Unlike other materials here, I haven’t really explored it. This one is on the list on the strength of its parent platform: Reddit. As of October 2017, the World-Building StackExchange has over 35,000 users and hosts over 65,000 answers to over 13,000 questions covering a range of topics. Like a lot of interesting forums, it is very easy to get lost following one rabbit-trail or another. The Worldbuilding StackExchange is a site I’ve spent a number of hours on exploring a variety of topics.
Check out their Tutorials in PDF Format thread. If you want to be inspired, however, you can’t go wrong with a visit to the Guild. Expect to find a lot of material produced with Adobe Photoshop and The Gimp. The Cartographer’s Guild community appears to skew towards the artistic side of fantasy map-making. There is a tremendous amount of good material and resources on The Cartographer’s Guild if you are willing to dig for it. THE CARTOGRAPHER’S GUILDĪn eclectic collection of topics on fantasy cartography and world-building. There are a lot of great and helpful people on the Community Forum, including staff from ProFantasy themselves. In a lot of ways, the Community Forum is the friend you wish you had after you’ve already been through the help, the user manual, and the Tome of Ultimate Mapping and nothing has worked. If you are a Campaign Cartography 3+ user, you should already be familiar with the resources found on the ProFantasy Community Forum. The resources listed here are the forums that I have most visited myself and found the most useful while creating my own world. User Elothan collated the material into a PDF which I’ve made available to you (Elothan shared the file via DropBox but that resource has disappeared). The thread is a great discussion of how the flow of water on earth is influenced by terrain.
HOW TO GET YOUR RIVERS IN THE RIGHT PLACEĪnother one of the great resources you can find on The Cartographer’s Guild. If the Cartographer’s Guild stops hosting the file reach out to me and I’ll get it to you. You can find it in PDF on the The Cartographer’s Guild and online. In such a short space it covers everything from brainstorming the personality and major features of your city to how topography influences city design and street layout.
At 19 pages long it is an easy and inspiring read. A great description of how to approach the creation and layout of a Fantasy City. Ravi Shankar‘s guide to the Creation and Depiction of Fantasy Cities. This guide changed my approach to mapping.
I haven’t yet purchased Ecology and Culture but it is on my list. If you find the Guide to Mapping useful, you can pick up Ecology and Culture in PDF for $13.
The Guide to Mapping is actually a 37-page excerpt of XRP’s much more expansive manual A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture. A MAGICAL SOCIETY: GUIDE TO MAPPINGĪ great, free resource by Joseph Browning, released by Expeditious Retreat Press and available from Warehouse 23, Paizo, RPGNow, DriveThruRPG. The goal is to provide a setting which feels real and operates in a way that approaches “reality” – except where it does not. Plausible cartography resources apply real-world principles and models to world-building.