If you have visited my blog previously, it’s probably fairly obvious that I fall into the camp of those who enjoy tinkering around with maps. I spend far more time creating maps and adventures than I do actually playing. To me, it’s another part of the hobby that I find very rewarding. However, I realize that some people don’t enjoy it and others simply don’t have that kind of time to spend on prep.
For those of you who may be short on time or inspiration, one little trick we would use back in the day was to use a real-world map as a template for some or all of your campaign map. It’s a resource that’s versatile and can be adapted with minimal effort for a variety of settings.
For instance, I grew up in upstate New York and my family would frequently vacation in the Adirondack mountains. Back in the early 1980s when I first got heavily into role-playing games, there were always paper road maps lying around. These mundane maps became the campaign setting for my high school AD&D group. Oh, I made the scale larger and changed most of the names. However, it provided me would a workable map on a very limited budget. A few years later, my friend Mike used a map of Mount Desert Island in Maine for the western side of his Fantasy Hero campaign.
These days there are quite a few resources out there, allowing people to easily craft their own maps. However, real-world maps can still be useful. The geological features in our world have been crafted by eons of history. If you are wanting to create your own map but time is precious, maps from our world can be a great place to start. Simply choose an appropriate area, trim a bit here and there, and you’ll be on your way with geography that makes sense. Using a little artistic license, it’s relatively easy to take a real-world map and sprinkle in some fantasy elements where you see fit. A mysterious forest here, an ancient ruin there, and before you know it, you have a living, breathing world that your players can explore.
It occurs to me that since returning to the hobby I haven’t been exposed to much other than my own games. I’m curious to hear what is common for other game masters. Do you lean toward using published campaign settings? Do you run your games in your own world and create your own maps? Alternately, do you tend to leave the overland stuff a bit more abstract and only focus on adventures and encounters?
That’s all for now. Thank you for stopping by and I hope you have a great week. Good gaming!
For more maps & plot hooks, go here.
For my Idea Chest posts, go here.
For some random tables, go here.
Want to help me to compile a list of TTRPG conventions? Click here. Finally, for a bit about me and some general stuff, this is the spot.
Talaraska 
I’ve been taking inspiration from maps since forever ago.
My current campaign map started with a map of the Lake Champlain Valley, and I built up from around there.
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That’s fantastic. Are you from that area originally? I grew up over in Rochester, NY but we vacationed over in the neck of the woods occasionally when I was a kid. I grew up on James Fenimore Cooper stories and would imagine them playing out but with a fantasy twist as we would drive through the woods. Thanks for taking the time to write.
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I grew up around New England, and for a while in Saratoga Springs, NY and Burlington, VT. I started playing D&D as a kid while in VT, so the area seemed like a great place to start a new campaign.
And to add to the Small World, I currently live in Rochester, NY.
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That’s great. Very similar to how I started. My folks are in their 90s now but still live in the same home in Henrietta where I grew up. I was just up that way for the holidays and had a chance to check out the new Millennium Games location. Nice to see something like that thriving.
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I love their new location, and the space it has. I first moved out here in the ’90, and I remember going to the small, packed store that was Crazy Egor’s.
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Oh, I miss Crazy Egor’s! It was always fun browsing through all of his used stuff. Do you happen to know if the owner (Paul) is still alive? Seems like he’d had some health issues when he had sold the Henrietta location but I think he carried on with mail order out of his home for a number of years (I think out toward Brockport somewhere). Hope he made out ok. Was always very friendly and quite a character.
Do you know if hey still have annual game conventions at RIT (Rudicon) and U of R (SimCon). Going to high school in the 80s, those were always something to look forward to.
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I don’t know how he is; and I also hope he’s well. He was always great to talk to.
I don’t know if Rudicon or Simcon have still been happening… it’s been a while since I have been able to think about attending one of those.
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That’s a great idea. I tried making my own maps a few times, but they never felt right.
So I tried using Greyhawk and then Forgotten Realms to set our games in. I’ve gone back to Greyhawk now, and have a huge poster sized map. Which is pretty cool. If I get a gaming room, I’m tempted to mount it on the wall.
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Nice. Was that the old Greyhawk hex map? I always loved that back in the day but never had the spare money as a kid to buy either the boxed set or the folio edition from the 1980s.
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Yea, I had the boxed set. I didn’t really understand Greyhawk that well, but it was a really nice hex map. Paizo has the poster sized one, split into four pieces. Can also find people selling them on eBay.
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I’ve bene a shameless ‘reskinner’ of maps, be it grabbing from modules and retooled for my own adventure or largescale theft of European maps so I can figure out the distance between major cities. I’m still building up that faux-Euro world for a homebrew world of History meets Fantasy.
Real world maps frequently had to be used for games like Call of Cthulhu or Champions that we would throw game related landmarks into. In my humble opinion, half the entertainment of period games like Cthulhu is the background research, even as a player.
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Oh yes! I forgot all about grabbing stuff from published modules and clipping a bit here and there until it fits the current needs. Good point.
Oh, I miss playing Champions, or really anything using the Hero System. I swear that when I retire and have time to really dig in, that will be my go to game.
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I have run a couple of Monster of the Week games and used maps from a theme park or a state park for the monster’s territory. Otherwise I’ve mostly used maps that I created specifically for my campaigns…at varying levels of quality….
I have a map of Ansalon from one of the old Dragonlance boxed sets that I traced and redrew part of on paper. Honestly I’m not sure what version of D&D it was made for. The map has hexes and was published by TSR, so that puts a bit of a date range on it.
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Sorry that it’s taken so long for me to respond. Covid had me down for most of the week.
A theme park map is a fantastic idea. I’ll definitely have to tuck that one away. I’ve been using maps from a local university for a Cthulhu game but a theme park would open up all sorts of fun possibilities.
Always had a soft spot for Ansalon. I received the Atlas of the Dragonlance World by Karen Wynn Fonstad shortly after it came out. I spent hours pouring through the pages of that book.
Thanks for stopping by.
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Crazy Egor is still around and you can still sometimes find him at local events. Simcon is still around as well though smaller than it used to be, Rudicon I do not believe has happened since 2020 and was off and on before then. Running Gagg at Geneseo has been the best one in the area for a while.
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That’s great to hear. Thanks for the update. I’ve been out of the area for quite a while. Happy to hear that the hobby still has a good presence in the area.
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