How to Make a Map that Makes Sense || D&D & Dael Kingsmill 

Me: Oh, cool, just a chill map-drawing video. Dael: *discusses tectonic plates* Me: I was not prepared.

I made my worldmap without actually thinking, but this video was super useful to retroactively justify it.

omg I love that you wrapped your Logitech around your neck like a necklace so we could see what you're doing. XD So awesome!

Utah has more like “sagebrush land” rather than grassland. But yes. 😂 Love this video! Thanks, Dael!

Great video- Thanks for sharing the tips!

World is set in the mind of a God in a cave world, yes continents, yes gravity ;-;

Deserts go on the west side of mountain ranges because of the direction the earth rotates, if your fantasy planet rotates in a different direction they would be on the other side

I came here when wasd20 started giving advice that was too complex for my lizard brain

Lock it in, Eddie

I've been struggling to get my grade 8s interested in geography. Watching this, it's suddenly occurred to me that they might get more from making up their own fictional maps, adjusting them weekly as we learn new stuff.

Dael: Go get a pencil and a paper. We're gonna be drawing! Me: *goes and refills my drink*

"Don't be afraid to change things up." Dael is like the Bob Ross of D&D

Hey! Thanks for the shoutout! I’ve been subbed for a month or two and just found this one in my feed. :) Great video!

"Trees are real good at growin' you guys..." That is true

step 1) coastline and elevation (ie: mountains, valleys, flatlands) step 2) equator-alignment/planet orbit/rotational features... which parts of the planet get more daylight, what are seasons like, etc...simplest solution is: "earthlike". step 3) once you have coast and elevation, you can workout how rivers would form naturally from high elevations to lower elevations as they try and work their way to the oceans. step 3.5) tidal features if you really wanna go insanely indepth into that for reasons of sea-faring/ sea-trade, etc. step 4) soil and plantlife features - lush marshes, forests, and deserts. Deserts can also form from a major shift in water levels. Some believe that the sahara was once a great sea a long-ass time ago, and after the super continents split apart, all it's water was lost into the ocean and it became a total wasteland. step 5) now you have your coasts, mountains, land types, seas, rivers, lakes, etc plotted. Now you can add towns near places suitable for agriculture. Since towns need food, and food needs places where you can plant and harvest... towns need sources of wood for construction, livestock hunting, and burning for warmth in colder months. so place towns near irrigated land and a source of fresh water and woodlands. step 6) connect towns by roads. they can be dirt roads initially, or be stone pathways if the towns have long-since been established. new towns usually don't have nice roads leading to them...they may not even have a real "road" to them, but just "10 miles over these hills to the next town over" sign.

Regarding the 2 weeks of travel idea, there's a lot of variation in that. For the Zulu, it was closer to 2 days, and it was on foot because they didn't have much in the way of horses and had some major border fractionalism. For a very different example, check out the Ottoman Empire in its heyday. They kept their outlying peoples happy by giving them a large degree of autonomy. This includes things like allowing cultural traditions and religion to persist; just because the Sultan was Muslim didn't mean he wasn't OK with having Christian subjects. (It's not pure freedom of religion, there were taxes and such levied against them, and Islamic institutions were the only ones that got government support, etc, but it's a hell of a lot better than the "expell the Jewery as a sign of faith" attitude that European countries still did.) They also had an immensely complex and ever-adapting system of governance that simultaneously allowed regional leadership to rule directly and kept them from feeling secure enough to plot against the throne. (Imagine an Australia where every decade or so the national government redefined the number of states and their boundaries... anyone wanting to keep their position is going to do their utmost to ensure the national goverment is happy with them.) This isn't an endorsement of the Ottoman style of rule. It's a massively complex system that endured for a good 500 years in some form or other, which is quite a remarkable achievement - plenty of the world's major powers today can't say they've held together that long. But it's also a system that embraced some very disturbing practices. For example, the standard system of selecting the heir to the throne was being the last surviving offspring of the previous Sultan, or the one who can amass the most power of the survivors at the time of his death. It proves a certain level of competence in that surviving requires the ability to weather assassination attempts and plan the assassination of rivals - you don't get a simpleton on the throne under those conditions, but you tend to wind up with ruthless leaders, and that can be just as bad, or worse. The ever changing nature of the system of governance meant that you had very loyal bureaucrats, but also that their loyalty was born in fear of failure. It's a very different system than anything us Eurocentric types are used to, but it's fascinating...I've yet to find a good source that really gets into the details...long as this comment is, I'm only scratching the surface.

