How to Create a World

[leper0messiah]

I've found the hardest thing in being a DM is creating the world. Not getting an idea, but designing it to look like a genuine world. Anyone got a decent generator? I've tried the donjon fractal world generator but it's too random, I'm looking for a good generator that's free and precise and easy to use. or even just a strategy.

thanks

[Masaioh]

I am also looking for the same thing as OP.

[Skeletor]

Lame I know but you can generate planets in just about any of the civilization games, also dwarf fortress generates entire worlds as well with names and history and all sorts of stuff.

[leper0messiah]

Lame I know but you can generate planets in just about any of the civilization games, also dwarf fortress generates entire worlds as well with names and history and all sorts of stuff.

linky please?

[kieza]

The best one I've found is AutoRealm. It's got a fractal generator in it, which is great for making coastlines. It's got a few downsides, like occasionally generating a coastline which crosses itself, but if you tinker around with it you should get some good results eventually. If you do like I did and just use the fractal generator to get a rough outline before making a map using GIMP, it works okay.

[leper0messiah]

The best one I've found is AutoRealm. It's got a fractal generator in it, which is great for making coastlines. It's got a few downsides, like occasionally generating a coastline which crosses itself, but if you tinker around with it you should get some good results eventually. If you do like I did and just use the fractal generator to get a rough outline before making a map using GIMP, it works okay.

...I like it

[Jallorn]

I managed to find a PDF around about a year ago that has some very nice rules. In fact, it lists simple steps you can follow in order to create a whole world. I don't have any links for it, but I'm sure if you search for Magical Society Guide to Mapping, you'll find it eventually.

[Ormur]

I just drew the maps for my world (continent actually) by hand so I can't help you with that but I can provide a few links to help with realistic climate since I'm a bit of a stickler for such things, Tolkien's maps of Middle Earth for example don't really make sense climatologically.

I actually started with what kind of climate and variation I wanted, studied sea currents, climate, rain shadows and such and then drew the map. The kind of mild European climate I wanted for my main setting had to face an ocean to the west (or actually the direction the planet is turning in so the hot sea currents flow there). I put it on the southern hemisphere so it wouldn't be a Europe/Middle Earth clone.

This page has descriptions of various worlds the creator made by tweaking the climate and axes of Earth as well as some other planets made from scratch. So one can see the results of a few different parameters.

I read about the Köppen climate classification to see what kind of geographies had what kind of climate and then compared them with ocean currents. Doing so should give one a rough idea of the climate in the setting after having drawn it, placed feature like mountain ranges and positioned it on a certain latitude.

For determining population density and level of services this page was very helpful but in retrospect I should have made the cities bigger since the page presumes a European middle ages level of urbanisation whereas my setting is economically more Renaissance like.

[Anxe]

You could use the real world... Your players will relate to it better and you'll know the terrain features are realistic. Just change the people and cultures to whatever you want for the section of the world you're interested in.

[Totally Guy]

If you can get some backstories simltaneously you can incorporate new things into the game world. You'll know those things with be important to the players because they were the ones that thought it'd be cool to stick it in the backstory.

[Reynard]

linky please?

Dwarf Fortress!!!

It'll take a while to get used to, but aside from using the world gen for terrain, you can use the Fortress mode to design Dwarven, well, Fortresses. And the Adventurer Mode to explore the world and find cool areas for you players to visit.


On general world-building, may I suggest this page. Scroll to the bottom. It might not be finished, but The Giant's advice on world-building has helped me out a few times.

[Aotrs Commander]

Being the the Lord of Overcomplicating Things, I generated and edited my world map in Civilisation 3's map editor. Then I went through and using printscreen and copy/paste into Paint Shop Pro 8 made a compiled jpeg picture of the world. I then dropped that into TurboCAD and traced around it.

A long a complicated procedure, but one that's given me a passably realistic distribution of climate (from civ's generator) and a suitable "random" style; plus the convieniant location of resources (which helped with city placement). Now I just edit and expand the map in TurboCAD, which has layers, making it easy to go through and (say) hide the resource dots or the political borders. It might have taken some fair amount of effort, but in the the end, it's easily the best map I have. And the advantage of being already digital is enormous, of course.

[Ravens_cry]

This might help with the process.It was certainly inspiring for me.

