Favourite RPG Maps?

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Voros

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I was going to call this thread Favourite Fantasy Maps but there may be some good sf and other genre maps for rpgs out there I'm unaware of.

My examples are going to be fantasy but don't feel restricted to that.

Some of the maps I'm most fond of aren't always the prettiest and I'm no stickler for realism in terms of geography.

Dungeon and other building maps are also welcome.

Let's get the obvious choice out of the way first, Darlene's Greyhawk map. I was one of those nerds who posted this to my bedroom wall as a kid. That of course led to it getting ragged and that copy is long gone.

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I also recall really digging the original maps for Castle Ravenloft.

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Can't resist including Jason Thompsom's great map of Castle Ravenloft although I'll resist posting more of his great maps which you can order from his site here (I have the Isle of Dread map) as we already have a thread with almost all of them here.

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Let's get the obvious choice out of the way first, Darlene's Greyhawk map. I was one of those nerds who posted this to my bedroom wall as a kid. That of course led to it getting ragged and that copy is long gone.

I had the Darlene map on my wall as a kid as well. I remember a friend sleeping over and my dad coming in to wake us up and staring at the map in bewilderment, before asking my friend if he was the king of Furyondy. “Uh... no, sir.”
 
I'll see your Darlene, and raise you one Trampier.

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Minaria, from Divine Right
 
I recall liking the maps for the 2e Greyhawk supplement Vale of the Mage, can't find a good shot of it online. I believe this is one of the few modules I kept from back-in-the-day, as I unpack when I find it I'll post some pics assuming I kept the maps (which with my OCD I probably did).

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I liked the map from Quest for the Heartstone with the wellevator.
 
I'd have to go with the Harn maps. Easy to read, looks great. Actually couldn't find a good version that I could link to with a good picture...so I linked to a picture of the poster map and a close-up of one section. The map I have is a 3'x5' vinyl map, but it's not accessible.

Heh. Found a Google Map version of Harn. Very handy...

Google Harn


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I'm generally good with most of my rpgs being pdf these days but find that you can't really improve on a physical map.

I should checkout the digital maps available on D&D Beyond, Roll20 though and see how they work for play.
 
The maps in Stygian Fox’s Hudson & Brand are really at a different level than most other RPG books. Highly recommended!
 
The only thing I ever liked about the Greyhawk box set was that dual poster map pictured above that came with it. That map was great.

One of my other favorite maps is the map of the High Clerist Tower in DL-8 Dragons of War. I feel that map is the pinnacle of that 3d isometric style ala Ravenloft. The layout itself isn't all that great, but the huge poster map of the tower is just inherently impressive.

I don't think Krynn ever got a truly fantastic poster map like Greyhawk did. I think the best it ever got were various recyclings of the two sheet DL-11 Dragons of Glory map, reprinted without the hexes.
 
The only thing I ever liked about the Greyhawk box set was that dual poster map pictured above that came with it. That map was great.

One of my other favorite maps is the map of the High Clerist Tower in DL-8 Dragons of War. I feel that map is the pinnacle of that 3d isometric style ala Ravenloft. The layout itself isn't all that great, but the huge poster map of the tower is just inherently impressive.

I don't think Krynn ever got a truly fantastic poster map like Greyhawk did. I think the best it ever got were various recyclings of the two sheet DL-11 Dragons of Glory map, reprinted without the hexes.

There's a map in the DL Tales of the Lance boxset that is supposed to be good. It comes with an index on the back that is quite evocative. Never seen it in RL though.

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Other favorite maps:

The Wilderlands of High Fantasy - the originals, though Rob Conley's new maps are right behind
The original First Fantasy Campaign map of Blackmoor, and the colorized and edited versions from the TSR DA modules
Harn
 
Other favorite maps:

The Wilderlands of High Fantasy - the originals, though Rob Conley's new maps are right behind
The original First Fantasy Campaign map of Blackmoor, and the colorized and edited versions from the TSR DA modules
Harn
Appreciate the shout out.
And a bit of eye candy to show what I did on those maps.
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I have three favorites which immediately come to mind, and they are all done on hexes. :grin: Some of the others posted so far are nicer, but I don't have the personal affinity to the world.

In no particular order:

(1) Arneson's Blackmoor map, done on JG paper and colorized by someone. Love it and use it for a lot of my OD&D campaigns. (Already mentioned twice in this thread, I believe.) It's been done "better" by a couple of recent cartographers, but I like this one better than theirs because of the old school feel.


(2) The map of Nehwon from the old TSR board game Lankhmar. Love the fact that it's printed on plastic the way other TSR maps were done in that era, and it's the only hex map of Nehwon that I've ever seen. The only thing that I don't like is that cities aren't done to scale -- a city might take up 1-2 hexes, which is clearly absurd. I'd love to see a decent scan or electronic copy of this one.


(3) The Middle-earth map from SPI's War of the Ring. I have a paper copy laminated and it's my go-to Middle-earth map. Some of the M-e maps from TOR are pretty cool, but I like this older one better. Probably nostalgia.

 
It’s always weird for me to see a 2D map of 3D space.
Have you seen a lot of 3d maps? I mean I know 5hats how it should be done but other than a few video games all the maps I've seen express 3d in 2d.
 
Just for the Flat Galaxiers: If you scale the Traveller map down so that it matches the bar, you get something like 400pc roughly centered around the Sun for a diameter of 1300ly. According to my sources [1, 2], that ball would fit either snugly or quite comfortably inside the Milky Way at our position.

[1] Idle, E; DuPrez, J. The Galaxy Song. CBS/MCA. New York, NY/Universal City, CA. 1983/1991.
[2] Andrews, B. “Fact checking the Galaxy Song — Monty Python's astronomy lesson.” In: Astronomy Magazine. 2018.
 
It’s always weird for me to see a 2D map of 3D space.
Visualising 3D space effectively isn't that easy if you're just showing a map on paper. Beyond a fairly low level of complexity it's hard to stop the map from either (a) not showing the spatial relationships effectively or (b) being too cluttered.

I'm largely of the view that you can sorta kinda get away maps like the ones below but an interactive 3D visualiser would be much better. However, that's a significant effort to build and maintain, and it makes your game dependent on a piece of computer software, which commits you to keeping it running on current platforms.

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Another one tidied up slightly

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