Hand Drawn Map tips?

[terrainmonkey]

as one of the people on here who does hand drawn maps primarily, i will tell you how i go about doing them.

maps are by their very nature pieces of art. for the case of RPG maps, one has to tell a story and create a setting that allows that story to unfold in all of its parts. a simple dungeon needs to be planned, not just a bunch of boxes and corridors. each room has to be given a part in the unfolding tale you are going to be putting your players through. each town or city needs to have certain elements that add to the narrative. with this in mind, i usually start sketching. while i am drawing, i ask myself the following questions:

1. who lives here?
2. what resources do they have?
3. what is the basic economy built upon?
4. is there plentiful food and water for the populace?

for towns and cities, there will usually be a river or stream nearby that the inhabitants use for everything from drinking and irrigation to sewage and waste control. if not, there has to be some way, either a community well, or an aqueduct. in a dungeon it is a cistern, a natural water cave, etc. don't discount magic either. i usually don't include this option when i design a town, as wizards IMC are few and far between, and the clerics of the area aren't about to go casting unlimited water spells every day.

for continents, or large land mass maps, i tend to look at normal earth features for the coastlines. it's all fine and good to draw a squiggly line and call it a coast line, but i like to use google earth (which is a free download at google) and look at how nature decided the coastlines. then, i design my map thinking about plate tectonics, where the rivers go, where the forests would be, hills, and other natural features. i usually draw mountains, forests, hills, swamps, rivers, towns, and roads. for alrge maps, i'll put the largest cities and towns but nothing else. for smaller regional maps, every village, tavern, town, etc. is laid out. i don't name these on the map, because i usually scan it in and then add them with the caslon antique font. this also allows me to do various other types of map, like regional naming, resources of the land such as gold, silver, etc., and in some cases, putting where the predominant races live so i could work out the back story for the PCs i was running.

usually my maps all start with a pencil sketch which is then put into pen and ink. i like to draw on an 8x8/inch graph pad, which usually gives me the scale i need. that way you can make one square equal 10 feet, 5', one mile, ten miles, etc. this makes it easier to keep everything in scale. it is easy for the viewer to see where scale is off kilter a bit, which kills the supposed "reality" of the piece.

you can see many of my maps at the following link:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=746

hope this helps.

[Gamerprinter]

The way that I'm going about creating my hand-drawn map for the November challenge is somewhat different in that the final map will be compiled in a graphics program. I am creating specific map content like rivers drawn by themselves to help dictate the form and placement of final objects. All other objects are created individually on own piece of paper, then scanned to digital format, scaled and painted in image editing software.

Finally I will use Xara, though one could use CC3, Dundjinni, PS, GIMP, Fractal Mapper or any other mapping software to import my PNG map object files and build the final map.

So although, all elements of my map were created by hand, composition occurs in digital software. This way I don't have to create the entire map and all it objects onto one document or map area - entirely by hand.