How to Draw a Coded Map

As you flee from the burning citadel, the night wrapped like a cloak around you, you feel the reassuring shape of the scroll in your hand. The object of your latest mission, the scroll is a map - written in code and wrapped in riddles - leading to the object of your quest, to treasure, or to the end of the world. 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. 

This week’s special will take you through the tips to keep in mind and the step-by-step process in creating a map of your own that needs to be deciphered and unpacked. In this case, Ryan of the Red Quills is going to draw a coded map of his own - including writing his own letter characters, riddles, and lore. The result is a map that does not look like a map, but something that needs to be bent to your will in order to reveal its secrets. 

If you prefer to watch these tutorials, you can view this one here: How to Draw a Coded Map

The map itself is a part of the Red Quill’s ongoing series: this map leads from Amador’s Vault to the location of the keys that are needed to open the vault. It also contains the riddle used to puzzle out what the password is. In the Lore Archive series, the Vault contains the massed treasure of the Pirate King, Amador Smoke-Eye, on the hidden Isle of Dreams. 

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There are several particular points in this map that I want to talk about and generate some ideas for your own worldbuilding, such as the considerations I had for the characters for my new language, how I wrote the riddle that the map uses to determine the password, the lore writings around the outside, and concept behind the coded map itself. 

So, let me introduce the idea of the coded map itself to the readers: the map is a large circular pattern, centred on the starting point where the Vault can be found. I’ve made it even easier to determine where that is later on, when I draw a bird of paradise there that regular viewers will recognise from my previous video How to Map your Adventures. Like spokes on a wheel, the lines that lead off point to the nearest islands and cities - you will need a copy of the Map of the Goldhunter's Sea in order for this to work.

You can see as I draw them that the spokes have labels in the outer wheel, written in the new characters - which I’ll talk about in a little while - and Roman numerals in the inner wheel. The labels are the names of the landmarks that the spokes point to from the Isle of Dreams, and the Roman numerals are the distances. Using the two, you can not only determine where the centrepoint of the map is, but also the heading and distance from there to where the keys are stored. Additionally, I will use the inner circle as a horizon map, in case the first clues aren’t enough. A pattern of land and sea to show what you would be able to glimpse on the horizon at the source. Fun, right? 

In order to figure out what the labels say, you need to know what the characters are, how they translate into letters, and how the letters are arranged. You can use the riddle as a rosetta stone for this: the English translation is in the top left corner, and the characters - which I’ll write in the notes later as being the in-game writing of the druids of Firn-na-Bolg. This is yet another clue, as the keys are found on a small island off the eastern shore of that strange place. 

The riddle itself is written on the Vault door: anyone who wishes to enter needs both a key - of which there are two - and the password in order to be admitted. The password can be gleaned from two clues on the map, one of which is the riddle and the wording that I will put into the wheel later on. 

Now, I’m going to discuss all of these clues and how I wrote and drew mine, but I wanted to give an overview of the map before I dove into talking about how you can make your own and the observations that I have as a fantasy mapmaker for your own projects. 

Maps as Long-Term Puzzles

I’ll start by saying that although I have made quite a few maps for various worlds, and I have run month- or even year-long arcs for my own players based on the same single piece of coded information, using only a map to do so is a first for me. It’s one of the reasons that I wanted to make this post and the corresponding video: not just as some advice and tutorial for you, but as a challenge for me. 

But the end result that I come out with is something that I would be happy using. I might weather the map a little, make a few more handouts to sprinkle some clues along the way, and of course it works that you can best understand it only with the previous maps - the Map of the Goldhunter’s Sea , and the cluster of maps of the Isle of Dreams. 

So let’s have a quick chat about what it is that you want to think about when creating your own puzzle map, and how you can make your own: 

Different Points, Different Difficulties

Something that I will stress for you when you’re creating long-term riddles and puzzles is: always err on the side of making it difficult. If it’s too easy, then your players or readers may figure it out early, which could be disastrous for whatever plot points you have coming up. But if it’s too difficult, and they aren’t getting the point, you can sprinkle more and more clues in until it’s certain that they’ve gotten the message. 

So, start with something difficult, and add in one to three layers of clues that will make it progressively easier. 