[thompur]

He's a bit pricey, but, if you want a country with a lot of fjords, hire Slarty Bartfast, the award winning world designer! ;-)

[Thinker]

I recommend the Pro Fantasy tools for making maps. They are not free, but are reasonably priced for what you want to do. To make truly amazing maps takes a lot of time and effort (I'm not there yet), but to make good maps only takes a few minutes. You can use it for cities, countries, worlds, etc.

[subject42]

This may sound odd, but how about several runs of Dwarf Fortress with a large tileset, stitched together?

Edit: Wow, I missed the previous post altogether.

[Zeta Kai]

The Cartographers' Guild called to you like a siren. Answer her, & crash upon her rocks. You'll be glad that you did.

[arrowhen]

Honestly I don't even bother with world maps anymore. Something like half a continent is more than plenty for any campaign I've ever run or played in.

[Ravens_cry]

Try turning a map of the world upside down. It's quite inspiring, I find.

[hamishspence]

I vaguely recall a picture based on the real world- only everything shaped like a real continent, was actually the ocean, and vice versa.

[Reynard]

This one?

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Also, that awesomely nerdy site that someone linked to before went into a great mount of detail about the climate, possible lifestyles, etc, such a world would have.

[hamishspence]

Yup- that's the one.

[Ranos]

Try doing some Dawn of worlds with your players for world generation. Makes the whole thing develop organically, and you get a nice background story for your entire campaign world.

Oh, you mean actually making the map ? I dunno, just scribble on a piece of paper ? Or use something grid-based with icons ? As long as you know what's there, how good it looks is secondary.

[Yora]

"Good poets borrow, great poets steal."
The first step to create a good setting is to make a list of things you really like and you wished you'd have come up with that idea yourself.

When I work on my setting, the great problem is not creating towns and cities and geography, and organizations, and religions and stuff. The problem is making these things cool.
Writting up things is really easy, but you pretty soon end up with stuff that is completely generic. There are some settings I think are just amazing: Planescape, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Eberron, and others. It's easy to create worlds that have cities, civilizations, and organizations like these, but the world never gets this feeling of being special.
After literally years of rewriting things, I've come to the conclusion that an interesting setting that is supposed to be special in a way, has to start with a theme, and not with the geography. If you just have a couple of static nations, all that PCs do is generic dungeon crawling and princess saving. So what a world needs is one greater central conflict: "Evil spreads from Morder", "Demons prepare to invade Azeroth", "Evil Darklords terrorize the people of their domains", "Factions/Dragonmarked Houses are endlessly plotting against each other". With a setup like these, you have the PCs jumping into the action, instead of being the source of action.

I've been working on my setting for six years now, and I managed to tie up all the freely floating ideas of cool things into one basic theme just last week.
It's "Some centuries after great wars destroyed many of the old civilizations, many groups of evil sorcerers make pacts with demons and search ancient ruins for magical knowledge and items. Traditionalist shamans oppose the demonic cults and gather warriors to keep them from rediscovering the knowledge of creating portals and taking political control of the small city states that make up the world." In addition the world is still mostly wilderness and sparsely populated, and forest spirits appear as both allies and monsters.

[Draz74]

The problem with basing a setting on a central conflict like that is, once the PCs beat it, the world risks becoming boring Happy Sunshine Land. Now, you can just make the main threat so epic that the players will never have a chance of destroying it entirely, only thwart its current plans, but it's still something to be careful of.

Personally, I think I like the way Eberron does it better -- have a lot of overarching conflicts. Eberron isn't just about the Five Nations' intrigue; it's also got the Daelkyr and the dragonshards and who knows how many other overarching plots going on.

[Jallorn]

The problem with basing a setting on a central conflict like that is, once the PCs beat it, the world risks becoming boring Happy Sunshine Land. Now, you can just make the main threat so epic that the players will never have a chance of destroying it entirely, only thwart its current plans, but it's still something to be careful of.

Personally, I think I like the way Eberron does it better -- have a lot of overarching conflicts. Eberron isn't just about the Five Nations' intrigue; it's also got the Daelkyr and the dragonshards and who knows how many other overarching plots going on.

Well look at the real world. During the ages of humanity's rise, and even now, nations do things that others don't like. Those bad feelings are harbored, and sometimes intensified over the centuries until you have a very explosive situation. It's true that we leave now in one of the most peaceful ages of man (I believe) and yet there is still so much chaos. So do stuff like that. Heck, just for fun, make the players play a second campaign where they find out halfway through the campaign that the enemy they hate so much was the ally they loved so much last game.

