Here's something I've never spoken about on this old blog o' mine: Dungeons & Dragons. I've been playing D&D for almost as long as I've been on Steemit.

My History with D&D

It's something I had wanted to do for as long as I've known about the game, but I never had a group of friends who were interested or experienced, and I didn't have the initiative to do all of the research myself. But I'm glad I started when I did. If I got into the game just a little bit earlier, I would have been playing 4th Edition, which I don't think I would have liked. 4e seems like a videogame, where instead of letting the computer do all the hard work and math, I have to do it.

I started by playing 5th Edition with a group of friends from work. Since then, I decided to try my hand at running my own campaign. For the uninitiated, the game master in D&D is called the Dungeon Master or DM. 

I recently finished running my first adventure with my wife and a few friends (an adventure that I'm sure I'll publish on Steemit one day.) I intended this adventure to be a short standalone (though it took us 3 sessions to play through), but I've now decided to expand it into a huge campaign. The adventure took place in a village. The campaign takes place on a continent.

The first thing I had to do to prepare for this was create a map. And that's what I'm here to share today!

Map-Making for D&D

I started with a sketch. I developed this at work over a couple of lunches. I first worked out the shapes of the landmass then the major landmarks, geography and political borders.

Then I translated the drawing to a larger sheet of sketching paper. I did everything in pencil first, then wrote over it with permanent pen. And I'm just realizing now that I missed a couple of labels as well as a scale marker on the finished map... I can fix that. Finally I washed over the map with tea  and added some wrinkles to make it look old. After it dried, I painted the land masses with tea to make them slightly darker than the water.

I tried to draw in the style of a Tolkien map. I hope I was successful.

I wish I had taken a few step-by-step photos. All I can show you now is the final product. I hope you like it!

After I finished the map, a friend pointed out to me that Winterfell is a location in Game of Thrones. Having never seen or read Game of Thrones, I was unaware of this. Now I'm full of regret because I want my locations to be free of associations and I did this in pen. Oh well, what's done is done!

~Seth

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