could not have been drawn onto  their map, until they mark it themselves! Next, we’re into what I consider the filler icons  of a map-- not because they are less interesting, but simply because they tend to fill  up a lot of space around other icons, so they have to come last. Forests are huge part of the kind of fantasy  I enjoy, and we have a bunch of good options for realizing them on a map: teeny mountains,  teeny triangles, teeny triangl

es with trunks, ovals with trunks, clouds with trunks, or  a cluster of one of these where the front treeline is detailed but the rest of the outline  mirrors the sides and tops of individual trees. If you want to be more realistic about it, forests  will tend to be more dense on one side of all your mountains then on the other side, but don’t stress  over it unless you’re a professional cartographer. Then drawing grasslands involves hardly any effort  at all. We’re talkin’ some dots or little d

ashes, maybe even super tiny little v’s, and that’s  it. But wetlands can be a combo of forests and grasslands, and whether or not you’re a  professional cartographer, know the difference between a marsh (wet grassland) and a swamp (wet  forest) to know which kind you want for your map. And if you enjoyed this tutorial be sure to  give it Like because that does help the channel, and let me know in the comments if  you’re interested in a video on more details for this process, or for dungeon maps

,  because I think that would be really fun! And check out this one on your screen  about how to turn THIS into THIS! Thank you to the Bob World Builder patrons and  channel members who make all of this possible, thank you for your support, and keep building! :)