David Stark extracted elements from a 1688 map of part of Germany to create a library of tree, hill and town signs that he thought entirely appropriate for use as map assets for a role-playing game. I look at them and see fantasy map design elements. In 2019 I noted the similarities between 16th-century maps and modern fantasy map design. Also, digitally created fantasy maps often feature clone-stamped hill signs; you could do worse than clone-stamp these if you were whipping a fantasy map up. At least there’s more than one kind of hill sign to clone-stamp: there are, in fact, 159 hills and 26 mountains—more than 400 tiny images in all, and it’s interesting that David has separate categories for towns and cities, and for hills and mountains. [via]

When it comes to rivers, I’ve noticed that quite a few fantasy writers don’t understand the basics. While their intent is noble, I’ve seen plenty of examples of authors struggling with the underlying science of rivers and river systems. I sympathize. These are mistakes I have made myself. Early on, in one of my first projects, I made a mess with the waterways in my fantasy world. Mistakes like these—I like to jokingly call them “river sins”—might go unnoticed at first, but when they are noticed, they can draw a reader out of the story or setting. It wasn’t until I later learned more about the behavior of these ecosystems that I was able to hone in on my worldbuilding, and the end result was something much more interesting and complex. The cool got cooler.

Previously: ‘The Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth’.

John Nelson’s One Style to Rule Them All is an ArcGIS Pro map style that applies fantasy map design elements to real-world geographic data. It does something similar to his earlier (2018) map style, My Precious (described here) only differently and with fewer assets (and 1/60th the download size). John has examples and links to a four-part video tutorial at this ArcGIS Blog post.

Previously: Maps Middle-earth Style: By Hand and by ArcGIS.

For her upcoming fantasy novel The Freedom Race (Tor, July 2021), Lucinda Roy decided to do what a lot of fantasy authors do: draw a map. But she did it in a way that most fantasy authors don’t: “I needed a persona map—a map that could feasibly have been drawn by Ji-ji, the main character in the book. Her map doesn’t simply introduce the world to readers, it actually appears inside the narrative and helps catalyze the action.” Then she decided that she needed two maps, both intrinsic parts of the story, both revealing a great deal about their respective mapmakers. Very much relevant to my interests: I wrote, after all, a piece about fantasy maps in fantasy worlds (and got some flack for it). Though it’s the first time I’ve heard the term persona map. A new term of art?

Australian author and illustrator Kathleen Jennings will teach a workshop on fantasy mapmaking in June: the focus of Map Making and World Building is “on story and art,” the mapmaking illustrative rather than cartographical, and in general it seems to be about the relationship between map and story. The workshop will take place on 19 June both in-person (at the Queensland Writers Centre in Brisbane) and via livestream; tickets range from A$35 to A$100, depending.

A History of Maps and Mapping, a short introductory online course taught by Katherine Parker as part of the London Rare Books School’s program of summer courses, “will challenge students to destabilize and broaden the traditional definition of ‘map’, and to recognize maps as socially constructed objects that are indicative of the values and biases of their makers and the cultures that created them. Students will learn how to analyse and catalogue maps for a variety of research purposes, and to discuss changes in map technology and style without recourse to a progressive narrative of scientific improvement.” Matthew Edney will supply a guest lecture. The course runs from 29 June to 2 July and costs £100 (student) or £175.

Here’s another map artist who draws maps of real-world places in the style of fantasy maps: Isaac of Lord of Maps has around 30 maps—mostly of U.S. states, but also a few countries and one city—available for sale as prints of various sizes. Style-wise they’re dead ringers for Christopher Tolkien’s maps of Middle-earth, down to the hill signs, trees and red lettering.

Previously: Callum Ogden’s Fantasy Map of North America; Callum Ogden’s Fantasy Map of North America; Maps Middle-earth Style: By Hand and by ArcGIS; What Does a Fantasy Map Look Like?

Previously: Dan Bell’s ‘Tolkien-Style’ Maps of the Lake District; Maps Middle-earth Style: By Hand and by ArcGIS; What Does a Fantasy Map Look Like?

Previously: Christopher Tolkien, 1924-2020.

Christopher Tolkien, the third son of J. R. R. Tolkien and the executor of his literary estate and editor of his posthumous works, died yesterday at the age of 95. But one of his legacies is likely to be overlooked: he drew the map of Middle-earth that appeared in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings. That map proved hugely influential. It helped set the norm for subsequent epic fantasy novels: they would come with maps, and those maps would look rather a lot like the one drawn by Christopher Tolkien.