Especially for puzzles in the long term, you will need to protect yourself from the ‘midnight realisation’ phenomenon, where they may have some ascendent understanding dawn somewhere well outside of your control. 

In this case, I have protected this map with coding and a prerequisite of other maps: if you have no skill with codes or languages, and you only have this map, you may never get any further than the notes scrawled around the outside, which tell you about the structure of the quest. If I give a handout with some translation, or a side-character points out that the two riddles can be used as a rosetta stone, then you’ll be able to crack the code - albeit with some difficulty. If you have the map of the Goldhunter's Sea as well, you can chart a course to your destination. 

When you’re making your own, have a handout or a clue that you can give them associated with each layer of coding or riddle, so that you can help or hinder them to align with the plot. 

Provide Security for Solving

Figuring out a puzzle when you’re in an adventure is a core part of the fantasy genre. Everyone loves the feeling of figuring something out, of being clever enough to have deduced it. But the actual solving of it depends on so much more than just intelligence: it relies on the puzzle-solver to have all of the information required on-hand, on their perspective being the same as the person that made the puzzle, and on them being in the right place at the right time. 

These elements of puzzle-solving are not their responsibility: they are yours, as the writer. Don’t tell them, but they aren’t responsible for solving the puzzle, you are. You need to control the amount of information that they receive so that they have the perfect amount to solve it and feel good about themselves. 

What you need to do is encourage them to start thinking about the information that you give them as being relevant. The major problem with large-scale problem-solving in a role-playing game or in a fictional world is just how much information is irrelevant, and how much they can put any inconsistencies down to being plot holes. The more patchy your worldbuilding, the harder it will be for them to solve problems, because they won’t know if they can trust the information that you give them. 

Make a simple rule: in my case, it is ‘Anything that’s written down is canon and relevant. It will come up later.’ If they know that they can trust the information that you give them, they can start to work with it. And they’ll begin to actively look for connections and answers to the riddles that they face. 

And sometimes they will still miss clues or solve things too quickly. It is a process that you have to feel your way through.

Codes and Ciphers

Let’s talk a bit more about the codes that I’ve used for this map, and methods that you can use to obscure the meaning in your handouts. There are all sorts of ways in which you can code, riddle, or obfusticate your players, there’s no doubt about that, but as above, you want to find a method that seems hard, but becomes easy when you have access to the necessary information. 

I’ll talk more about writing riddles in a moment, because their method of coding information using metaphor is something that really appeals to the fantasy genre, but it’s particularly difficult to get that balance right. Not to mention, it takes a lot of writing skill to do it properly - or does it? 

But first, let’s talk about simple codes. Translations, ciphers, and transpositions. 

Direct Translation Codes

The first is the easiest to wrap your head around: the direct translation codes are the ones that you just need to switch out one letter or character for another, and the message will come out easily. Many ciphers will fall into this category. They can be complicated, they can have many steps, but they have the prerequisite number of letters and will come out perfectly if you apply a rule of reading. An algorithm, if you will. 

This is not a post on all the different methods of coding that are available to you. I’ve used some here, that I’ll talk about more in-depth, but if you want more options, look up ciphers. There’s a great deal of variety and ingenuity, and they’re guaranteed to keep your readers or players occupied. 

The direct translation I’ve used here is a linguistic one. Or a symbological one, depending on how you view it. I’ve come up with a different lettering method, based on using a single trunk as the basis for writing, so that you write on either side of a line, and then written the coded messages in that. For added difficulty, I have not provided a direct translation on the map itself. I’ve written it down separately, for your use. But the tool is the rosetta stone in the top left and bottom right: the riddle written in both languages. 

As codes go, it’s honestly fairly simple. But it looks very impressive. 

Embedded Codes

The translated codes above use only the letters that you need, or mix some in to throw you off, like addition codes. But another method is an embedded code, where you find a method of secreting a messaging within a text so that you can provide two layers of information at once. For instance, Francis Bacon used a method of breaking a text down into five-letter blocks, and then bolding specific clusters of letters within that block to code a message. Like a written morse code. 

