The Art of Cartography

The first map I made with any serious effort, back in 2018.

Greetings and Salutations,

Fantasy mapmaking has become increasingly popular in the course of the past decades. From the first Fantasy books to the most recent publications, in almost every single fantasy boom worth their salt, at least one map can be found. Sometimes maps even make an appearance in non-fantasy books where locations hold an extra significance to the story.

Apart from fantasy novels, the steady rise of popularity of dungeons and dragons and other roleplaying games have propelled the want and need for maps even more. Wherever new and fantastical worlds are laid out before adventurers, ready to be explored, maps will make furor.

What is it that makes a good fantasy map? Moreover, how can you yourself make one? Two important things to look at are the form and the function. In other words, which visual style would you like to use, and, what sort of information should the viewer be able to get out of the map? In that sense a fantasy map is the same as any other map: it needs to serve its purpose.

Once you have determined the style you would like to use, and the information you want to portray, then you can start making your fantasy map. There are many ways to go about it, just like there are many different types of fantasy maps. For this example, I will cover the basic fantasy world-map. If you are not particularly artistic, you could always use software to make your map, or have Ai generate a map for you. Alternatively, you could commission a cartographer to make a map for you. Let us presume you want to give it a go yourself. Take your pencil and an empty sheet of paper and start as such:

1.       Draw an interesting line for your first coastline (if your world has water) and continue this line until you have a finished continent. Think of the real world and look at maps you like for inspiration (do not copy anything directly, always make it your own) Add bays, river outlets, fjords, peninsula’s. Make sure to use a squiggly line here, and a straight-ish line there, to get some nice diversity going that looks natural. Of course if there is a specific shape you have in mind for your story, use that.

2.       Add islands along the coast at locations where they would naturally form. Think of plate tectonics and how your continent would have gotten its shape, to extrapolate where the islands would form. Then place lakes using the same logic.

3.       Add mountain ranges, again thinking of the plate tectonics of your continent. Usually the mountains appear at the center of the continent, or at one or multiple of the coasts. They can appear where plates collide into one another. Naturally, we are working on a fantasy map here, so feel free to break the rules if it makes the world more interesting, and you have an explanation for it in your lore.

4.       Think of canyons as well, and cliffs, add these in where they would make sense.

5.       Now trace your rivers to the mountains from the coast. Never let rivers run from the middle of a desert out to sea, or worse, run from one sea to the next straight through the lands. Water always runs down to the lowest point, and always chooses the easiest route. So keep this in mind. Fantasy only works, if the world, though fantastical, makes sense according to its own laws.

6.       Include hills near the base of the mountains, and spread out from there. In addition, ranges of hills can appear where mountains are yet to form, or have eroded away over millennia.

7.       Add vegetation, where it would appear. Thick ancient forests or more spread out greenery.

8.       Add terrain features such as deserts, swamps, grasslands, tundra, ice-plains and whatever terrain your world has.

9.       Include important locations from your story. (Here we come to the purpose) Names the readers can instantly recognize from the story, and place where in the world, and in which landscape the story is happening.

10.   Rinse and repeat for all the continents that you want to include in your map, and then proceed with ink to fill everything in properly.

There you have it. A very brief basic introduction to the art of cartography.

To end this blog, let me challenge you to create your own world-map, following the above-described steps. Happy map-making! :)