Creating fantasy maps

A few weeks ago Henry Hyde's new book "Wargaming Campaigns" was published. I haven't read all of it yet, but it's definitely worth its weight. The book outlines various ideas on how to run wargaming campaigns and how to make them work in practice.

I've long toyed with the idea of starting some sort of fantasy campaign, and the book contains some useful pointers on how to build your own maps using software. One of the tools mentioned is Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator, a free mapping tool that runs in your browser. Sounds good, so I wanted to give it a try.

Last week I toyed around with the tool and trying out various options and what one could do. Then, it was time for some real work, and I started to create the World of Do, a fantasy world me and a few friends invented back in the 80s for a roleplaying game we published (more details about that game here).

I started out with an original hand-drawn map of our fantasy world (this map is over 30 years old).

Original map of Dor, drawn in 1990.

 

I then used Photoshop to make a quick (manual) mask to distinguish between land masses and water:

This was imported into Azgaar, and with some manual tweaking a height map was the result:

Then I started to define the various states and give them names. Here are some screenshots of my efforts so far. Some of the content such as city names, heraldry, etc. are still randomly generated, but I was very satisfied with the results so far.

Map with the various states.

Zoom of the region of Atumbar. All city names (except Atumbar) are randomly generated.

Same regions, but with some layers made visible.

3D view of the map

Map projected on the globe, which also allows for defining climate zones etc.

Heraldry layer made visible. I experimented with a few emblems myself, but almost all of them are randomly generated.