Welcome, adventurers, to this latest episode of the Red Quill's Guide to Fantasy Lands. Welcome to a realm where the very fabric of reality is woven from the threads of thought and emotion, where the laws of physics are but fleeting whispers in a starry wind.

Imagine a vast underwater city, once the pinnacle of an ancient civilization's glory, now lying in eerie silence beneath the waves. Schools of fish dart through crumbling archways, and the occasional glimmer of light catches on ancient, forgotten treasures. Welcome to the world of the Ancient Sunken Ruins, a place where history, mystery, and adventure collide.

The ground beneath your feet is uneven, with hidden pits and treacherous drops waiting to ensnare the unwary. Welcome to the Underdark, a realm where danger and wonder lurk in every shadowed corner.

The sun is shining as the early morning mist begins to fade away, and the sound of birdsong greets you over the cusp of the sleepy hills. Tidy farms, low hedges, and colourful flower beds mark the country as you descend from the wild lands into the welcoming Halfling Boroughs.

Today, we’re looking at How to Draw a Druid Enclave. I’ll be drawing the map below, which is a map of the ruins of Rostivale and its inhabitants, the Druids of Firn-na-Bolg. 

If giving your world and players a coded map, something for them to puzzle over and sweat over, is the direction that your quest needs, here is our latest special: How to Draw a Coded Map.

We’re going to be looking at a challenge today. I've been asked several times over the past few weeks about making a video on creating smaller maps. We've covered a lot of different topics over the last fourteen weeks, but in each video, I create one A2 map and use that as the focus. But if you're not making something quite so big, what can you expect? What differences do you need to make? What techniques can you use to make the most of a map? Welcome, adventurers, to this week's topic: How to Map for your World.

Today, we’re revisiting fantasy towns and cities. My name is Ryan and I will be taking you through the process step by step, discussing some important points to keep in mind and flesh out your world, and we’ll finish up with this map of Smug Rock, the pirate stronghold on the back of Great Okh’aratoa. 

If you wanted to hide your treasure, why would you resort to tattered pieces of paper, crudely-drawn landmarks, and ‘X marks the spot’? If you wanted to make sure that you could find your hoard again, but still keep it safe from anyone who wanted to find it, wouldn’t you think your way through it a little more? Isn’t there more to treasure maps than you may think at first? Here is How to Make a Realistic Treasure Map.

Every adventure needs an ancient, weathered map: painstakingly drawn with just the right amount of detail to help, but not solve everything.

For a worldbuilder, it can be tempting to allow your story to stop at the travellers’ comprehension. To use their assumptions and understandings to fill in the gaps before you move on. But if you want to do more than tread water when filling your world, it’s not as daunting a task as it may seem. 

In this post, I will be going into the methods that I use to create a heist map, the details that I include, the tips and tricks that will elevate your writing and gameplay, and why I go to the effort of making a map, when you could really just write all this down. 

This week's map is the Bank of Indusaal, and our focus is in creating a map for planning a heist. It goes with our video on our YouTube channel, How to Map for a Heist

It happens to all of us occasionally, but when you’re creating your fantasy world, you may occasionally need a map of that city to aid you and your heroes in your adventures. You need to be sketching cities if you want to stay consistent.

Today, we're taking a closer look at drawing maps of sites and significant locations. As a writer or a game master, you're going to want to plan out the encounters that your protagonists face, whether they are in a peaceful village, a bristling castle, or a dank mine.

Hello, adventurers! Welcome back to the Red Quills, where we go through all of the tips and tricks you can add to your fantasy world to make it as lush and vibrant as our own. Today, we’re discussing culture in your fantasy maps and worlds – something that we have written about before, but we’re going to go more into depth on it today. 

So you want to become a merchant? It's long hours, the pack animals don't appreciate you, and you're never quite sure whether your investment will pay off. But if you're still certain, here's a quick guide for the writer of a fantasy world: a list of tips and tricks to help you to flesh out your fantasy trade.

The map shows how to give an overview of your major battles and conflicts: supply lines, troop movements, distinct fortifications and the stages in a skirmish. Its focus is the fictional Twenty-Day War, in which two opposing sides fight over a castle in a lake.

The scale of the war lends itself to the scale of the parties involved. A war world has spheres of influence that extend across continents, but a civil war in a small country will have cities or individuals as players with their own allies and following.