Locations and places are a large part of what makes Dungeons & Dragons such a special experience. The fact that a living person is imagining a world with you and can respond to anything you explore sets it apart from video game experiences. As a Dungeon Master if you have to rely solely on description it can become difficult to relay accurate images of where the players are to the table. To solve that, we have maps.
While many excellent maps already exist for your use, the ones you create yourself are the most unique and engaging. Players visiting towns or exploring the wilderness can gain a far more immersive gameplay experience through visual aids. Crafting your own dungeons and combat encounters is also another part of the gaming hobby. This list suggests the best products to construct better locations for your gaming.
How To Draw Fantasy Art And RPG Maps
Best Mapmaking Guide See at AmazonDungeon Masters Isometric Graph Paper
Best Dungeon Sketchbook See at AmazonMr. Pen – Landscape Templates, Architectural Templates
Best Template See at AmazonFantasy Mapmaker: How to Draw RPG Cities for Gamers and Fans
Best For Cities See at AmazonRandom Tables: Cities and Towns - The Game Master's Companion for Developing Inns, Shops, Taverns, Settlements, and More
Best For Ideas See at Amazon- See More
Black Ink
Best Drawing Software See at Steam
The Best Products For Custom Map Creation For Dungeons & Dragons
Best Mapmaking GuideHow To Draw Fantasy Art And RPG Maps
Put ink to page and learn the techniques for beautiful maps
This title will help you develop your drawing skills for evocative new worlds and places. Create your own settings of adventure and fantasy in pen and paper with detailed maps and art.
Pros & Cons- Great entry to drawing in fantasy style
- Plenty of advice and material
- Will consume a lot of your time
- Requires some skill
A wonderful introduction to drawing for those interested in fantasy mapping, this entry offers advice, practice, and material lists for making the best maps you can. For any level of artistic skill there is something to be had from Jared Blando in this wonderful resource. With a focus on creating fantasy worlds, there is guidance on typography, geography, and many other techniques. With a pen, paper, and an afternoon, you can draft up your first map using this as your guide.
Great amounts of patience and practice will be required of you if you wish to reap the best results. For the excellent price, this is a worthy investment of time and resources to learn a beautiful new skill. If you have never drawn anything, you can develop new skills, and for those who have experience with other mediums, this is a lovely exercise in creativity. Step-by-step instructions and guidelines on creating convincing maps will have you feeling confident about your game world in no time.
Best Dungeon SketchbookDungeon Masters Isometric Graph Paper
Plot many a dungeon and cavern old with the isometric grid
Planning a deep dungeon? Raiding a mighty castle? Whatever the case, you can easily map a 3D layout of the place using this isometric graph paper.
Pros & Cons- Easy to sketch location layouts
- Good grid size for overviews
- Little to offer beyond gridded paper
With dungeons being such a large part of the gaming experience, maps and overviews to display their layout can be incredibly important to your sessions. When we create our own adventuring locations, having consistent geometry is important to player choice and avoiding DM headache. You can plot a three-dimensional dungeon or castle using isometric grids like these. Adding a few notes and markers will provide you with a complete and unchanging encounter.
You could procure any number of gridded papers to draw your ideal dungeon. However, this notepad is the right scale and type for easy drafting. Many other isometric grids can be subdivided in ways that make viewing difficult, and this pad is affordable as well. Using a pencil and ruler alone, you can make functional maps for you and your players. The grid scaling is quite small to attempt playing on a map drawn with this paper, but it can be used with miniatures by increasing the size of your squares.
Best TemplateMr. Pen – Landscape Templates, Architectural Templates
Quickly jot in all the details of your landscapes and locales with templates
Templates of this type are often used for architectural purposes but also serve as excellent guides for tabletop drawings. This set has many drawing aids useful for outdoor encounters at the common 1" grid scale.
Pros & Cons- Quick and incredibly easy
- Excellent for outdoor areas
- You'll be stuck with one scale
Need to complete a large outdoor map before game night begins? Quickly place down trees, fences, and other markers using these templates from Mr Pen. Usually, this type of tool is used in business for planning construction and the like, but the scaling fits well for the one-inch grids TTRPGs make use of. If you want fast mapping or are fearful of hand-drawing everything on your map, this is the ideal addition to your kit.
Many of the shapes included in this set could be used for a variety of objects by slightly adjusting their use. You can partially outline them for coastlines or natural-looking curves, by using colored inks, you can represent different objects with the same shapes. There is an endless supply of maps to be had with some imagination and a little time. Offering a helping hand to beginners, this is still useful for expert artists to speed your creation or create decor of the same size and shape reliably.
