Settings with no world map - anybody tried?

[balterkn]

One of my old (2E) campaigns was done without a world map. The players were all provincial people from various mountain settlements - they had a sketch map of their immediate area, notes on various mountain passes and trials to other places they'd been or knew about.

As DM, I had a sketch map of the mountain region that was only populated with the places the PCs knew about, places that I specifically created in advance for plot (that the PCs would eventually learn about, or be able to explore), but kept it mostly open.

The "world map" was really nothing more than a list of place names, brief descriptions, directions and distances from where the PCs were adventuring. This was for consistency (hence the same country was "to the east" session to session).

My take-away was that notes are very important when going without a map.

For the record, this was my most successful home-brew. The players loved the setting. On talking with them years later, one said that the freedom of not having a world map made the various "exploration" adventures in the mountain more exciting, because he said that he really felt like he was exploring (no meta-game knowledge of exactly where everything is).

 

[Varianor Abroad]

I think players in general expect there to be a lot more known about a given land than would necessarily be the case in a standard fantasy-medieval setting.

Agreed. Though I have enjoyed it when I created player backgrounds and passed out slightly conflicting or overlapping information. When the PCs finally figure that out, and start swapping stories, that's even more fun.

I love making just a local map, but you can often reach a stage of needing a larger one. A "DM's rough" showing the names of nearby lands and a one or two-sentence description works very well.