Creating a world from scratch is a daunting task.  Personally I don’t recommend it unless you know that you are going to be playing a long campaign and that everyone is behind the idea.

However, sooner or later most of us decide to at least make a drawing of the fantasy world we have imagined.  Here are some tips to make the job a bit easier and to get a more coherent end result.

1 – Start with a  coast-line.  Draw out the continents first.  The major land masses will help define cultures as well as other major geographic features.

2 – Decide where the mountains go.  Mountains, if your world follows real-world plate tectonics will be somewhere near the coastal regions where continents collide.  This is not strictly necessary because a fantasy world is a fantasy world, but players will find it familiar.  Mountains also define where water is and which way it will flow.  Rivers flow downhill (assuming gravity is the same on your world as in ours).  This means that rivers will not cross mountains or flow up into them.  Rather they will flow down from the mountains towards the coastal regions.

3 – Decide on the major civilizations as well as major volcanoes and deserts.  These features further help define the world and the interactions between the intelligent races.  Most races will naturally avoid wastelands, volcanoes and deserts.  These features naturally tend to destroy major cities and civilizations.  Likewise they make trade difficult.  Civilizations will tend to start near sources of resources as well as easy means of transporting them i.e. rivers.

4 – Finally add other geographic features like forests, plains, small swamps and other geography that will not have a major (i.e. global) impact on the civilizations.  These kinds of features will dominate life locally but do not generally define where or how civilizations are built.  Also many of these features will naturally define themselves, such as swamps forming around river deltas as they empty in the sea.

Until next time have fun drawing your worlds.

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