To anyone worried about maps: It's cool, it took thousands of years before we had anything close to accurate maps for the world we live on. Cereal, look at 13th century maps. Even if you rotate them so North is up (which wasn't a thing for quite a while) they aren't very good at describing reality. Besides any overland map that's any good is a crown secret so as long as your relative directions stay the same tweak it as you go.

Well, that was something. I've always had a hard time drawing maps, mostly because I have a hard time drawing anything, but also because a map of my game world seemed so permanent. Once you've got a map, you're stuck, at least that's how it feels. As for my grandma, she much prefers real maps to fictional ones. If you give her a map and compass she can navigate you anywhere in the world...

Thanks for the shout out! I haven't seen that beach technique before, that's cool.

Yet another fantastic and useful video! Something I've noticed when folks talk about drawing maps is that nobody really mentions that just because plate tectonics is how land masses are formed on planet Earth, it doesn't mean that's the way it happens on every planet, even in our own universe. Some planets don't have plate tectonics. The beauty of creating one's own fantasy world is that as long as you keep your logic consistent, it works. You can even just say, "a wizard did it".

Something I do that works really well is to take features from one place (Alaska’s peninsula and island chain), rotate it, change its scale; then take features from another place (Scotland), move it all around and smash it together. BOOM Beautiful, believable, unrecognizable map. Repeat for a whole world. Why can’t France be next to Korea and upside down?

Your big lake looks like a cat eating, watched from above. I love it

Fun, educating and inspiring me to create stuff, just how I like Dael's videos. I used an eraser shaped like an apple while drawing my own map.

One other thing to remember about lakes and rivers: lakes have river flowing out (or 0, in special cases where natural evaporation drains the lake as fast as it fills, which only happens on a large scale in a few places on Earth.) Consider a container holding water. As the water rises, it stays in until it hits the lowest part of the rim, at which point it spills out at that point and only that point. The container is your lake, and that lowest part of the rim is the exit river. You can, of course, pour in water fast enough to overwhelm that one outlet such that the water pours out at more than one point. When this happens to lakes, we call it a flood, and it tends not to be a sustained condition of the water flow, just a once a year/decade/century/whatever event.

sometimes i forget that Dael is Australian, been a while since someone mentioned a Billabong.

The southeastern river flowing into that lake probably wouldn’t have those horseshoe bends that close to the mountains and coast. If the soil were loose enough to form horseshoes, the river would probably be able to bend to south to the bay. And if the soil was firm enough for the river to flow west, then it would probably resist those horseshoes.

“Tectonic plates and gravity” Oh yeah, THIS is why I watch these videos!

Low terrain is always due to water. FOLLOW THE WATER!

Another thing that forms deserts are cold ocean waters. Atacama desert for example is in between the Pacific and the Andes. As you said the mountains generate rain when air currents pass through them, that's what happens to the currents coming from east. This doesn't happen to the western currents because they are dry, the ocean is cold and doesn't generate water vapour to make them wet. That's also why Antarctica is the dryest desert in the world. But if analyzing tectonic plates is complex doing so with ocean and air currents will bring madness upon you.

Oo, Dael, have you ever checked out the Cartographers' Guild forum? I tend to trawl through the Regional/World Mapping section, and there are a few users there that have some really good advice, especially for really detailed maps (Acrosome, Pixie, Azelor, off the top of my head, have a couple of awesome threads, one based largely on Geoff Eddy's (Bricka's) "Creating an Earthlike Planet" and "Climate Construction Kit" (which can be found online, but mostly in copied versions, I think. The original doesn't seem to exist anymore). For climates, having a long look at the Köppen climate map for Earth is a good start as well, to get a feel for what latitudes certain climate regions occur and whether they occur on the east or west coasts or are mostly found inland. I think that's covered in Geoff Eddy's guide as well. It also then gives you a good sense of scale for your world (if it's meant to be the size of Earth). So if you've got, say, a hot desert and humid continental climate on the same map, you're probably looking at around 750-800km (450-500 miles) minimum between the two running north to south. Some of it isn't entirely suited for DnD, though, in that, as you said around 7-8 minutes in, it can be very bottom-up rather than just aimed at making a map that makes sense, but I'd say a fair chunk of the advice given could be applied to just inform the creator to give something that looks realistic, but without being so heavily dependent on building the world up layer by layer.

