How to design (and illustrate) a map for your adventure setting

I've designed and illustrated one map for Bazaar of the Gods, so take my advice with as much scepticism as that warrants. But I made a lot of mistakes, which you don't have to make! All my suffering will not be in vain.

Illustrating the map is in itself pure vanity. Functionally speaking, you don't need much more than a diagram. Like the one used in Electric Jungle Jam. If you're planning on playing the Bazaar of the Gods module, maybe you want to skip this devlog as the magic will most certainly be ruined by the mundane mistakes and trickery that went into the final product. Enjoy the magic of the module, then come back and read this. 

Diagram of a dungeon

Source: Electric Jungle Jam by Goblin Goulash

I started with diagram like this one. Resisting the temptation to start pulling out refence photos and looking at all the cool things I wanted to draw into my adventure map, I started with a boring (but very functional) diagram. What things absolute need to be on the map and where do they need to go in relation to each other? When plotting this, I kept in mind some of the principles of 'Jaquaysing' dungeons. Considerations of Jaquaying I put on the forefront were:

• Multiple entrances
• Loops
• Multiple level connections

Bazaar of the Gods, is a Floating Fleefair which I decided would be an exclusive market in the sky, but in terms of a setting I approached it as if it were simply a dungeon. First gameplay decision was therefore that they wouldn't let just anyone in, giving the players a challenge and multiple ways to address it. Obviously, it is an adventure, so we don't want the entering to be prohibitive (or even worse... boring), but there are multiple entrances they can explore and the one they choose will also shape their interactions with the rest of the adventure and NPCs.

Once they were on the Floating Flea fair, the various landmarks needed to be placed in interesting configurations to each other. I didn't want it to be a linear dungeon, I spent a lot of time refining the encounters and NPCs, I wanted the players to have the biggest chance to interact with them in interesting ways, so they needed to be organised with that in mind. I wanted the ruler's palace to overlook the main square. That would give the GM a (literal) platform to showcase the ruler of the Bazaar, but also give the players an obstacle to climb (up to his Palace) or an asset to use (by for example speaking from that platform themselves). Essentially, the landmarks needed to be more than just pretty images, they needed to provide fodder for the player to play with and interact with. Because honestly, otherwise what is the point of an illustrated map? If the visuals don't add to the possibilities, you can just give them the diagram. The advantage of the map is the hope that the players' creativity can be sparked with some additional detail. I remember the time when the GM offhandedly mentioned there was a wooden statue of a goblin in front of the inn. That statue became a central point of player interactions, where we dressed it up, we plated it in gold, and we remembered that statue (more than the whole adventure to be completely honest - sorry GM).

From Dungeon Diagram to Illustration

I wanted them to be encouraged to visit all landmarks. And here I borrow a bit from video game design - where they are very good at leading players to a point of interest. To craft that organic feeling, I used multiple level connections to make it more interesting and organic. Also giving players a number of ways to access the various levels. E.g. take the waterfall down from Class Cruisers, take the stairs through the Palace, climb down onto the Hand of God.

Many routes to and from Class Cruisers
Source: Bazaar of the Gods by Goblin Goulash

So after devising the many ways they could enter (and the many ways I wanted them to be able to interact with the environment), I had to depict them on the map. Which sounds pretty easy, but I quickly encountered another problem due to my lack of experience. All the landmarks should be visible on the map. While initially that sounds obvious, in reality when depicting it, it can become weird. How is it that all coincidentally, all the important buildings are facing the 'camera.'  Unfortunately, there isn't much to be done about this, so I just rolled with it in the end, but you have to make it seem sort of natural and that comes down to feeling and spacing of the landmarks.

Using Silhouettes to Find the Shape of the Map

It all starts with the first question, so the Floating Fleefair is a floating island, but what does that mean. Is it a flat disk, a rock, is it on the back of the Great A'tuin? In my first sketches, I was exploring the possible shapes that could fit all my important landmarks and keep them interesting and related to each other.  I was having a lot of trouble finding a shape that could accommodate the key landmarks and approaches. I wanted a place overlooking the square, I wanted a square around the Hand of God statue, I wanted an Inn, I wanted underground burrows and I needed to shape that could accommodate all these while not looking ridiculous or 'unrealistic'. 

Initial shape sketches - small and lose to find the right shape

The silhouette was also on my mind. I remember a Design Cinema Episode where Fen Zhu explained that silhouette's were especially important in games because the player has to know what they are looking at within a fraction of a second. And while he was talking about first-person shooters and I suppose when evaluating a floating island over the desert, there is less urgency in deciding whether it should be shot at. In the end settling on the silhouette also help settle the interaction and the interlinking between the various key areas of the story. 

Then I roughed out the buildings and some of the landmarks. 

It was almost like carving out the buildings from the rough shape. As you can see the rough locations remained the same, but the details of the buildings did change. Considerations prompting these changes were mostly due to homogenizing the styles as it was looking too chaotic. I wanted it to mix Byzantine architecture and junktown containers, but this become a bit jarring and chaotic on paper. Therefore, it was a bit more homogenized. It needs to seem like it exists in the same world, and putting too many diverging styles in just makes a chaotic soup. Again great advice from Feng Zhu: 

For each project, keep your drawing and painting styles consistent. More importantly, you must keep your design languages uniform.

And my daughter kindly helped with a few touches of her own. These did not make it into the final version of the map.

Not so isometric after all

With all that settled (and a highly recommend settling all that before rendering) it was time to render the map. My initial intention was to make it an isometric map. Inspired by Niklas Wistedt's Paths Peculiar (who if you don't know you should 100% look up - he's also way more experienced at maps than I am), and many Shadowrun games, I thought isometric was the way to go. But I encountered two problems with this. 

1. Isometric would make the map surface even bigger
2. My initial sketch was nowhere near isometric

Fitting a small city on an A4 is already a challenge, but isometric art is specifically designed to have the most visibility of all the objects in the scene. Objects don't scale with distance and all 'tiles' are the same size, so that would mean that each part would take up more space on the page. This is less of an issue with a digital map, where we travel along with the camera, but with a fixed A4 page size to work with that paper real estate is at a premium. And this is probably why when doing the initial sketch I was very far off from isometric perspective, making my groundwork sketch pretty useless for anything but planning. I decided to simply go with a simple 2-point perspective that to the naked eye could come close to being seen as isometric. So if you want to do isometric, take this into account early on. Use an isometric grid to help you even with the initial sketches and take into account the extra space you will need.

So Many Details in the Map

I had the sketch down and I decided on my vanishing points and I was ready to work on the linework. I had been warned about the level of detail by David, but I was optimistic. Each detail that needed to be rendered takes time. That's understandable, obvious even. But I love detail, I love reading comic books with wonderfully rendered and detailed backgrounds. And they are great, but each building as a huge amount of detail and there are a lot of buildings. One detailed object is fine, a city-worth of detailed objects gets out of hand quickly. I simplified the initial details and still was left with too many. While, I'm happy with the result, I'm not sure the time invested in all the tiny details are worth the end result. It will help to decide at an early stage the level of detail you'll be wanting to achieve. A map can look very good with little detail, but keeping this in mind when designing is important because it needs to be balanced.  Having one building super-detailed and the other buildings of the city drawn with less detail will give it an inconsistent look and this will be jarring for the average player. 

Want to see how it worked you can download and try out Bazaar of the Gods. Want more 1-page modules, we've got them!

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