DM'ing: The Benefits of Mapping Your World (Even if the Players Don't See It)

This is the first in a long series of weekly articles on ways to help spread some constructive ideas and strategies on DM'ing. The next few weeks will have everything to do with creating your own worlds, as opposed to using a module or a published campaign. The 4th Edition Dungeon Masters Guide gives you plenty of good reasons to use pre-made campaigns and adventures, but if you're style is anything like mine, you spend most of your time in your own worlds.

As you may have guessed from the title, this particular segment is about making maps. Let me just put in the disclaimer that I am in no way artistically inclined with a pen/pencil/crayon/stencil, but I love drawing maps. Now why do I draw maps as opposed to writing or just remembering the setting? First of all, memories of your D&D world can easily fade when a certain region has not been visited recently. Even though it was only a week for the players, it could be months in reality! Also, writing out the description of the entire world before you map it is generally regarded as a poor mnemonic when it comes to accessing stored data in your brain. In other words, visuals really help you remember things about your world without having to specifically look them up. A small crook in the ocean line on your world map might remind you of the fact that you named the nearby port city "Crookshore". It's a little known fact there are no mussels on the coast near Crookshore, they were eaten to extinction by a band of Kuo-Toa that were left behind after a raid. But I digress.

I've established that memory is a driving tool for having a visual, as opposed to written or remembered, map, but there are other important facets that I come across while drawing:

Creating is Familiarizing -
As you draw at your world in a visual format, you get to see and feel the land being made in real-time. You understand the work that gods themselves put into the shaping of lands, and you are able to really connect with the continental shapes that you've drawn. It's not just the facts, it's what you yourself have created from nothing, and you are more likely to identify with the lands earlier on. There will be many instances where you will be put on the spot to describe your lands. The deeper the connection you have to the contours of the terrain, the more detailed your descriptions will be become, and players love details.

Frame of Reference -
When you craft the world from your imagination, you not only familiarize yourself with the terrain, you also get to convince yourself of some of the more important aspects of the geology. Why is the Dwarven City built in this part of the mountains? Does a Human settlement really belong that close to an Elven wood? These are the question that you can answer when placing cities, towns, and settlements throughout your worlds.

Improv becomes Lore -
Old DM pros know that there's a lot of improv involved when you create your own world. One of the greatest challenges of a DM that uses homemade settings is the tricky questions the players like to ask that you are rarely prepared for. "How does Talonvale survive as a farming community without a nearby source of freshwater?" You might not have thought of that when designing your landscape, but maybe you came up with the answer on the spot just then. The answer has just become a part of the lore of the town as well. There's not above ground river, but there's a massive channel of underground waterways that just so happen to be infested with and the townspeople need help!

Lore Inspiration -
When drawing the map for my first 4th Edition setting, I came upon one of my favorite connections. It was suggested by one of my PC's that I set the campaign in a world that was once struck by a huge war or disaster of some sort. I had no idea how that might get implemented at the time, but as I was drawing the hilly landscape that players would start in, and the mushroom forest valley below, I realized that the best explanation for a giant forest of mushrooms surrounded by hills, that are surrounded by mountains, was quite obvious in fact. The mushroom forest grows out of a crater cause by a massive impact in the center of the continent. This impact could have been a meteor, a ritual gone wrong, or perhaps a god falling from the heavens. Making your maps can and will inspire you to think about more than just geography and geology, but about what makes your setting unique.

Check back next Sunday for more tips on creating a setting of your own.

-Lance of the Hill People