Just got home from the pub, get a notification for a new video from Dael. Time for a quick snack and some Dael 'n' DnD! :D

I like that you talked about forests, savannas, grasslands, and deserts. It's worth remembering that those ecosystems tend to follow a common pattern: Faerie Sorcerers Gather Daisies (or) Forests Savannas Grasslands Deserts It might not be the most marvelous mnemonic device, but it's an easy way to remember.

Deal you are one of my favorite people to watch on youtube. You take a simple draw a map and then go so in depth!

Thank you for another awesome episode Dael, the extra geographical bits help to make my map look more real, thank you!

Drawing along got me to a point of zen. Thanks for the info! Also those pillows are awesome.

Environmental science student here. On rivers: the slower the river, the more they swirl, meaning after they formed in the mountains they go straighter (faster) than down in the plains (slower). Also Deltas are cool (;

Summary; Look at Dael try to hold a small camera and talk to some piece of paper for half an hour. Just what I subscribed for, thank you!!!

Making maps was always one of my faves parts of story planning. Thanks for the advice. I appreciate you. :)

I could listen to you talk for hours... Especially with that super chill music in the background! ANYway, excellent job on this video. Can't wait for the next one. I finally was able to draw a map that I might actually use!

This was wildly helpful. Eagerly awaiting part 2.

Yes please to part 2!

New Zealand in general mostly mountainous with an absurd amount of volcanoes

Great video! I was so surprised when you mentioned Utah, most people either forget or don't know we exist lol. Currently all that water northern Utah gets is in the form of massive amounts of snow;;; Actually, snow makes up most of the water we get, although it usually stays up in the mountains and isn't in cities as much. We consider ourselves a cold desert because of that! ...It's very cold :'((((( Blankets are a b l e s s i n g

Thank you Dael! You inspire me to DM on a scale similar to Matt Colville.

I haven't played roleplaying games in many years but I remember when you did the G&S vlogs and you've been popping up in my recommendeds a lot lately and your videos are just so nice. You're well-informed, articulated, have this lovely friendly attitude, and it's just nice and chill and relaxing.

Another interesting and helpful video. Thank you!

Great video. I'm ready for part 2.

I tried to pause your paper perspective camera. Also, I like that this affirms my thought process for map making while giving more helpful information. Thanks

Deserts might have petrified forests where rivers/swamps once were. Great place for blights in my opinion.

I got this notification on my phone and immediately opened it. Dael is my favourite

*Chants* Part 2! Part 2! Part 2!

I watch your channel for the great mythological stories and the D&D tips (great potions video btw), I can’t draw so this is great just for laughs at the hilarious setup. I’ll show this to the person who draws my maps for me.

Oh oh oh, I've recently been thinking about map making for my homebrew world, this couldn't have had better timing! I am also a geographer, and I have a few more tips/tidbits to share for making interesting maps. Rivers that are long are also very wide, a mile or more in some places. The bigger your river is, the more tributary rivers you need to help feed it. Rivers also tend to end in lakes, other rivers, or the ocean. You will never see a river that is just a line between two places, not even small creeks or streams. Rivers also tend to follow the path of least resistance. Meanders (the small curves Dael added) are formed depending on your favorite theory, but the point is this: if you have a meandering river (and who doesn't, they look awesome!), you might also have oxbow lakes, or U-shaped lakes that used to be part of the river and were cut off. (Note: oxbow lakes will eventually drain of water. This means your landscape may have dozens of these dried lakes left over.) Mountains tend to be long and narrow, thousands of miles long and only a couple hundred miles wide. While Dael is also right in that mountains form where two plates are converging together, you can also have mountains in places where plates USED to be. This is evident in the Appalachian Mountains in North America; they used to be high as the Himalayas, but they were formed originally when North America and Africa crunched together during the formation of Pangaea. Deserts will actually form in different locations based on how your planet is spinning. Assuming you do not have a flat planet or that your world is actually on the back of a giant turtle (hey, your fantasy map, your rules!), you'll need to think about the prevailing winds, or the direction the winds blow, and the direction storms therefore travel. Rain shadows always form on the downwind side of very tall mountains. Rain shadow deserts also aren't the only way deserts form. There's a ton of great resources about different deserts based on how they form, but most of the "hot" deserts on Earth are equatorial. They're formed because the prevailing winds on either side of the equator blow WITH each other, causing them to actually experience more sunlight due to lack of cloud cover.

