How to Draw Fantasy Maps: Political Borders

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Should have shown this video to sikes and picot when they were drown the new borders of the middle east

So your complaining that there simple, what?

Another thing to keep in mind is that premodern countries often don't even have clearly drawn borders. The further you go back, the less clearly and distinctly the lines are drawn.

Not only did The Inheritance Cycle introduce me to fantasy it revived my love for it when I lost interest.

The main thing I’ve learned in making fantasy world building more realistic is: Start with a logically consistent world, then sprinkle on some bullsh-t. Draw your maps around logical borders, then straighten some, bend others, and do enough random stuff to make it feel just a little off.

Make sure it makes sense, but also that you could to a “Top 5 Weirdest Borders” video in your world.

Wait, did you mean that Transylvania was a country? I may just be getting the video wrong, but it wasn't clear on that. Just to be clear, Transylvania was a region, and was part of the Austrian Empire (later the Austro-Hungarian Empire) for much of its history. It was after WW1 that Romania annexed the region following the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Northern parts of Transylvania was annexed by Hungary during WW2, as a reward for joining the Axis, and Romania (also an Axis member) got compensation during the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) by annexing Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and more lands in the USSR. However, after the Axis defeat in WW2, Romania lost all of the land they had gained during the invasion of the USSR, but they did retake Northern Transylvania.

Always remember the cost of maintaining control of unprofitable areas will determine if a region is even claimed by a political affiliation at all. This has more impact on maps thats aren't saturated by people than in highly populated regions.

Mountains specifically are often unclaimed land because of the difficulty and cost of managing a mountain kingdom.

It's funny, I always get told the exact opposite when people on Reddit critique my maps. They'll always say that any border that's not on a natural landform is "arbitrary" and that you NEED to have the border be a river or forest.

Also worth considering that, borders have been far more vague in the past. In a medieval-like setting, it could make sense to not have nationstates to begin with.

Great video but id say one issue is that it would be based on the technology level of the fantasy world the ability for politics to trump natural borders when it comes to making boundaries. Take the us states, the majority of the 13 original states are separated by rivers. But as you move west they become more blocky and based on local politics.

I think a fear of border gore plays a part in the “perfect borders” most fantasy maps seem to have. They are fantasy for a reason and if you take everything about fantasy and try to make it realistic, you will end up getting something dangerously close to reality, something that can work in certain contexts but won’t fit most worldbuilders creations.

Also it's important to remind that the modern definition of borders is pretty new. For centuries it was more important who your leader is and those leaders often had to pledge their loyalty to another more powerful leader. Also borders weren't as much of a boundary than nowadays you mostly could cross them without trouble. Languages and cultures also doesn't have as much of a break than nowadays they shifted slowly and you often could understand the villages around whether they are in your nation or not, but understanding a outsider from the other side of your nation was often very difficult. If writing a medieval setting it's important to remind one self that the world worked completely different to today.

Worth noting that the points raised in the video very much depend on the time period.

Drawing straight lines on maps requires that you care about what a map border says. That was very important in the colonial period because big empires needed to agree on borders to avoid fighting each other. But a pair of medieval kingdoms fighting for territory won't care what a map says, they'll fight until they can hold their territory or they'll lose and be absorbed. Natural barriers are very helpful for that.

Outside of natural barriers, the borders are likely determined by which fiefdoms are under a king's control.

Mf uses a fantasy country of thefts to justify fantasy nation. Fking gypsy propaganda

You have to scroll down surprisingly far to find the angry Hungarians in this comment section.

Yreeeeees România first🇷🇴

Bro called transylvania a naition😂 it was a territory in Austria-Hungary.

Political boundary maps are too modern of a concept to be used in a realistic way in most fantasy settings imo

bold of you to say romania """unified""" with trsnsylvania

A good thing to keep in mind is that each country should consider their borders to be different and even have physical representations of their borders (mountains, rivers, stones, etc).

At least one of my nations is thoroughly lacking any major dividing natural barriers on its borders. Its modern borders are defined by its massive array of forts and outposts. It defined its borders by proving it could hold them better than anyone else on the steppe.

Interesting video, but I feel like it kinda misses the point of borders in fantasy maps. This video talks about modern, post-colonial borders. In many time periods that we build our fantasy worlds in borders simply don't exist in our modern sense. They aren't hard lines on a map. They are much more porous and unless it's a fortified river, the idea of a 'border line' simply doesn't hold up.
A more genuine way would be to think about regions and don't draw borders at all. Look at maps of middle earth, not a border in sight. And if you must draw borders to show control, just remember that they are rough zones, not precise lines that people respect in everyday life.

I'm a little bit guilty of this in my world build but conscious of that i broke the mold at least a few times in each continent. :)

And one thing you could add.
Mandala model of medieval South East Asia.
Basically, the idea that geopolitical extension came from a sphere of influence from nearby areas beyond its core region and the ability to extract tributes from said relations. Kinda like feudalism but much more apparent as political philosophy in South East Asia

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Why are you talking about modern borders for Fantasy Nations?
France's overseas territories would not exist in a Fantasy World, they are far too far away from France itself!
Romania would STILL be Wallachia, Moldavia and possibly Transylvania NOT Romania!

Rule #1: No USA state borders.

