Mapping Adereon: A Fantasy Cartography Project

The known landmasses of Adereon have never been mapped – until now.

Over the past two years, I have been playing quite a bit of Dungeons & Dragons My friend Nate is in the process of homebrewing his own universe, and I thought it would be a fun exercise to digitize the maps that he had drawn (see Figure 1).

The above map represents the cartographic fruits of my labor. Making this map involved three steps, more or less: 1) choosing a coordinate system and projection; 2) georeferencing; and 3) digitizing. I chose to project this data on to the moon, because that was a closer approximation of the globe that Nate envisioned than our Earth is. Nate provided me with two maps – one of topographic features and one of political boundaries – which I had to georeference with one another. Digitizing was straightforward but arduous. I spent far more time trying to design a workflow for vectorizing the hand-drawn maps that Nate provided, and it worked but not well (that process is detailed in my methodology below).

The total contents of the map include a few forests, some rivers, and the countries & continents of Adereon (which is the name of this imaginary world). While Nate included mountains on his original map, I had trouble representing them cartographically without generating a raster, and that was beyond the scope of this project.

I had a vision for this project that was much larger than I could actually carry out. I wanted to complete three other things: 1) create a flow map using the QGIS Flow Mapper plugin of political alliances, 2) digitize data for a city, and 3) publish this as a slippy map that could be explored, zoomed into, and scrolled throug. Still, in the course of this project I created the rough, first draft of a dataset that can be revisited and continously updated as my D&D group explores this territory. In the future, I'll hopefully be completing those updates as I'm able, and adding other bits of infill such as roads, mountains, and more detailed rivers.

Thanks for reading!

A detailed account of the methodology, including my failed attempt at automating the workflow, can be found here.