Best For CitiesFantasy Mapmaker: How to Draw RPG Cities for Gamers and Fans
Further improve your fantasy maps with majestic city art
Jared Blando offers you a tome for further mastery of the craft with How to Draw RPG Cities for Gamers and Fans. Points of interest such as towns and temples are vital to a good fantasy world. Create engaging maps from capital cities to humble villages.
Pros & Cons- Cities make for beautiful maps
- Excellent source of additional advice
- Less broadly applicable
A second entry from the wonderful Jared Blando, this title dives further into fantasy drawing by focusing on towns. Cultivate your artist talent with exercises for cities and buildings. Forts, villages, and many other structures are made with incredible detail in this guidebook. Presenting advice and exercises, you can advance your mapmaking such that you can create every level of scale. From the highest top-level view of a country, down to a city, and working your way into maps for miniature play.
Many of the helpful techniques in this book can be scaled up to create character-sized maps for gameplay. As you get comfortable drawing buildings, objects, and walls, you can work on your own dungeons and castles. This pairs excellently with the first book to give you a solid foundation of fantasy art, and they have many works you can explore for map inspiration while you work on the skills in these books.
Best For IdeasRandom Tables: Cities and Towns
Prevent headaches and creator's block with an array of possibilities for your world
Title Random Tables: Cities and Towns: The Game Master's Companion for Developing Inns, Shops, Taverns, Settlements, and More Author Dr. Timm WoodsWhen populating your game world, the number of cities you create can cause repetition or dulled ideas. Keep everything new and engaging with this collection of world-generating random tables.
Pros & Cons- Generates engaging towns and cities
- Good source of advice and info
- Won't contribute to the actual drawing process
As you become an artisan of population centers, it may become difficult to imagine unique settings every time. For a neverending fountain of ideas and places, Random Tables: Cities and Towns offers you plenty of material to form interesting locations. With tables for creating fun shops, city layout, and many other aspects, you can rest easy knowing the party will have fresh places to explore for the duration of your campaign.
Although this book does not offer anything specifically for better drawing, it is vital to keeping your creativity fueled and ready. Without something to stimulate our ideas, they quickly become stale and repeat themselves. Avoid creator's block and fight back with a collection of inviting thoughts and prompts. You can skip a lot of headaches and wasted time deciding what to create by rolling up some options and selecting what speaks to you.
Best Drawing SoftwareBlack Ink
Sketch and ink with digital tools using intuitive and powerful software
Released February 8, 2016WHERE TO PLAY
DIGITALSweep your brush across a digital canvas and create unique maps and art with Black Ink's toolkit. With GPU rendering, you'll have incredible power right at your fingertips.
Powered by Expand Collapse Pros & Cons- Many brushes, effects, and drawing tools included
- Has a free demo to try out the product
- Less useful without a drawing tablet
Paper-and-pen is a tactile experience in drawing that feels classic and has a great deal of heart. However, many artists and gamers prefer the ease and convenience that comes with digital mediums. With Black Ink, you can draft and design maps and other fantasy art with a GPU-powered tool that offers a beautiful and streamlined creation process. The program does not require a monthly subscription and has a free demo to try before you buy.
The unique element of Black Ink is the panel where you can create effects and layer modifications using a coding-like interface. Experiencing it for yourself is the best way to understand whether this feature will make this your new drawing software of choice. Luckily, these features of Black Ink are available in the trial version and will have you experimenting for hours with the effects and visuals you can create using this system.
FAQ
Do I Need To Be An Artist To Draw Maps?
While experience with art can certainly help the process, even a complete beginner can make functional, attractive maps with a little time and effort. Many old-school maps and monster drawings had a charm and simplicity that can be replicated with some determined practice. Hatching or dotting is often the method of choice for adding a shade or effect around dungeon halls or the mountains on a country-sized map. When you are beginning your map crafting hobby, point-crawl maps can function just fine as well. This is a style of map that marks what is connected to what without fancy aesthetics or accurate distances. As an example, you could mark a small fort named "Rockford" and draw arrow lines connecting it to a nearby village, "Frost Forest Hamlet", with no additional drawing required. Point-crawls can be perfectly adequate for gaming and require no drawing experience to create as they just display what locations are connected for travel.
What Is Hatching Or Dotting Exactly?
Many times, when shading landmarks or elements of a map, a technique known as cross-hatching, or hatching, is used. You create short parallel and perpendicular lines to add depth and saturation to the art. This can be performed by anyone and is therapeutic during long drawing sessions. You can begin by drawing two to four lines that are short and adjacent to each other, then rotate and repeat until you have filled an area. This creates an effect with many small lines that intersect in direction. Dotting is a similar practice when you place numerous dots in clumps as shading rather than using crossing lines.
NextBest Budget Tabletop Terrain In 2024
You won't have to move mountains to afford these landscaped for your tabletop games.
Posts
