What Makes a Great Fantasy RPG Map Great?

I spent a good portion of my weekend (when I wasn't marching up and down the square) thinking about maps. Cartographic love runs deep in many old-time rpgers and I am certainly no exception. In fact the powerful draw of maps preceded my entry into the hobby and maintained itself even for the two decades I was out.

Where does that power come from? What features of a great map make it great?

Let's take it apart.

A great map provides both a cerebral and visceral experience. A great map doesn't just tell your brain the necessary practical facts to help run a game—like how many hexes it is from Nyrond to Rauxes—it hits you in the gut too. It evokes a feeling or mood, the fleeting sensation of a world that might have existed.

There was some back and forth in the comments on Saturday's post about how hand drawn (and hand inked as Scott Pasha added) tend to be more powerful than even beautifully done computer-generated ones. My guess at the why is that a hand-drawn map creates more of an illusion that a map is a product of the world it represents.

A computer-drawn map talks to your head. It's precise, a useful tool to help you effectively run a junket through the wilderness—but it misses that gut pull completely.

Feel the difference in the two following maps of Harn.

Great map:

Good map (but missing something right?):

A great map tells a story about it's setting. It visually pulls out elements that are critical to that setting and influences what is important to a reader.

Each of those five maps I listed on Saturday immediately told me something about the setting before I even cracked open a related gazetteer.

Church's maps graphically highlight features that seem imbued with myth and mystery—hallmarks of Glorantha. What is that gigantic monolithic block rising three-dimensionally from the page? Why is there a swamp pooled at it's base?

The flowing alien-seeming Tsolyani script and symbolic on-map caricatures of deities instantly transport a viewer to the exotic environs of Tekumel. Skeletal Sarku leers from the City of the Dead. (Sadly this is only of these maps that uses the kinds of depictions of people, monsters, ships, etc. common on medieval and ancient maps to build mood.)

The eye-catching prominence of tracts of wilderness in Darlene's Greyhawk maps jump off the page. Long stretches of dark-green heavy boreal forest and heavy black ice made me instantly want to know what this Blackmoor was. How wouldn't see the jagged bands of thick chocolate-brown mountain peaks surrounding the Valley of the Mage and want to immediately pack up some mules to investigate?

A great map uses color and negative space to contrast elements. Notice in Darlene's map how the wide, green spaces that make up each nation make for a subtle contrast with those wilderness areas I mention above. There are no heavy border lines just beautiful terrain brackets.

Though Church's Prax map is black and white, it's lack of color is almost a virtue because of it's effective use of white space and his shading detail for terrain features.

A great map uses fonts that are appropriately sized and chosen for feel. Map text doesn't dominate any of those five maps. We have all seen those maps where text virtually clutters the whole thing for a busy, busy mess that exhausts you just looking at it.

Contrast this recent Dragon Pass map with Church's to get a sense of the defining differences to both those features above.

Good map:

Great map:

Top Five Fantasy RPG Maps

Rob, the protagonist of High Fidelity, claims early in the novel that you can judge the character of person by their responses to Top Five lists. Such lists are part of the stock trade for lazy day blogging. Who am I to resist the call?

What are your Top Five? I promise not to judge. Much.

In reverse order:

5. Dying Earth RPG maps by Sarah Wroot. The color and skill of these maps thrill me. They are some great whimsical touches on the street level maps of Kaiin that at times sell me on the Vancian feel more than the RPG itself.

4. Bey Su city map from Empire of the Petal Throne by M.A.R. Barker. It wasn't until my second time around in Tekumel fandom that I realized that the cover of EPT was a map by the professor himself. Bonus immersion points for a map more symbolic than geographically accurate (if anything what most maps drawn in our dreamworlds would look like to the inhabitants themselves).

3. William Church's Prax map from Runequest II (the first one that is). No other map captivated me into wanting to know more about a setting than this one (remember that the details of Glorantha were pretty sketchy for those of us who had only that rulebook as an intro).

2. William Church again sweeping the list with the map from Dragon Pass. OK this is a bit of a cheat since it's technically from a boardgame of Glorantha, otherwise I'd be tempted to put it in #1. Click to enbiggen to get the full effect. 

1. Ah, the all-time classic and nostalgic favorite, Darlene's map of Greyhawk. Other kids had posters of Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and ferraris, I had this one up on my wall—where it reigned for four years until a Black Flag poster came along to kick it off.