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All Rules in Creating a World

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Geography

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 146
One of the greatest joys of creating your own campaign setting is the thrill and challenge of crafting an entire world, shaping it out of the primordial clay and setting it spinning in the void. Yet as much fun as this can be, it can also be a complicated and frustrating endeavor if you aren’t already an expert in the things that make our own planet what it is. When you run up against something outside of your knowledge base, it’s often tempting to simply say, “This is a magical world— rivers and mountains and deserts can go wherever they want.”

Tempting—but lazy. Your players deserve better. Take the steps to make your world realistic, and when you do want to break fundamental laws of reality and put a desert in a swamp, make sure you come up with a reason. After all, if you take pains to ensure that the rest of your world is realistic, those magical regions that break the rules will feel all the more fantastic and unique.

If you’re familiar with the real world’s geology, you’ve already got a leg up in designing a realistic world. It’s no fun to spend weeks or months creating the perfect setting map, only to have a geologist or cartographer friend point out something you did wrong. Yet if your game group includes specialists like this, you’re lucky! Don’t be afraid to ask your geology enthusiast friend to help you decide where to put mountain ranges, or to ask your meteorologist pal to help you define your world’s trade winds. At the very least, using your gaming group in this way keeps them from ambushing you with errors later on.

But let’s face it—most GMs don’t have access to these resources. In this case, a little research can go a long way. Read up on geology, meteorology, astronomy, and other earth sciences. Watch documentaries and educational shows on these subjects. Most of all, study maps of the real world, not just game products—as any student of geology can tell you, it’s shocking just how many scientific errors appear in maps from the most beloved fantasy games and novels.

Creating a World Map

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 146
The first thing to accept when you sit down to draw a map of your campaign world is that it doesn’t need to be beautiful. As long as you can understand your own scribblings, you’ll be able to maintain consistency and verisimilitude when running your game. If you don’t think of yourself as particularly artistic, buy some tracing paper and crib shapes and designs from maps you like. Try reproducing a favorite map by hand, or extending an existing map beyond its edge in the same artistic style.

When creating your world, you can use color as a handy way to keep track of forests, deserts, or oceans, or develop your own system of simple cartography symbols. These symbols can be extremely simple: inverted “V” shapes for mountains, crosshatching for forests, scattered dots for deserts, etc.—whatever makes the most sense to you. Some GMs prefer to draw their world maps on blank paper, sharing them with players as “in-world” handouts. Others prefer to use graph or hex paper, the better to precisely track distances and travel times. Still others use professional cartography software. The “right” method is the one that feels most natural to you, and the following advice applies no matter what media you use.

Starting Size

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 146
The kind of campaign you want to run should inform the scope of the map you need to create. If your game focuses entirely on a small valley in a mountain range, you might not even need to create a world map. On the other hand, if you’re intending to include long overland journeys, you might need to create a sprawling map of an entire continent, or even a whole planet! The important thing to keep in mind is that you don’t need to finish everything before the first game. Focusing only on the parts of the map that are directly connected to the next session not only eases your workload, but makes it easier to keep track of things. You’re learning about your new world as you create it, and if you do so in small patches over the course of months or years, your knowledge will grow organically.

Terrain Hierarchy