Christopher Tolkien himself was self-deprecating about the execution of his map, and about the design choices he made. Regarding a new version of the map he drew for Unfinished Tales, he took pains to emphasize that

the exact preservation of the style and detail (other than nomenclature and lettering) of the map that I made in haste twenty-five years ago does not argue any belief in the excellence of its conception or execution. I have long regretted that my father never replaced it by one of his own making. However, as things turned out it became, for all its defects and oddities, “the Map,” and my father himself always used it as a basis afterwards (while frequently noticing its inadequacies).

However hastily it was drawn, it was pivotal all the same.

Meanwhile, a couple of other things. Here’s a piece by the author Lev Grossman about the urge to map fictional places. It’s excerpted from his essay in Deserina Boskovitch’s Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy (which came out last month from Abrams).

It didn’t matter that these places didn’t exist, what mattered was how much people wanted them to. Fictional maps are a visual trace of the ridiculous, undignified passion that we pour into worlds that we know aren’t real. They seem to confirm the ridiculous faith we place in novels—to see one is to say, silently and only to yourself, See? I knew it was real!

And the author Diane Duane has a simply massive collection of links to digital mapmaking resources in re fantasy maps, from map generators to tools to tutorials.

Dan Bell’s career drawing maps of real-world places in the style of maps of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth continues apace; a recent piece, a map of San Francisco, got written up in the San Francisco Chronicle, and his website is full of other recent works.

But computer mapping may be about to overtake hand-drawn illustration. John M. Nelson has created an ArcGIS style that does the very thing Dan Bell does by hand: emulate the maps of Middle-earth executed by Christopher Tolkien and Pauline Baynes. The style is called, naturally, My Precious: John explains it here and here, and demonstrates the style with this map of the Americas.

There are, of course, some flaws in this method: a mechanical representation of a hand-drawn style risks falling into the uncanny valley’s cartographic equivalent, especially when mountain and forest signs are clone-stamped over large areas. And to be honest I’m not a fan of the Aniron font: those letterforms were used in the Lord of the Rings movies, but never the books’ maps, and now they’re found on damn near every Tolkien-style map, and we hates it, precious, we hates it forever. But Nelson is basically emulating modern fantasy map practice: modern fantasy maps are invariably done in Illustrator, labels are computer generated rather than hand-drawn, and hill signs are clone stamped. Applying it to real-world maps, and GIS software, is new, but a difference in degree.

Previously: Dan Bell’s ‘Tolkien-Style’ Maps of the Lake District.

Last year Callum Ogden started making real-world maps in the style of fantasy maps; his most recent is this map of North America, which is very much in the post-Lord of the Rings-movies style of things. In this Medium post he talks about the process of making it.

Holy cow—if you like fantasy maps, spend some time looking at New Orleans. WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON WITH THIS CITY?! If this came in from a freelancer, there are half a dozen things that would raise my eyebrows. pic.twitter.com/ApqYYWlE8d

— James L. Sutter (@jameslsutter) March 19, 2018

Don’t miss writer and game designer James L. Sutter critiquing New Orleans as though it was a city from a fantasy novel. A major criticism of fantasy maps, whether of cities or worlds, is their lack of realism: unrealistic rivers, mountains and so forth. New Orleans, with its totally unrealistic terrain, doesn’t pass the test. “Please clean up your map and resubmit when it follows the rules of a real-world city,” Sutter concludes.

Maps of real places done up in the style of fantasy maps are a thing, as those who have been following along will know by now. I’m planning a dedicated page on the subject in the Fantasy Maps section. That page will have to include Dan Bell’s maps of the Lake District—maps, he says, “that resemble the iconic style of J. R. R. Tolkien.” His maps have suddenly got a bit of media attention, which is atypical for this sort of project: BBC News, The Westmoreland Gazette. They resemble more the maps done for the Lord of the Rings movies than the maps created by Christopher Tolkien or Pauline Baynes: one tell is the triple-dot diacritic above the a, which is used in the movie maps and comes from Tolkien’s Elvish script. Bell, a 25-year-old “ordinary guy” from the Lake District, is selling prints of the maps online. [Kenneth Field]

"Even though ice is frozen water, it's still water, and it wants to go downhill." –@katsudonburi #mappingfantasy

— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) December 16, 2017

Other tips would be familiar to cartography students.

