How detailed are your wilderness/overland maps?

[Hand of Evil]

I try to create landmarks, locations are then X minus or plus from them, landmarks include things like ruins, bridges, inns, mountains and such, they are things very visable, locations are off them.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Shucks...with 3E's speedy level gain, it's quite conceivable to rise from 1st to 20th level in a single 65 mile area stocked with a few villages and dungeons. I think it would be vaguely amusing to spread out the entire GH map and watch reactions as the DM points to a spot and says, "...and the entire campaign I've prepared takes place in this hex."

Heh. Roughly 80-90% of my campaign has occurred within a 100 mile radius circle, or basically 4 of those hexes.

But both of these scenarios rely upon player metaknowledge in that for a 2nd level party, griffons and trolls are out of their league. This is why I think the game calls for a new Knowledge skill for this sort of purpose, Monsterology

My game has Knowledge:Bestiary. It provides basic information on how not be eaten by things that want to eat you. I.E. DC5: wolves *will* eat you if they are hungry. DC10: Trolls are big, green, spindly, and look kinda like the thing that just eviscerated your buddy. DC15:trolls aren't really dead unless burned or consumed by acid. DC20: firebreathing hydras don't care if you use fire on the neck stumps.

 

[kigmatzomat]

My problem is that I want wilderness to be "accurate" (whatever that means in a fantasy world). I'm always worried the mountains won't have enough foothills as they become plains, there aren't enough rivers, terrain types change too abruptly, that city doesn't have enough farmland around it to sustain it "for real." The nomads' grasslands are too small for their numbers. There are too many orcs too close to the goblins competing for food... logistics and ecology.

Yeah, I know the feeling. But two things: 1) players don't care. No, really, most of them really don't care. 2) the players almost never have enough information to prove you wrong.

I'm way too hung up on wanting it to be "realistic" that I get paralyzed from making any decisions.
What do you guys do?

Make decisions that feel good and work with what I want. Then ignore it for a week. Later I pick it up and look at it from the nit-picky standpoint of a rules lawyer who also has a degree in engineering. I find the holes and decide if I want to fix them or consider them part of the setting.

Should I remove the excess population based on my limited understanding of medieval agricultural production or create a plot point? Does one of the villages have a relic or maybe a druid grove that quadruples their production? Do the desert nomads hunt thunderworms for food? Is it possible the orcs & goblins sell many of their kind into slavery creating an abnormally high value export that counteracts the low land production?

Sometimes that creates the best plot hooks (someone steals the relic, the goblins plan to use their slaves as insiders during invasions, etc) because they feel right. And they add a good dose of flavor even if there's no plot hook. (Mmmm, thunderworm steak.)

 

[MerakSpielman]

I have a thing for overly-detailed maps, but I lack the patience to draw them myself. When I draw a map of a kingdom, for instance, a quick scribble is the coastline (if any), a few more scribbles for rivers, some upside-down V's for mountains or U's for hills, a few puffy-cloud shapes for forests, and some vague circled areas labled "swamp, grassland, wasteland" etc... Then I toss in a few blobs for cities and dots for towns and scribble in some roads between them.

Frankly, the players have never noticed how vague the world is, and I don't think they really care as long as they have fun adventures.

However, like I mentioned, I have a thing for highly-detailed maps. This is why I purchased the Kalamar Campaign Setting and Atlas. I love the pretty pictures, zoomed-in one inch=25 miles scale, topographical data, different qualities of roads, etc... I haven't played any games in the setting yet, and I doubt my players will find the maps as fascinating as I do.

 

[Knightfall]

When I made my adventure, I think I should have made the overland/wilderness maps first. I am now trying to make my area map, but am encountering difficulty in deciding where to put what. Oh, I know that the dwarven ruins are in the foothills, and that the shrine is by the main road, but other than that, I am having some problems deciding where to put what. So far, my map has been sketched on a piece of loose leaf paper.

Anyways, how detailed are your maps?

Go here!

 

[dreaded_beast]

Great insights everyone! well, what I did was ending up placing my campaign in the Forgotten Realms. I wanted a small area to play in, so I picked an area in the silver marches, the Lost Peaks, and tried to make a smaller map of the area. This being my first adventure, I wanted it to be a small area, so I ended up making it around 2.5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide. I didn't realize that, according the rules on movement in the PHB, my player could walk out of the entire "campaign" area in around an hour or so, hehe. The "encounter" areas and buildings were all around 15-30 minutes away from each other just be walking, less if my player "hustled".

Anyway, do you think having such a small "campaign" area is a bad thing? I plan for my player to explore more of the realms as she gets more exp, but I guess I'm the type of DM/Player that thinks that there must be something "interesting" every couple of miles, heh

 

[Buttercup]

I don't think there is one right way. If using a very small area is working for you, stick with it.

Since your player is new to D&D, starting small is probably less intimidating.

 

[DMScott]

I'm the king of lazy DMs, so when I need a detailed wilderness map I grab one showing an appropriate part of good old Earth. If the adventure calls for a detailed trek through a forbidding mountain pass, my PCs won't know it but they may well be crossing the Khyber Pass. It's a lot easier to scatter my areas of interest on a map that already has all the terrain detail I could ever wish for than to come up with the whole thing myself.

My hand-drawn original maps tend to go down to a scale of about 1 cm = 10 km or so, then I steal real-world maps when I need something more detailed. I'm also getting to be a fan of focused campaign areas rather than mapping out a whole continent - I find it adds a nice medieval feel if people are only vaguely aware of what the world is like more than a few days ride away.

 

[nikolai]

Apart from mountains of the impassable variety, wildernesses tend not to have ways to channel the party into areas that are appropriate for their level.

The best "solution" to this I've been able to come up with is the impact of monsters on society. Large cities are going to be very well defended, and the area near them safe. As you get further and further away from civilisation the wilds will get gradually more dangerous until you get inhospitable wildernesses only very powerful characters stand a chance of surviving.

I'm also surprised no-one has yet mentioned Mirkwood. This seems almost a classic example of a wilderness adventure.

 

[Wolffenjugend]

I'm the king of lazy DMs, so when I need a detailed wilderness map I grab one showing an appropriate part of good old Earth.

Where do you get them from?