Thank you so much for this video. I'm not artistic at all, so having some scientific reasoning behind the placement of things helps me find a starting point and a formula for map-making.

Rather minor point, and you did it right on the map anyway, but just for the sake of the audience (and because it irks me in some other maps, especially in video games): Fortresses do not go where it is most defensible, they go where there is stuff to defend. Nobody cares if you build a great fortress on top of the highest mountain in the middle of nowhere, they will just walk around it (and it would be a royal PITA for you to maintain). The best places are natural chokepoints connecting your empire to its rivals, like mountain passes or river crossings (and then pick the most defensible spot within sight range of it). You can collect tolls from trade in peacetime, and during war the enemy can't just ignore your fortress because his supply lines have to go past it. The time it takes him to siege the fortress is time you have to raise your army...

This is some really good mapmaking advice! I'm going to be running my first game in the next few months, so this has really helped.

Oooh very relevant. Thanks for this!

That lake at the beggining seems like a cat looking down on something for me :P

Great video! I also like the ancient Egyptian power rangers pillow

If you wanna get really in-depth (with tectonics, latitude etc.), Artifexian has some great vids on all aspects of worldbuilding.

Dael is calling the Dutch coastline bullshit! Take that dunes!

Another thing about mountains *I believe is right* is that they get most the rain on one side. I feel like I heard that before in classes or map drawing videos lol

Those Mystery Spot stickers end up EVERYWHERE!

4:32 *Laughs in Genghis Khan*

This would make a good book. Explain the geology and geography, then show ideas on how to implement each kind of terrain, and how to put it all together.

I know she isn't really Australian. The video isn't upside down. Anyway, the bean method can be pretty good if you combine it with natural topography. Like say the beans on the edge that are dispersed can be an archipelago. I think it's a good place to start.

huh, and i JUST got done watching WASD20's map making video. err...his new one anyway. oh well, can't hurt to watch another one

Norway has a massive coastline and tons of mountains, but is in the middle of a tectonic plate. Whaaaat

Today I successfully checked critical role and ginnydi off my list of awesome dnd people of meet one day. Whos left? Matt colville, Dael Kingsmill, Joe manganiello, chris perkins and Jeremy Crawford. In that order! I love your videos!

I almost forgot... generally rivers flow towards the equator... and while doing so... they come together. When a river moves past the equator, like the Nile they tend to break apart and form a delta. Obviously... moving "downhill" is a much more important factor than moving towards the equator, but it is generally true apparently due to a greater centripetal force. If I just knew how to draw I could make great maps. I just need to watch this video over and over to see how Dael does it. Next time I design a capital city I think I'll have to call it King's Dale and have an important mill in it.

Either you're in the Aussie minority who normally say "eraser" or you've become adept at appealing to a broader audience by not saying "rubber" ;) I continue to love what you do and how you do it. Your ideas are at the same time dope and different, and it's awesome.

I've just discovered Wonderdraft and bought it immediately. Best map software I've come across that is actually affordable, but I'm also not good with a writing device.

Maps are fun! I am a real life cartographer. Ive made a fun map recently that looks like an old map. With a sea monster in the ocean and everything!

You just keep churning out those monarchs, Dael.

Just the video and inspiration I needed to finally start mapping this weekend. Thanks Dael! Any fast and hard rules for determining a distance scale? I've tried this before and always end up with ridiculously out of proportion geographical features. In the past I've just gotten frustrated and given up.