"Every map has a viewpoint, whether or not you're explicitly telling the reader that." @PrinceJvstin #mappingfantasy

— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) December 16, 2017

Here’s a point that makes sense from a worldbuilding perspective, but it has led to the cliché that every point on the map has to be visited:

Your maps should show the areas and features that are relevant to your story. If it's important to the narrative, it should appear on the map. @PrinceJvstin #mappingfantasy

— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) December 16, 2017

On the other hand, there were some subversive bits that are so prosaic and pregnant with meaning that I’d love to know the context.

Join Alex Acks and Paul Weimer as they talk about fantasy maps in order to give you the tools you need to create and map your world. Topics include basic geologic principles, common mistakes, forms maps can take, how maps reflect world view, and how maps change over time.

Acks, you may recall, wrote pieces on Middle-earth’s problematic mountains and rivers, and fantasy maps in general; Weimer, for his part, wrote a defence of fantasy maps. The class costs $99 and takes place via Google Hangouts on 16 December.

Drawing Maps for your Fantasy World,
aka Maps Aren’t Always About Landscape Geography:
A thread. pic.twitter.com/1mDrtn6cSK

— Jeannette Ng 吳志麗 (@jeannette_ng) October 20, 2017

Another example of a map of a real place done in the style of a fantasy map: Ben Riddlebarger’s map of Dayton, Ohio, done in October 2014. [Cartophilia]

When Alex Acks vents about fantasy maps, it’s because the mountain ranges in Middle-earth don’t make sense, not because the cartography of Pauline Baynes or Christopher Tolkien wasn’t up to the task. It’s more that the territory is shaped to fit the story rather than the other way around, less that the maps of said territory frequently lack a scale. When Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza says that “Game of Thrones has such a terrible map it could be presented as a parody of bad fantasy maps,” he’s not saying that the cartography of the various Song of Ice and Fire mapmakers, such as Jonathan Roberts (The Lands of Ice and Fire), James Sinclair (books one through four) or Jeffrey L. Ward (A Dance with Dragons), is deficient. He’s saying that the Game of Thrones geography is terrible.

“Fantasy maps,” writes Adrian Daub, “are invented, but not all that inventive. Virtually all of them repeat certain features. The way coastlines, mountain ranges, and islands are arranged follows rules. For instance: a surprising number of fantasy worlds contain vast landmasses in the east, but only an endless ocean to the west.”¹

They’re not critiquing the map, they’re critiquing the territory.

I’ve seen this before. When people talk about their favourite fantasy maps, they’re not actually talking about their favourite work of cartography; they’re talking about a map of their favourite fantasy place. Harry Potter fans like the Marauder’s Map because it’s a Harry Potter map, not because it’s a particularly fine example of fantasy cartography.

And if in certain critical circles the fantasy map has a rather bad reputation, it’s not because of the quality of the cartography. It’s because fantasy novels are expected to come with maps. It’s become a cliché, thanks to multi-volume epic fantasy series that are basically derivative Tolkien clones: Tolkien had maps, so they have to as well. The presence of a map at the front of a fantasy novel signifies that this fantasy novel is the kind that comes with a map, i.e., an epic fantasy series. Whether you like or dislike fantasy maps often comes down to whether you like or dislike those kinds of books.

In all of this the question of the maps themselves gets elided a bit. If fantasy maps are bad because they’re ubiquitous, because they’re often unnecessary, or because they depict a risibly unconvincing terrain, are they also bad because of their design? As I said earlier, we’ve conflated the map with the territory, in a way that real-world cartographers would find confusing: your opinion of a map of Italy doesn’t depend on whether the Boot is a convincing example of a peninsula.

This is an example of a bad fantasy map:

But why is it a bad fantasy map? Is it bad because the terrain is so ridiculously, implausibly mountainous? Or is it bad because the cartography is so poor? The map is drowning in undifferentiated hill signs: is that a fault of the author’s cartography or of his geography?

Which brings up the question of fantasy map design. “What does a fantasy map look like?”—or more to the point, “What is a fantasy map supposed to look like?”—is a question I get a lot, especially from beginner fantasy writers who want to Get It Right. I always demur, partly because I don’t want to set myself up as the judge of such things, partly because I don’t want to perpetuate fantasy clichés, and partly because I’m not actually sure. Because it turns out that for the most part, fantasy map design is unexplored territory.