Good news, I found that PDF: http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=XRPFREE2

[Last_resort_33]

Here is what I do and all my best looking maps have turned out like this.

Get yourself a world map. Get yourself a world map, a meteorological one can be quite good for later. Get some other random maps of coastlines.

That's the end of your computer use, now get a BIG sheet of paper (A3 minimum) I tend to use 2x3 ft cheap canvas, draw a 1" border around it in pen. Draw, lightly in pencil several huge blobs, to be used as continents. Although your world may not work like this, to make things look right, it helps to make them very very roughly match up so you can imagine them sort of having drifted apart through tectonic shift. They can touch, overlap, or skim each other (like North and South America) Add a short wide one at the top and the bottom, world maps look odd without poles

Once you have these big faint blobs, go over them again, slightly harder, this time adding wiggley bits, peninsulas, fjords etc. look at your coastline maps to get an idea of the sort of shapes there are, directly copy any ones that you like.

Now take a pen and go over your second line, without lifting your pen, using lots of short, jerky movements to create a natural looking edge. (crooked not spikey)

Using the same technique, add some add hoc islands to some areas that look enclosed, and maybe one or two dotted about in the middle of a vast ocean.

Now we are going to draw some mountain ranges in pen, These work well running vaguely parallel to coastlines, and particularly on the edge of continents, or where they overlap (Think vaguely about how tectonics work and you won't go far wrong). for your mountain ranges, just draw a series of upside down, wide V shapes of varying sizes and use horizontal shading on one side, the goal is the sort of effect as the maps in in the front of Tolkien's books.

Now rub out all the pencil lines

Now look at your meteorological map, this one is quite good.

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using a pencil, draw 8 wavy lines east to west to give you a guide to temperature distribution.

They should be something like this
Snow
Cool
Medium
Hot
Hot
Medium
Cool
Snow

The hot areas should be mostly desert, although if you end up with a big forest nearby, you can fill it in with forest later and that will be rainforest, so until then, leave this blank for now. The north and the south will be left white.

In the cool and medium areas, using the pen technique from the coastline draw some lakes/small seas.

Now draw rivers, lots of smaller ones in the cooler areas, few, but large ones in the hotter areas. Use the coastline drawing technique again. They should usually run from mountain to plane to sea, start in the mountains and weave them out and find a nice place (a sort of V shape) in the coastline to finish. Then add more, either from planes or mountains as tributaries all leading into the same river at different points. rivers should look like long, crooked trees.

Now add forests. Only bother with big ones. pick a few small random places in the medium areas and then start drawing little circles out from those points, working towards rivers and stopped by mountians and coasts and when you think "Christ, there's enough trees here already"

Then add settlements. On the edges of natural features is the best, especially where they meet, at forks in rivers, at estuaries, where a mountain range meets the sea. Occasionally, if somewhere looks REALLY bare, slap a settlement in the middle of it and it can be a plot point.

Now use the edge drawing technique to draw in political borders, one or two settlements in each country. Try to follow mountain ranges, rivers and other natural barriers where possible.

That is how I create a world.

[ghost_warlock]

You can also use this site to make a random world map. Can save the picture to your computer and import it into various map-maker programs (such as AutoREALM) to slap mountains, towns, etc. on it. May have to convert it to a .jpg first, though.

[Yora]

Get yourself a world map. Get yourself a world map, a meteorological one can be quite good for later. Get some other random maps of coastlines.

Or, as a different approach, don't start with a world map. Quite often a setting that spans an entire world is in fact multiple settings that could work isolated from each other.
For example, a campaign about european knights does not need to have Africa on its maps. Trade networks at that time reached far to the south of Africa, but for almost everyone in central Europe it only mattered so much as "there's another continent to the south". And there's really no reason at all to include America anywhere, as there were virtually no connections at all.
Creating entire worlds has the tendency to make you lose focus. Khorvaire is a special case, but when you play in Faerûn, you either play in the North, or in the Unapproachable East, or the Southern Sword Coast, or the Cold Lands. But you really don't need perfect details on all of them.
Also, I think a world kind of loses something of it's wonder when it's completely mapped out. I always liked the white at the edges of maps of Middle Earth. At some points, the people who made that map in-world just didn't know what places were beyond that.