I’ve always disliked the proliferation of what feel like lazy maps in fantasy. It seems like every other map is either the lower left-hand corner of a rectangle or something insanely stylized in a pattern.

Wah, wah, wah colonialism bad. Lol. Get over it and stop simping for people that would have had your eyes for juju beads.

I always interpreted elves living in forests and dwarves living an mountains as examples of niche partitioning. Elf civilization does not look like human civilization. It seems much more based on hunting or permaculture than arable agriculture. Dwarf civilization especially does not look the same. I would guess underground fungus and terracing the rugged terrain is probably more typical. The borders between elves and humans would not look like the border between two human nations because they prefer and excel in different environments.

In many ways I would expect the tendency to be that large empires end up as multi-species empires.

Lmao, unified with Transylvania. More like took it as spoils of war 😂

Whats Eragon?

Energy grid though and Energy use for transportation

Honestly, It's always good to hear that my interest in the history part of my world building project has helped to make the borders feel more realistic. For example, a lot of the borders in the "Barltad" "Tahnt" and "Fent" regions don't follow most natural formations because of the messy break up of larger states in the past that ended up lasting to the present


also p.s. "Ahikto" has over 240 countries in it... which is a far cry from the 2018 version of the world where there was only like, 35

Hmm

Great advice. I'll add that you often don't need precisely drawn borders at all to build a great setting. Sharp, defined borders are a pretty modern invention. In the middle ages, borders between political entities were often fuzzy, even between established and powerful ones. You don't have to draw every border take your world fleshed out.

unified with transylvania- more like SHTOLE IT!!!! WAAAAAAH TwT

Lol jumping over to Eastern Eurpoe ---- goes to largest country in Western Europe.

I've also been extremely bothered by this, even in the absolute best fantasies. Most maps just look so ugly and obviously made up

IMO the one quick and dirty hack to solve this is just to put a few random not-too-nearby enclaves, and a few weird small city states everywhere:

"There's the Island nation of A and the Holy Kingdom of B on the main continent to the north-east, and the C Empire to the south-east, and separated by a mountain range."
No, fuck that.
A has a port city on the southernmost point of the world, which was a 200 year lease deal with C.
The biggest, most central city is the capital of neither A B or C. It's an independent harbor with no real political power but a large economy.
B has 4 dozen independent counties in C, close to the border.
C has a big chunk of B to the north-west.
A has an exclave inside that B exclave, as they helped in the war in exchange for a port on the mainland.
Next to it is an independent city state, established to maintain peace between A and C.
C has rebellions all over, so many chunks are missing/fuzzy.
The mountains are completely uninhabited, and some parts of it are unclaimed.
The east is basically uncharted and unmaintained, so the borders are extremely fuzzy, but there is one city that joined B and because it grew too large and needed to trade to survive, and that left a thin corridor.

Hi political geography major here! Another aspect to consider is that in a medieval like fantasy settings, especially in a feudal system, the concept of borders is very difficult to locate in the fictional reality of the world.

We are conditioned by concepts like nation states and clear cut political maps, to intrinsically understand the concept of a border. But for a majority of humanity (before our time) the concept of borders as we know it was foreign, they looked upon borders from the ground, different feudal lords had different fealties, e.g. the king of england was also the duke of Normandy subserviant to the King of France.

Nonsensical territories and patchwork bordergore like in the HRE (holy roman empire) came about through political systems, decades long border conflicts were caused by unclarity of land deeds.

I encourage you to first place important settlements, think about the political entities, culture and the people living there and then as a result of that one should draw the borders!

Nah, except that's bullshit. You can't generalize fantasy borders from modern borders. Fantasy settings are usually medieval, and modern technology makes keeping Romania united much easier than it would have been with medieval or earlier technology. Romania is the perfect example. Romanians have their origins in the Dacians where were able to briefly unify against the Roman empire, but for nearly 1000 years after the Hungarians settled in Pannonia, the Romanians were not able to unify into a single country. It just wasn't feasible for Romania to be stable and united for over a century with medieval technology.

And this isn’t even factoring contested borders, where nations/factions each claim a different piece of land.

I think expanding on this, its also good to look at available maps from eras where the avalible technology of the time may be analogous to your setting. Natural barriers are easier to overcome and negotiate/trade/unify/conquer your neighbors up over the mountains if you have access to aircraft - or big ass dragons. Also think of resource distribution/access (and if that resource is, was, or will be something that would be usefull given tech level, past, present, and/or future) and how that might effect what specific land/river/coastline may be fought over. Food cultivation is very important to consider as well! This is why some of the first recored human civilizations where in river valleys - fertile soil good for larger scale agriculture.

one issue with fantasy vs your video is modern borders are better maintained and regulated. in most of history borders were not exact. tribes often had "no mans land" between groups- particularly if they fought regularly.
In a fantasy world these "no mans lands" would make great hinterland that are filled with bandits and monsters.

Rivers are of course a natural border between everything from clans to nations. Mountains are less defined. Defined borders in a mountainous region required fairly advanced surveying techniques. Plus a mountainous region between two major regional powers may well be occupied by independent minded peoples who want nothing from either power.
In many ways the size of an Empire or nation can be defined by its speed of communication.

This makes me feel much better about my maps :D