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 At last, a genuinely useful galactic map for space-operatic tabletop roleplaying purposes.

I don't know who originally made this wee masterpiece. If you know, I'd love to be able to give credit where it belongs, so let me know.

NOTE: Sectorbob, in the comments, tells me "That was made by VENGER SATANIS for his Alpha Blue setting/rpg. Mostly a silly fun rpg with a lot of slease." I've  heard of Alpha Blue, but never seen anything of it in real life.

Ein Volk, Ein Dungeon, Ein Fuhrer!

"The 6th Panzer Division creates a pincer encirclement here to deal with the infestation of bugbears kobolds and squid-face things, which will open our path to the Holy Grail and TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION!"

The Next Bit

This is the players' map of the next bit of country they'll be moving through*.

The HeadLand is so called because of the many great stone heads that adorn the many rises and knolls of the valley of the River Norflowd. They are the relics of an ancient people, long gone. The heads remain, looking out over the flocks of sheep that now graze those downs.

This was done in indian ink with a croquil nib, coloured with watercolour and coloured pencil. It took a lot longer than it should have, and it reinforces why I do all this kind of shit on the computer these days.

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* You would think that after SPECIFICALLY ASKING FOR A MAP OF THIS BIT OF COUNTRY the players would show at least a modicum of interest in exploring some of its many interesting features. But no, turns out the purpose of SPECIFICALLY ASKING FOR A MAP OF THIS BIT OF COUNTRY is so that they can hurry straight through it as quickly as possible, ignoring everything. For fuck's sake.

Old Mantua

Here's an excellent roleplayable map of Old Mantua. I have just the spot for it in my campaign world too.

Clichéa

 Redditor called Sarithus has created a map of Clichéa, “a map based on fantasy tropes that also pokes a little fun at unoriginal map makers.”

Now, although this is intended as a parody of many, many (so many) fantasy worlds, I think it would also be very useful as an introductory campaign world. The tropes are all familiar enough that new players could feel right at home, and that familiarity would allow them to come up with their own character and adventure ideas without first having to figure out what game the GM is playing.

As I've said before, clichés become clichés because they work.

The Known World Expands

I've been working on some more of my campaign world's maps.

Specifically, I've been expanding the north of the main continent out to the north-west and incorporating Færún's Sword Coast (from the D&D Forgotten Realms campaign setting) so that I can make use of Neverwinter and Waterdeep.

I started our 5e campaign with the Starter Set and its Lost Mines of Phandelver module (which, incidentally, we're nowhere near completing), and all the action in that adventure takes place on the Sword Coast. So, it seemed like a good idea to shoehorn it into my own world.

Progress thus far. Clickupon to enlargenate.

The geographical features are more or less all present, but I still have to add all the place names and roads and what-not in the eastern half of this map — the overlapping area with the existing map of the North. Also, I have to come up with names and terrain for the islands out to the west. I haven't really thought much about what they're like.

Adding roads is way easier since Photoshop finally started supporting dashed and dotted strokes on paths — I think they started that at long last in CS6.

Wave Echo Cave

Here's the map of Wave Echo Cave I gave my players after they cleared out Cragmaw Castle, failed to save the dwarf from having his throat cut or find the dastardly evil-doer they were actually looking for, and got 25% killed by an enraged owlbear which saved the rest of them from being butchered by the remains of a depleted century of hobgoblins.

Whether or not they'll ever actually get to Wave Echo Cave is now doubtful. I seem to have gone a bit off-piste with that adventure, and now they're in Neverwinter trying to find out what's going on behind a nasty plague of zombies and things, and people not staying decently dead as they should do.

I should note that I'm not actually using Faerûn as my campaign setting, I'm using my own world that I've been playing with for a bit more than thirty years now. I've just inserted Neverwinter's bit of the Sword Coast in the north-west of my main continent where it can't do too much harm.

LMoP — players' map

I've been running our gaming group through the D&D5e Starter Set adventure, Lost Mine of Phandelver, which is set near the city of Neverwinter™ in the Forgotten Realms™ (which has taken over from Greyhawk™ as the official™ D&D^®™ world™^©).

I don't use the Forgotten Realms™ as my campaign world, but I've got plenty of empty space left on my maps to slot this bit in somewhere.

Anyway, there's an overland area map supplied with the adventure, which is a good and fine, but I prefer that my players not be able to count hexes to get an exact idea of how far away anything is from anything else, so instead of giving them access to that map, I've made this considerably cruder and less exact map for them to refer to, and to scribble on and abuse as they see fit.

