God doesn't play dice...

But I do.

Tik Tok user Derosha27 posted this clip of using dice to build a world map that went viral, at least in my little corner of the internet where I must have seen it a couple of dozen times. I was thinking about setting up a new monthly campaign and so decided to use this to create a map of the world.

As this was going to be my wife's first Dungeon & Dragons game we decided to keep the standard settings for the world from the Dungeon Master's guide; ancient, filled with magic and lots of wild space.

So we had the following set up:

A large sheet of whiteboard paper
Various colours of whiteboard markers
8x d4 for lakes/bodies of water
12x d6 for forests
8x d8 for hills
12x d10 for settlements
10x d12 for ruins
12x d20 for mountains

We gathered all the dice then scattered them across the whiteboard paper:

We decided that the higher the number on the dice the bigger or more important the feature would be; this ended up being literally bigger on the map for some things (note the ruins and settlements). Each player (and me as the GM) then took a marker and started drawing on the different features. Blue for lakes, green for forests, red for ruins and purple for settlements - hills and mountains had to share black.

With the key features of the map all but complete we started talking about what the world might include and what we wanted for the campaign. As we went we started adding notes to the map and ideas for what the world was like.

During this process we came up with some specific things for our campaign:

The ruins of an older civilisation are scattered across the landscape and in places fought over
A Greek pantheon
Orcs are tribal wanderers rather and traded with rather than systemically attacked
Wood elves are savage
Drow are part of the culture and accepted
Tieflings in their own city
Aasimar are 'demi-god' type character from ancient Greek myth
The island with the two lakes is controlled by Illithids
The large ruins at the top of the map contains many unstable portals
The '3' settlement at the top of the map is controlled by gnomes who've managed to avoid attack
Dragonborn isolated and restricted to an island caldera

The only thing left then was to give the world a name, given the importance and dominance of the ruins (part of me thinks we included too many) I came up with 'Karithia' a variation on the Arabic word for catastrophe.

Somewhere in the middle of this process, as we talked about separating off some of the features into islands, I came to the realisation that I wouldn't be using this as the game map, but would use this as the basis and inspiration for it.

We seemed to have some pretty logical mountain ranges so I started with tectonic plates to make these work and figure out where I should extend them (note I also turned the map through 90 degrees. I also wanted to establish scale and figured our main continent should be close to the size of the US. This would give us plenty of room for nations and dominions, but also a good amount of unclaimed land.

The rest has just been a process of tidying up the details, adding borders and naming locations.

Overall I'm really happy with this process as in addition to the framework for a map, it let the players bring their ideas to the table and develop parts of the world in ways I never would have. I even got some bonus maps created by my players defining their character's home towns:

Beautiful Domains

Express Order!