8:56 Ah yes, that Pacific Ocean primary school experience of pointing out all the islands that are bits of tectonic plates

Okay but like imagine developing a table for the dice you roll for coastal/continental lines! Like a d20 rolled a 12, so since it’s above ten it’s a higher altitude area, and since it’s an even number it’s more forest than plains, etc etc. for all the biomes

LOL, that lake looked like a top down view of a cat to start....

Lol great video. Tbh this is all I think about in my ecology class.

I believe a lot of this was covered in the 2nd edition Creative campaigning or a similar book. Excellent information. I haven't thought much about it in years. I wish I still had that book. When I was a kid away at camp, my tent got blown down and my footlocker full of 1st & 2nd edition D&D books floated downstream for 40 minutes before finally sinking. I like to think it is still there. I've been thinking a lot lately about what effects a 100 years of meteor bombardment would have on my campaign setting. I thought it would be interesting if it churned up the oceans into mud, and turned large landmasses into seas of glass (which of course have their own wind powered vehicles and pirates). Can anyone think of anything this kind of disaster might do to the planet's surface?

Where did you get the x-wing poster?

When Will the Dael's guide to everything come out?

I am a geologist who tried making a map that was 100% accurate, but it proved difficult (or maybe just tiresome) and I used a map of my region on Earth instead. I'm not lazy, I'm paying homage to Piers Anthony's Xanth series lol

As a first year geophysics undergrad the temptation to actually plan the tectonics of my world has always been high but I know my players wouldn't appreciate it so I'd have to make the starter session just an hour long geography lesson

Are you planning a Kickstarter for a setup for running a game? I would tune in there like I tune in here.

Where does one get a Hieroglyphic Power Ranger Pillow/Pillow Case?

Why not carry on using the grid paper that you used earlier on if you've got some?

water flows downhill, unless youre in the mystery spot

I have yet to see someone make a map of endless lands with a few oceans interspersed.

A saucy video!

Poor Dael, she doesn't even have a table to put her sketchbook on.

Here's another way to get good maps: rip them off nature. Look up what Antarctica looks like underneath all that ice. Find maps of what various regions would look like if sea level were higher or lower. Use maps of mars or ganymede or titan, then add your own seas in the low spots. These all get you totally natural, credible maps. Then just run your rivers down gravity, and follow the other general rules of climate Dael talked about here. Easy, detailed, adaptable. Also, you can just take bits of earth, change scale, and swap stuff around. Look on google maps for some cool areas around the world, then make them bigger or smaller and connect them together like jigsaw pieces as you go. There are lots of interesting lands that your players wouldn't necessarily recognize, especially after you add your own touches. For example, make Grand Traverse Bay (Michigan, USA) a thousand times larger, and you have a whole region of planet to play with. Take some islands from Indonesia, rearrange them a bit, and plop them down sideways in the middle of that sea as buccaneer kingdoms. Add Finland, resized and flipped over, as the next region to the east or south, etc., with all those cool lakes scattered around. Boom, continent map ready!

Plate tectonics is making some big assumptions about my infinite flat earth world... :P (I like weird settings that try to account for the weirdness - an infinite flat world calls for a lot of weird things, and some pretty basic stuff doesn't work. Compasses are magic items and they point to the capital of the empire that makes them, because they're not so much compasses as they are needles that are attuned to always point at the Lodestone, a bigger magical item kept under guard there. Depending on the party choices, stealing it might be a mid-level adventure.

My pencil says "this pencil was stolen from the UMass Dartmouth physics department". So should I take that philosophy going forward?

Fantastic advice. I've been flirting with the idea of designing non-spherical planets. Thinking a cube, a diamond, or an oblong planet that would resemble a rugby ball

I have way too much of a juvenile humor considering the peninsula. Aside from that, my own world building took a deep dive into geography and geophysics. So this is great content. What do you recommend for determining distances on a map so it portrays the idea of being a sphere instead of a flat surface?

The inca didn't have horses and they could transport messages pretty damn fast.

Dael, are you gonna use this new map as a section of your larger continent? Because you said you only have a small part of your continent in one of your streams

Great vid, Dael. Loved it. Next time, please suspend that camera above your desk or something. Your shoulder is terribly shaky.

Why did you not start this video with “HEY YOU GUYS” 😂