I intended it to be a bit crappy, but I have to confess that it's even crappier than I intended. Never mind, it will do the trick.

My World, And Welcome To It

This map shows the relationship of the land-forms shown in my individual world maps, with a few place-names to help show you roughly where things are. Apart from the outlines of the continent and archipelago, it contains no geopgraphical or political detail.

It's less than 3,000 miles across, so it's substantially smaller than our own earth. It's still a lot of space to fill with adventure.

This is just one of about twenty or thirty adjoining planes on the surface of a multi-planar sphere. If you imagine a d20 or d30, this would be one face of the die. With the proper protection and life-support, it is possible to walk from one "face" to another (though border conditions are inimicable, to say the least), and the planes also interconnect via the UnderDark.

The fact that two planes are adjacent and border one another is no guarantee that they have similar life-support requirements.

There is a simple A4 PDF, designed for b&w laser printing, here. It's about 255 KB.

Terrific idea

Check out this idea over at Underworld Kingdoms for building megadungeon maps by overlaying a whole bunch of building plans — castles and so forth.

This is the sort of thing that computers and the internet have made trivially easy. It could have been done back in Ye Olden Tymes with overlay cels and what-not, but it would definitely NOT have been easy or straightforward.

This sort of layout looks a lot more like real building than most megadungeon mapping. Structures that accrete over ages don't tend to have any overarching design, and they don't generally conform to a convenient grid, having been tacked on to and built over existing construction.

This would probably drive any obsessively accurate mappers up the wall. Muahahahahahahaaaaa!!!!!

Modular Megadungeoneering

I'm running a megadungeon at the moment. The party are in Hell, though they haven't yet experienced much hellishness. Yet. Muahahahahahaaaaa.... and all that.

Anyway, I have to say that I'm not a great fan, as a DM, of the traditional sprawling twisty-turny megadungeon level map.

The reason for my lukewarm acceptance of this model of mapping is purely to do with manageability. A map like this is going to require pages and pages of room and encounter descriptions, even if they're pared down to the bone.

That means a lot of page-turning, and inevitably there will be times when numbered encounters, which may be adjacent on the map, will be pages apart in the written descriptions.

That adds a level of confusion I don't need.

Additionally, the sprawling nature of the map means that the party could go just about anywhere, any time, which makes it that much harder for me to plan ahead, or to take into account relationships between dungeon denizens on the fly, or to foreshadow upcoming event possibilities. I don't mind having to do a little prep work as DM, but I prefer to keep it as minimal as possible.

These little maps by Dyson, on the other hand, are relatively limited in terms of their geography.

I can fit a whole map on a single A4 page at a scale large enough to read easily and to make legible notes on, and I can fit the written descriptions for the whole map on a single facing page.

The modules can be easily interlinked just by noting where the exits are, and how each exit connects with any of the other maps. They could all be part of the same level, or they could be scattered across dungeon levels.

Best of all, wherever the party goes, the map and description are right there together — which makes for excellent manageability. The end result is transparent to the players; as far as they're concerned, all of the maps might as well be one huge many-folded confusing mega-map.

And if I decide, on the spur of the moment, to introduce an area in which all the tunnels are made of rotting meat, swarming with black beetles, worms and maggots, it's a piece of cake to introduce a new map into the ecosystem.

Byzantium

I'm not sure where this excellent map of Old Constantinople came from, but it's great. It wouldn't be as easy to use in a game as a boring old plan view of the city, and it's certainly not accurate to scale, but it's a wonderfully evocative image.

This is a modern image, but it's very reminiscent of 15th-16th century woodcut city maps I've seen from Northern Europe, especially Germany.

Treasure Map

I like to have physical props for my players to fiddle with, and one of the ones I've created over the years was this treasure map which I made to go with the opening of a low-level campaign I ran once.

All the characters started out as zero-level farm brats, the McMurdoch siblings, forced off the farm upon the death of their father. This map was found amongst his effects, along with his old sword and chain shirt.

That campaign was at its most fun when the characters were all hopelessly incompetent, but as they gained experience it became a lot more run-of-the-mill — I don't mean it wasn't fun then too, but it wasn't really much different to any other campaign. In the beginning, decisions like what farm equipment to take with them really mattered (they decided to take the anvil, for some reason). Later on, that sort of stuff disappeared. Ah well.

Anyway, I drew the map with coloured ink on heavy rag paper, and then baked it until it became quite fragile so that the players (just like their characters) had to be quite careful about how they handled it.