I love maps. They are one of my favorite details of fantasy fiction, and typically one of the first things you see when flipping through the front pages of any proper fantasy novel. Getting immersed in another world is why so many people read fantasy, and maps give a visual manifestation of that world, orienting the reader to the scope of the world, the location of the characters and events, and the geographical influences that may affect the cultures and happenings of the story.
Creating a map is one of the first things you will do before starting a fantasy story. How can you make up a plot and characters if you don’t know where they are? Setting influences so many things – do blizzards affect your character’s magic? Better have some mountains. Does the culture revere water? Better have a desert or some dry scrubland.
The course of rivers may dictate the location of cities, or the trade relations between nations. Shared borders can spark hostility and war. Mountains can cut one culture off from another. Never underestimate the power of geography to define a continent’s social and political dynamics.
So. How do you make a map? You don’t need to be an incredible artist or cartographer. Here are some tips to make a functional and visually pleasing map for your fantasy world!
1. Draw a Shape
Literally just let your hand loose to draw a weird and globular shape. This can be roughly circular, oval, or square, or it can be a wild amoeba with large bays and peninsulas.
Things you’ll need to consider:
- Do you want an entire continent with coast on all sides, or the quite popular ‘corner map’ with mysterious edges that presumably go on to other lands?
- Is there just one continent, or are there multiple continents (like Game of Thrones), and do you need to depict both for your story?
- Are there are any sizable islands off the coasts?
2. Add Large Bodies of Water
Are there any large lakes, fjords, or seas that define the space? You’ll probably want to add these before filling in topography and cities, though I would suggest leaving rivers until you have filled in more of the map. Bodies of water are as easy as the continent outline – just make loose, globular shapes. We’ll add more detail later.
3. Study Existing Geography
While your fantasy world can follow whatever rules you want for geography, it can be extremely helpful to do a quick study of existing geography first. Where do mountains usually form, and in what patterns? How do they affect the climate of the spaces around them? Do you want north to be colder and south warmer, or the other way around, or the center warm and cold spreading out like a fan?
You will want to see how climates and biomes work on Earth to make a believable map of your own. Then, even if you want to flip the rules of nature on their heads, you have a firm foundation on which to build, and know to explain any strange phenomenons in your story (a desert in the middle of a snowy mountain range – there must be some weird magic here).
4. Add Topography: Mountains, Prairies, and Swamps, Oh My!
Here is the meat of your map’s geography, and what is most likely to affect your story. You may make all of this before you even have a story idea, and then generate your cultures, characters, and plot from the map. Or, if you already know you want your main character to grow up in a mountain village and travel to a land of jungle elves, you already know some components that need to be in your map, and can shape your geography as it fits your vision.
A general list of components that may be in your map:
- Mountains, hill country, hardwood forests, coniferous forests, scrubland, plains, deserts, prairies, tundra, rocky plateaus, tropical forests, marshes, jungles, swamps
At this point, just make more globular shapes and label them as ‘forest’ or ‘desert.’ For mountains you can just draw some frosted teepees. You can add in details later, just get a map that satisfies your story needs or personal preferences.
Once you have topography, add in rivers where they make sense, thinking about where they originate and which way they are flowing. There are LOTS of rivers and streams in natural landscape. An absurd amount, in fact. You don’t need to show every single stream on your map, just major rivers that influence the geography or the cultures that live there.
5. Make a Scale (using Excel)
Before you start to add more detail to your map and fill in cities, you will want to get a sense of how big your continent is. If you put one city in the southern mountains and another in a northern swamp, how long will it take a character to travel there on foot, by sea, on horseback, or on a hoverboard or dragon-back?
While your map doesn’t necessarily have to be to a point-perfect scale, you do want distances to make sense and be believable to the reader who is consulting your map while they read. I suggest thinking of existing states and countries to get a sense of size, and using google maps to measure distance across them. Is your map the size of Texas, Rhode Island, or North America?
Once you know the size of your map, the best advice I’ve used for keeping a scale is to make a version of your map in Excel. Using ‘fill colors’ for the squares, make a shape that matches your drawn continent in a spreadsheet, then set each square to a certain distance. For example, in my map, one square is 25 miles x 25 miles, so to calculate distance, I add squares and do simple geometry (a2 + b 2 = c2) to calculate how far it is between cities.
When writing my story, I check average speed of different travel methods to see how long it will take to sail from one coast to another, or travel across a mountain range on foot.
6. All Dem Names: Nations, Cities, and Landmarks
Obviously most fantasy stories will involve human or humanoid civilizations living among your landscape, which means cities, towns, villages, nations, kingdoms, and borders. You can include as much or as little of this as you want on your map. Some maps only have the biggest cities and nation names on them, while other seem to name every single village, stream, and copse of trees on the map. This is all up to you and a matter of preference.
You can add a lot of these things as you write your story, but placing and naming any nations, major landmarks, and important cities up front can help shape your story.
As for naming, this deserves its own post – or three. Some people turn to other languages for inspiration and roots, some go to random name generators, some just throw letters and syllables together until something cool comes up. Naming can be one of the most fun and frustrating parts of creating a fantasy world, so have fun with it but don’t worry if you don’t name everything all at once! Use filler names to mark locations until you have the perfect one.
7. Add Detail: How to Draw Realistic Shorelines, Mountains/Hills, and Forests
Here is where you get to make your map pretty. Now if drawing globs and teepees is enough for you, there is nothing wrong with that. If your story ever gets published, you can find people who are good at maps to make it pretty. But it’s not too hard to make a decent map without incredible artistic skill.
Shorelines: Shorelines are not smooth. Look at any existing maps, and you’ll see how jagged coasts are, with infinite dips and cuts and squiggles.
- Go back to your globular shape of your continent, and replace the smooth lines with random jaggedness. This alone will make your map look WAY more realistic.
- Then, thicken and darken any shoreline that faces the bottom of the page. This is such an easy thing to do, and gives a feeling of depth and shadow to the map that is way more professional.
- Next, add a border around your map close do the shore, and draw light squiggles or waves coming away from it. This simulates the tide, and makes it look like your map is surrounded by water.
Mountains and hills: Mountains and hills are probably the hardest thing to draw on a map, and can take some practice. Again, if you’re good with drawing lumps and triangles for hills and mountains, go for it, but if you want to make something more realistic, this is how I do it.
- For hills, draw a hump with a trailing end, then draw a line coming down to either side, and one going straighter to the middle. These indicate slope. Drawing a lot of these humps together gives a great impression of hills, and looks really good coming off of mountains.
- For mountains, draw a squiggly line following the line of the mountain range. At each turn of the line, draw a stroke diagonally down to one side or the other, making that turn into a peak. You can branch some of these strokes to give the impression of more ridges. Make the strokes on one side of the range darker than on the other to give the impression of shadow. Then, you can add random lines coming down the sides of the mountains to show more ruggedness.
Forests: Forests can be so easy to make look good.
- Just draw a cloud-like shape wherever you want your forest to be, with squiggles or arches as a border, then make the outline of the bottom edge darker and thicker to give the illusion of shadow (like the shoreline).
- Next, fill your shape with upside-down U’s to simulate trees.
- Finally, draw lots of sticks coming down from the southern (darker) edge of the shape to simulate tree trunks. Now you have a three-dimensional-looking forest!
What are your favorite fantasy maps? Are there any resources you use to draw your own?
If you like this post, please sign up for my email list to receive updates on new ones!
