How do you Map your world

[Beholder Bob]

I'm mapping out my new world and a thought occured to me, actually a couple of thoughts (my office got smoked)...

1) what scale maps do you use?

2) what are the key terrains you include on the maps?

3) how many times do you 'zoom' out from a spot?

mine so far: I'm using grid 7 sqaures to the inch (in excel)

1 sq = 1000 mi - the world
1 sq = 250 mi - this shows major land masses
1 sq = 25 mi - this is for showing major features, country division, crops
1 sq = 8 mi - this is a close up for overland travel. For overland movement, roads, rivers, fort placements, army manuevers

I'm thinking of adding another 'zoom' of 1 mi/sq for views of regions around a city and such.

So far, I've got forest, swamp, desert, scrub, and mountain - and am trying out a few variations for showing water/lake/river/etc. I also have 3 types of community - Thorp / Hamlet, Village / Town, and City / Metropolis.

I still need to add Tundra, Taiga, and Steppe. I was going to leave plains as the defult/blank entry for a regions.

Is this overkill, typical, or not enough? If nothing else - it is fun.

So, what do you use?

BB

 

[barsoomcore]

The only existing map of Barsoom:

I stay away from grids, myself. I don't find I very often need the grid -- I can just include a scale (or keep one in my head) and calculate travel times etc. My heroes tend to stick to the road or sail from one place to another rather than do a lot of cross-country hiking, so I just keep a table with average travel times from one place to another. Road conditions and hazards and weather probably have more to do with travel times than distance, anyway.

 

[D+1]

1) what scale maps do you use?

Whatever scale I need. I've done big worlds, small worlds, some that I've tried to squeeze in lots of detail (smaller scale, ergo bigger/more maps) and some with hardly any details at all until details of a smaller, specific region are needed.

2) what are the key terrains you include on the maps?

I used to try to recreate the earth with every new world I built. I don't anymore because campaigns I run just don't turn into world-spanning epics with the characters covering every last corner of it. It's a waste of time. I map what's needed. I may have an IDEA of what's not mapped, but it's not formally mapped until I have time, need, and/or inclination.

3) how many times do you 'zoom' out from a spot?

Again, depends on what I need. I may take one kingdom off a world map and zoom down to that. Then zoom down to the area around a particular city or area of that kingdom that I plan to run a lot of adventures in. But no more than that really.

I also have 3 types of community - Thorp / Hamlet, Village / Town, and City / Metropolis.

I do stick to the 3E "standards" of city sizes and try to have only a select few metropolis, with most being village or town size.

I still need to add Tundra, Taiga, and Steppe. I was going to leave plains as the defult/blank entry for a regions.

For some regions the default ought to be forest or even jungle, not plains. What I generally do now is disinguish plains and heavier forest as specific terrains with the "blank" regions varying according to the lattitude - it might be plains mixed with patches of light woods or light woods mixed with patches of plains, but either way it doesn't much affect anything except the kind of monsters that might be encountered - a mix of plains or forest.

Is this overkill, typical, or not enough? If nothing else - it is fun.

Then don't let me stop you.

 

[random user]

Though I wouldn't necessarily recommend it (it is a fair amount of work), what I did was take the CivIII editor to create a map, and then I threw it into Photoshop.

Because it was CivIII, there is only jungle, hills, mountains, lush grassland, plains, tundra, forest, and um... I think that's it. In any event you can look at the map and tell.

Then I decided I wanted it to take about 6 months to travel from near one end to the other, long enough that any one caravan probably wouldn't want to do it as an annual trek (given that a caravan is going to stop in cities for up to weeks at a time, most caravans will run about 1/2 to 2/3 of the length, and companies can coordinate between caravans if someone or something needs to get from one end to another).

Then I made my regions, and the capitals for each region. Then I zoomed in to my starting region and flushed that out a bit. The other regions haven't been flushed out yet as my characters haven't gotten that far yet.

The whole thing is in photoshop, and the resolution is quite good, so I just make all the things in photoshop and then zoom in as necessary.

It's worked so far. As new points of interest pop up, I add them. I don't add anything new where they have already been.

Here are the maps:

Nyternia: http://www.cardplace.com/images/chosen/nyt1100.jpg

Cressa (their starting region): http://www.cardplace.com/images/chosen/cressa.jpg

I haven't had a chance to make any roads yet. They are on my list of things to do.

 

[the Jester]

I use random sizes and draw them by hand on paper of varying size, depending on what I'm mapping. I work at Kinkos, so I've taken to scaling my maps by copying them and enlarging/reducing, then redrawing sections that need it, adding/subtracting detail, and recopying to make a clean map of it.

As time passes in the game some maps get updated by being redrawn, some by being drawn upon, some by a combination. The working at Kinkos thing is really great for stuff like this, though.

 

[jgbrowning]

Though I wouldn't necessarily recommend it (it is a fair amount of work), what I did was take the CivIII editor to create a map, and then I threw it into Photoshop.

That's pretty cool. Now I have to go play CivIII again...

joe b.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I use an 800X1000 map scale (standard CCPro) adding details as I want. This map becomes a center grid in my world, I will map additional grids as needed as the game direction takes.

 

[S'mon]

I find grids get in the way - it's ok to transfer to grid later, but drawing map straight to grid paper results in sucky maps IME.

My favoured scales these days are 100 miles/cm for continental maps and 10 miles/cm for local-area maps, apart from adventure-site maps those are all I usually need. In fact 95% of my game over the last 2 years or so has taken place on 1 10 miles/cm map (see sig link).

 

[Pbartender]

My latest map...



That's about 13,200 miles across the equator.

 

[Psion]

I use Fractal Terrains and CC2/FT. Which means that from the beginning, my scale is "the whole world on the screen", whatever that means.

The largest map I'll print out is of my South-America sized continent.

More typically, if I want to focus on a region, I'll slice off a peice of my map and detail it more, about 500-1000 miles on a side printed on an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet.

I forget what size my hexes are, but I seem to remember the numbers 250, 125, and 50 for various maps.

Here's a very low res version of my continent map:
http://members.tripod.com/~hawk_wind/trinalia/tringuid.html

And this page has an old version of a smaller "sliced" local campaign map:
http://members.tripod.com/~hawk_wind/trinalia/ssccamp.html

Note that those two are older maps from my 2e campaign (I think they were for CC1 in DOS). I imported them into newer versions of CC2 and even pulled it into an FT world map, and they are much more colorful and nicely detailed.

I am currently not using that world but a fantasy version of Earth. For a while, I was just using an inexpensive small world atlas as well as a world history atlas I have. FT has a great utility for pulling in real world data, so I am now using that to make maps with my fantasy details.