In his study of fantasy maps and settings, Here Be Dragons, Stefan Ekman talks a little bit about it: using a sample of fantasy maps, he explores whether and how often various cartographic elements, like hill signs or cartouches, are present. His study allowed him to make the following remarks about the “typical” fantasy map:

In brief, a typical fantasy map portrays a secondary world, a compass rose or similar device showing its orientation with north at the top. It is not set in any given hemisphere (not necessarily in a spherical world at all), although there are reasons to believe that clues in the text would indicate north as the direction of colder climates. Apart from topographical map elements such as rivers, bays, islands, and mountains, such a map would also contain towns and other artificial constructions. The hill signs used are typically pre-Enlightenment (either profile or oblique).

Even this brief list reveals the mixture of modern and historical map features. Like much high fantasy, the secondary-world maps follow a pseudomedieval aesthetic according to which dashes of pre-Enlightenment mapping conventions are rather routinely added to a mostly modern creation. Whether this is because of careless research, genre conformity, lack of imagination, or a desire to give the reader the easiest possible access to the map and the world it portrays is hard to say.²

In the end, it’s tautological: fantasy maps are designed to look like fantasy maps. An endless series of variations on a single theme: as the inadvertent holotype for maps of derivative fantasy worlds, Christopher Tolkien’s original map of Middle-earth has a lot to answer for. We talk about fantasy map geography—the territory—because insofar as the cartography is concerned, there’s very little to say.

Because what a fantasy map looks like is received wisdom. And more to the point, that received wisdom is accepted without question or second thought. For an example of this, consider the many examples of real-world maps done “in the style of fantasy maps.” An incomplete list would include Samuel Fisher’s maps of Australia, Great Britain, Iceland and the United States on Reddit; Callum Ogden’s map of Europe “in a Fantasy Tolkien Style”; and map prints sold at Etsy stores like CartoArt, Mapsburgh and Parnasium.

We know these are done in the fantasy map style because, like obscenity, we know it when we see it. The trouble is that we don’t seem to be able to enunciate what that style is, where it comes from, or what the rules are. There’s a design language here, but the rules are understood, sometimes a bit subconsciously, rather than perceived.

Read Callum Ogden’s article on how he created the Lord of the Rings-style map of Scotland and you realize that what’s going on here is mimicry: the quality of the map depends on skill of the mimic and the quality of the original being mimicked. The problem there is that sometimes the original is itself a copy. Like an extruded-product fantasy trilogy based on a warmed-over D&D campaign, the final result is just a few too many steps away from anything vaguely resembling original source material.

If you want an example of how this can happen, consider a book that ought to be about fantasy map design, but isn’t: Jared Blando’s How to Draw Fantasy Art and RPG Maps (Impact, 2015) is about fantasy map execution. That important difference means that Blando’s book operates on the shared assumptions behind the default fantasy map design, but does not define, explain or interrogate them. Rather, this is a book that will hold the hand of people who want to make their maps look like fantasy maps—the people asking me to tell them what their map should look like will find in this book the answer they’re looking for, but not necessarily the answer they need.

Lavishly illustrated, How to Draw Fantasy Art and RPG Maps is not a manual for professional artists or cartographers; the intended audience is signalled in the book’s subtitle: Step by Step Cartography for Gamers and Fans. (To be honest, my study of fantasy maps has ignored the vast quantities of mapmaking done for role-playing games, both published and homebrewed. I had to draw the line somewhere.) As a guide to mapmaking it’s less useful than you might expect. Blando’s method is to start with the blank page and add, one after the other, the various elements until the map is finished. Start with the basic shape of the continent, then refine the coastline. Add detail like lakes, islands and bays. Trace the line of the mountain range, then add detail. Start with a basic drawing, then add detail. It’s the fantasy map equivalent of drawing everything by starting with a bunch of circles.

While the book assumes a shared understanding of what a fantasy map ought to look like, within those parameters it isn’t prescriptivist. The author does not lay down rules: elements are described as fun, a great way of adding something to the map, and so forth.³ It’s really up to you. And in the context of a private D&D campaign, there’s really nothing wrong with this approach: Blando is basically giving gamers a list of elements to include on the maps of their campaigns, and getting out of their way.

