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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Catavarie" data-source="post: 2716940" data-attributes="member: 30451">Mapping out your WorldSo now that you have your world written and described in as much detail as you want...hopefully its very detailed...it time to create some visual references for it and by that I mean of course maps. I'm not going to tell you to draw them by hand on loose papper, and I'm not going to tell you to go out and buy Campaign Cartographer or some other mapping program, thats a decision for you to make yourself as to how you like to do things...me I use a cartography program and hand drawn maps.Well first step is to draw an atlas of your world...One map with all the Continents and oceans and seas and forests and mountain ranges and isles and great gorges and large lakes shown.  Don't worry if your not the best drawer in the world afterall you dont want any straight lines at this point you want your coastlines to be rough and uneven with various peninsulas and inlets throughout.  This seems like a daunting task but its really easy once you have your world written down...for example if you have a large city that is located on bay on the southern tip of the western continent already written down then you know that is where you need to drawn in a bay.  Once you have your Atlas drawn...label it.  Name the Continents, the mountain ranges, the bodies of water, the deserts and forests.  If you felt it was important enough to draw it in then its important enough to label. From here on is where a Cartography program comes in handy to keep shapes the same <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Now draw seperate maps of each continent and chain of isles, and label them with landmarks and cities.  Mark the cave of your great dragon, or your swamp swarming with trolls.  I even suggest going as far as marking territory borders for the individual kingdoms.By this point your probably getting the idea of where I'm going with this...Then repeat the process for each major city, or isle, or village of note, or pirate cove...anywhere that your Players might wish to go early on...and mark dungeons connected to these areas.Map out some dungeons...a stack of dungeons is a great thing to always have and by simply moving doors to different walls and switching a few traps a dungeon can be reused many times with out the players ever realizing it.  After all it wouldn't be Dungeons and Dragons without dungeons.For your cities remember that the walls of buildings might be straightlines themselves but streets can still bend and turn so keep the city interesting and if their are any large or particularly interesting structures then map them out too...heck I map out every Tavern and Inn because so much happens in them, along with street markets and especially boats for the same reason.  Just remember that this is your world and you can create as much or as little as you like.The last step and possibly the most important one is simple and will cost you a little bit of money...Sorry everything can't be free...this is to laminate your maps.  If you are thinking to yourself, "Well DUH!" then you know why I say this, but on the other hand if you have no clue why I say to laminate your maps then I'll explain.  When your players are trotting along through one of your dungeons or traveling across the country and decide that they want to go back to something they past earlier and you were smart enough to mark on your maps where they had been and what they have gone through then you will know if they need to disarm a trap again or if they must avoid detection by the patrolling Goblins to get there.  And it also helps you to remember where in your world they are at.As a side note I don't use battle mats of any form in game I like to keep things simple and mobile, if it can't fit into my backpack then I don't need it.A few mapper programs that I use from time to time are <a href="http://www.nbos.com/products/mapper/mapper.htm" target="_blank">Fractal Mapper</a>, <a href="http://www.profantasy.com/" target="_blank">Campaign Cartographer</a>, and my personal favorite <a href="http://www.gryc.ws/autorealm.htm" target="_blank">AutoRealm</a>.  I also use <a href="http://www.enworld.org/RolePlayingMaster/" target="_blank">RolePlayingMaster</a> for mapping and all my other GM needs from organizing and prep work to actually running a session, its great for automatically crunching all the numbers for me. And that my little plug. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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