In my own fantasy campaigns in the past, I’ve given handouts to my players, where the handout appears to be a normal letter. But I’ve deliberately misspelt words: the misspellings show, by the addition or subtraction of letters from where they should be, a secret message. 

I’ve got a couple of such embedded codes in this map, too: I’ve actually messed the most obvious one up, because it was the last touch I added to the map, and I was very tired. I’ll fix it in post, so that it works in the downloadable version, but the wheel around the exterior says, “I suffer from the sea, from accidents and madness.” And then the translation into latin: “Mare ad patior, mare ad casus et rabidus.” If your players look it up, they’ll find that the translation is terrible: there are much better ways to say that in latin, it’s the worst kind of second-language shenanigans. Which is on purpose: the first letters of the latin translation spell the password for the door: “Mapmaker”. 

It’s worth noting that the letter K doesn’t appear in latin. 

This Language and How I Made It

Alright, I wrote my own language for this: obviously not to a Tolkienian extent, I’m not a professor of linguistics at Oxford, but enough to form my own alphabet. I’ll briefly talk about how I did that, because it was fairly simple. 

I started with the idea of how I wanted it to appear. The spoked wheel look of the map meant that I would like the code to run down the line; I happen to know that Ogham - an old Irish language - uses the same method, scratching lines out from the centre at various inclines and frequencies. To make it look a little more fantasy, I made more curves. 

The idea of having separated consonants and vowels is also something I’ve stolen from observation. There are many examples, but the one that came to mind for me is Hebrew, which uses dots placed around the consonants to imply the connecting vowels. Because that’s all vowels are - the space between consonants. 

Blending those ideas together, I wrote the consonants on the right hand side of the line, when you orient the start of the trunk to the top of the page, and the vowels on the left. To avoid even more confusion, the consonants are always pronounced first if they are both at the same level. So you read top-right, top-left, bottom-right, bottom-left, and so on. 

Before we move on, I wanted to also note how I did the consonants: when you’re coming up with your own language and you don’t want to be so lazy that you take your alphabet from English, there are all sorts of other alphabets that you can use. I’m not a linguistic expert, but I like the use of the letter H in English to suggest softened or voiceless consonants. So I took it further. I use a second parallel trunk next to a consonant to represent a soften version of that consonant: so B to V, T to TH, and so on. 

The language will be available to download with the map, later this week. 

Writing Riddles

Alright, let’s talk about writing riddles.They are such a thematic part of the fantasy genre that it’s difficult to write a story or a campaign that does not have one, because everyone immersed in that genre wants to solve one - and if they don’t, it’s only because they think they won’t be able to. So, to give the fulfilling experience that we all, as creators, want to provide, we’ve got to be able to write a riddle. Or at least steal one that kinda fits. 

But the problem is that they either don’t quite fit, or our own just don’t seem good enough. 

So here’s some tips when it comes to writing my own riddles and linguistic challenges in my campaigns. I’ve written riddles, poems, songs, and even a multi-page prophecy for my fantasy world, and it’s always a challenge.

Step 1. Choose a Template

I always start by finding something that I want to emulate. And that could just be the format and the tempo of it, but a lot of the time, I look deeper into what the form itself means. Haikus, for instance, are really simple to write, but hard to do well: they always have to deal with nature in some way, use metaphor for internal conflict or transformation, and simplify large concepts into manageable chunks. 

In this case, I took a poem from C. S. Lewis’ book The Magician’s Nephew, which reads, “Make your choice, adventurous stranger. / Strike the bell and bide the danger. / Or wonder ‘til it drives you mad / What would have happened if you had. 

Now, I’ve used that exact rhyme in my campaign, because I knew my players would immediately ring the bell, but in this case, I kept the rhyming format - four lines of eight syllables, with AABB rhyme - and changed it only slightly. 

Step 2. Focus on your Core Words

I made the second pair of lines one syllable shorter, to make feel slightly incomplete (for plot reasons), and made the final word of each line the focus: stranger / danger, beyond / bond. If all the reader gets are those words, the message is received. Additionally, the middle word of each line is also significant: well / come. keys / words. 

With these eight words, I’ve summed up my riddle. If I wrote, “Well stranger, come danger. Keys beyond, words bond.” That would be a riddle in and of itself, and an ominous one at that. 