But the fantasy map method is not limited to role-playing games: there’s plenty of genetic exchange between game worlds and novel worlds. Games have become novels, and vice versa. With the short shrift given to landforms in Blando’s guide, it’s easy to see where critiques of fantasy geographies like Acks’s can come from: a map whose creation started with “draw a simple shape” is only going to result in a geologically or geographically plausible continent by accident.

In other words, it’s not the map that’s the problem, it’s the mapmaking process. It’s not the cartography, it’s the act of creation.

We can’t expect Blando’s beginner-level drawing guide to serve as a primer for fantasy cartography. But it offers a possible explanation as to how the fantasy map making process yields a map that ends up being called terrible: as an example of how fantasy map shibboleths are invisibly received and propagated, and of what fantasy mapmakers don’t think about, it is, ironically, quite revealing.

(Featured image: Impact Books)

Previously: A Q&A with Fantasy Cartographer Jonathan Roberts.

50 Fantasy States is Chris Engelsma’s ongoing project to create fantasy-style maps of all 50 U.S. states. Six have been completed so far, including the above fantasy map of Alaska.

This post describing how to make a fantasy map using macaroni has been making the rounds of Tumblr for a while—it was first posted in January 2014—but it just got picked up by Tor.com recently, so let’s talk about it. The point of the post is how quick and easy it is to make a good looking fantasy map:

LOOK AT THIS WONDERFUL PIECE OF SHIT IT TOOK ME LITERALLY TEN MINUTES TO MAKE TOPS AND NOW YOU JUST NEED TO FIGURE OUT WHERE TO PUT ALL YOUR DWARF-FUCKING ELVES AND LIZARD-PEOPLE WITH BOOBS

(All caps in the original. Yes, it’s like that throughout. Sorry about that.)

But it seems to me that its quick-and-easy appeal is also an indictment of the fantasy map making process—just like the Uncharted Atlas bot (previously), which demonstrates that fantasy map terrain can be algorithmically generated. They do not, in other words, require much in the way of human imagination.

Meanwhile, on the Atlas of Ice and Fire blog, Adam Whitehead has a look at the maps of the Malazan world. Originally co-created by Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont as the basis of a role-playing campaign, the Malazan world is the setting for multi-volume fantasy series by both authors.

Once again, Tor.com is marking the publication of an upcoming fantasy novella, this time The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, with an essay on how the book’s map, executed by artist Serena Malyon, came into being. Malyon takes us from the author’s own map through several iterations of what ended up as the final map. The end result is a unique take on the fantasy map style, marked by the use of watercolours and perspective, backgrounded by a constellation-filled sky. Amazon (Kindle) / iBooks

Previously: Mapping The Drowning Eyes.

In a blog post, Bradley Beaulieu describes how he worked with artist Maxime Plasse on the map for his fantasy novel Twelve Kings in Sharakhai (published in the U.K. as Twelve Kings). “There’s been a lot of back and forth to get things from my very rough starting point to the final version, so I thought I’d share some of it to give you a sense for how the process typically works.” I am, as you know, a sucker for process; Beaulieu takes us from his own map, which he generated with Fractal Terrains and Campaign Cartographer, to Plasse’s final, full-colour map (above). [via]

Twelve Kings in Sharakhai: Amazon (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks (U.K. edition)

To mark the publication this week of a new fantasy novella, The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster, the artist hired to create the map, Tim Paul, wrote an essay on how he did it. I’m struck by the lengths he took to “avoid making the map look too European” and by the careful consideration of what a map from that world should look like, which is almost unheard of in the fantasy map business, where maps invariably conform to a very specific style. The end result is a map that evokes portolan charts, replete with windrose lines and looking like it was drawn on vellum. As fantasy maps go, it’s one of the finer executions I’ve seen.

Amazon: paperback (Canada, U.K.), Kindle (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks

For the audiobook version (Amazon, iTunes), the publisher has taken the map and made it interactive: clicking on a location gives you an excerpt from the book. It might not quite be “[the] newest in map technology” but it’s a small and interesting innovation as far as fantasy maps are concerned.

Previously: Robert Lazzaretti, Fantasy Mapmaker; Mapping An Ember in the Ashes; How to Make a Fantasy Map.

Lou Anders interviews fantasy mapmaker Robert Lazzaretti, who drew the maps for Anders’s Thrones and Bones series (Frostborn, Nightborn). I can never get enough information about the process of making fantasy maps.

Previously: Mapping An Ember in the Ashes; How to Make a Fantasy Map.