Step 3. Dress it up in rhyme.

Use the core words as your lightning rods, and write your poem, your riddle around them. Use a template, an inspiration, to give you a structure, or just have a fiddle. Riddles don’t need to rhyme, though it is expected. You can use poetry, existing riddles, or nursery rhymes. 

For instance, I could have written this as: “The king has seen the stranger / who’s dressed up strong and well / and flocking shades of danger / are coming here to tell. / For all who seek from here beyond / to find the jangling keys / Must always pay the king his bond / in blood and word and deeds.”

Since riddles are always enigmatic, practice will definitely help. But as long as the riddle contains your core words, and they are the focus of each line, the meaning will come through eventually. 

Details to Include

Looking at it from above, it doesn’t look like it contains as much information as it does, which - from one perspective - is probably a good thing. If your reader underestimates how much information it contains, then they will need to come back and spend more time studying it. It’s just up to you find some way to encourage that. 

So, all the ways in which I’ve hidden information on this page:

Coded Map

The coded map, which is twofold: firstly, the spoked-wheel map, using labelled lines and printed distances rather than continental shapes, coupled with the subtle horizon map around the interior of the circles. Between the two, they will show where you need to begin, and where you’ll go, depending on whether you can figure out… 

Symbols

The new language, and its symbology. They will present a challenge, but having to use the riddle as a translation matrix will make that a lot more possible, or your party can see that the mapmaker remarks that it is the language of the druids of Firn-na-Bolg, and they can sail there to find someone to translate, or buy a guide. 

Either way, the map will direct them to the key, and to the password. The riddle gives them a hint as to what it could be, but the password itself is hidden in…

Embedded Message

The message that is layered within the text of the map. The password itself is the latin within the outer circle, “Mapmaker”, but there are other hints here and there throughout the text as well. And some are not coded, but are subtle. The riddle, the password, the account itself, and the other logs in the Lore Archive are all pointing to a secret that the mapmaker - and therefore the players - are on the verge of confirming. 

Connection to the Campaign

And that is an excellent segue. Once again, we’ll connect this map to the wider story arc for this season. So far, we’ve followed a trail of maps by the explorer Yemoke Dramasae: from the initial treasure map of the Goldhunter’s Sea, where he left a note warning any who find it about the Pirate King, Amador Smoke-Eye. While he set off to find and attempt to kill Amador, he also left clues leading to the Pirate King’s fable treasure vault. 

This map can be found at the doors to the vault, and lead to the keys necessary to open said doors: both the physical key, hidden on the island of Firn-na-Bolg, and the password that needs to be spoken to gain admittance. It comes with a portion of Yemoke’s journal, from when he first arrived at the vault to study it. 

The doors themselves are found on the northern tip of the Crudhigh Reefs, from the map of the Goldhunter’s Sea, where sailors will find themselves drawn to and marooned upon the legendary Isle of Dreams. In the centre of the Isle, a cave called the Maw opens onto a channel. Within is the Vault, and the entrance to the ruined palace of a once-great civilisation. 

So far, from that first map of the Goldhunter’s Sea, we stopped at the City of Ships - a town perched on the carapace of a gigantic crab - and of course arrived at the Isle of Dreams, an Odyssean isle ruled over by the capricious Sylarae, the Lady of Dreams.

All of these accounts can be listened to in more depth in our Lore Archive series, which we release weekly: this one came out today on our YouTube channel, link above.

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And we’re done! One heavily coded and secretive map, served warm. The codes are difficult, but very solvable, and if the players need more help, I have the benefit of the other maps and handouts that I’ve created ready and waiting to give them more help in solving. It’s honestly so extensively coded that I think they would definitely need help, but I’ve added layer after layer to give you guys some examples of how to do your own. 

I’ve covered a lot in this post, and I’ve got limited time, so if you do have any questions at all, please comment them below. If you find any more codes that I haven’t mentioned, you can also comment them to show off how clever you are. 

As always, thanks to our supporters, it means a lot. We’re growing all the time, for a channel that’s only four months old, and we’re very privileged to have such a supportive group of viewers. 

Good luck with all of your mapmaking endeavours!