50 Fantasy Map Ideas for Your Next Story
Fifty map ideas, and every one comes with a story already stuck to it. Some are big (a wall across the north, a sea serpent guarding a strait), some are small (a bakery on a bridge, an inn at a crossroads), and a few are for the long dark nights coming up. Skim, bookmark, steal the one that makes you sit up. Then there is a live map maker below so you can start drawing it.
Pick a stamp, tap the realm to drop it, drag it into place, double-tap to name it.
How to use this list
Do not read all fifty and pick the best. Read until one gives you a little jolt of story, the feeling of a scene arriving before you have asked for it, and stop there. A map idea is good when it makes you want to know what happens next, not when it is the most original thing on the page. Then mix freely: a tide-cut kingdom with a cartographer's lie, a cozy shire with a road to nowhere running through it.
Island and coast realms
Water is the oldest plot device on a map. It isolates, it connects, and it drowns things.
- The tide-cut kingdom. An island that becomes two islands at high tide, twice a day. Whoever holds the causeway at the turn of the tide holds the crown, and someone has just been stranded on the wrong side.
- The lighthouse chain. A coast with a lighthouse on every headland, each kept by a different family. One light goes dark, and a ship that should have made harbor never does.
- The archipelago of exiles. Every island holds people sent away from the mainland for a different crime. Your hero is the first one ever sent back.
- The cliff road. A long coast where the only road runs along the clifftops between fishing towns. Storms close it for weeks at a time, which is how a stranger ends up spending the winter in the wrong village.
- The island with one harbor. Sheer cliffs all the way round except for a single bay, so every person and every crate arrives through one port. Whoever runs the docks knows every secret on the island.
- The drowned coast. The sea has been rising for a generation and the old harbor towns are reefs now. Fishermen haul up church bells in their nets, and one of them still rings.
- The serpent strait. A narrow channel between two kingdoms, guarded by a sea serpent that lets exactly one ship through each day. The whole story is about who decides which ship.
- The five trading isles. Five small islands, each famous for one thing: salt, glass, wine, charts and rumors. A treaty says one ship must call at all five before the autumn storms.
Mountain, border and frontier worlds
Borders are arguments drawn in ink. Put one where the land makes it hard to hold.
- The one pass. Two kingdoms split by a range with a single usable pass and a fortress astride it. The fortress has just changed hands without a battle, and nobody on either side knows how.
- The wandering river border. The river is the border, and a spring flood has moved it a mile west. A whole village woke up this morning in the other kingdom.
- The wall at the edge of the world. A great wall across the north, built against something nobody has seen in two hundred years. The garrison has been cut to twelve, and the twelfth just arrived.
- Three crowns, one summit. Three realms meet at the peak of one mountain, and each claims the shrine on top. Every pilgrim has to choose which kingdom they climb through.
- The frontier road. A string of new settlements along one road into unmapped country, each a day further out than the last. The furthest town has stopped sending letters.
- The sealed valley. An entire realm inside one valley, reached only by a tunnel through the mountain. Nobody born inside has ever seen the sea, and one of them is about to.
- The twice-taken march. A strip of borderland that has changed hands so often its villages fly both flags and keep two sets of tax books. A new king wants to know which set is real.
- The dragon's watershed. Every river in the realm rises in one mountain range, and a dragon sleeps at the head of them. The rivers are running low this year, so someone has to go up.
Cities and towns
A city map is a map of who is allowed where. Streets are social rules you can walk down.
- The city of guild bridges. A city on a wide river where every bridge belongs to a different guild and each one charges a toll. A courier has an hour to cross the whole city without paying a coin.
- Upper town, lower town. The rich live on the hill, the poor live by the docks, and one long stair joins them. Something terrible happens halfway up the stair.
- The walled heart. An ancient walled core inside a sprawling newer city. By old law the gates still shut at sunset, with whoever is caught outside left outside.
- The canal city. Streets of water, ferrymen on every corner, and one complete chart of the canals, owned by the ferry guild. Your thief needs that chart.
- The temple grid. A holy city laid out in a perfect grid around its great temple, where your street number tells everyone your rank. A street appears that is not on the grid.
- The crossroads market town. Four roads meet at one market square, and every rumor in the realm passes through it. The best detective in the kingdom is the innkeeper.
- The city on a ridge. An old town strung along a spine of rock, a castle at one end and a cathedral at the other. The quarrel between them is fought in the lanes in between.
- The modern town over an older one. A present-day town whose streets still follow the walls of a castle nobody remembers. Your heroine finds an old map in the library, and the streets line up.
Strange geography
One impossible thing, treated with total seriousness, is worth a dozen ordinary mountains.
- The salt sea. A dried-up inland sea, flat and white, crossed by caravans at night. The old ships are still out there, upright on the salt, and one of them has a light on.
- The volcano at the heart. A realm laid out in rings around a volcano: farms on the rich slopes, towns at the foot, nobody in the summit's shadow. This spring it started to smoke.
- The marsh with moving paths. Black water and reeds, with paths that shift every season. Only the marsh folk know the way through, and they have stopped answering questions.
- The wandering forest. A wood that sits a few miles further east every year. The maps disagree about where it is, and so do the villages it has swallowed.
- The rivers that run uphill. Rivers that climb into the mountains instead of running down from them. Scholars argue about why; smugglers just use them.
- The glacier road. A trade route across a glacier, re-marked with stakes every spring. This year the stakes lead somewhere new, and the caravan follows them anyway.
- The island that breathes. On the charts it is an island. The colonists who settled it have noticed the coastline is a little different every morning, and that the whales keep their distance.
- The red badlands. A maze of dry canyons the old maps leave blank, where a lost army is said to still be marching. Every map of the place is drawn by someone who came back.
Maps with a secret
The map itself becomes a character: something it hides, something it gets wrong on purpose.
- The missing valley. Every map of the realm leaves out the same valley. Your heroine was born there.
- The cartographer's lie. The royal map has deliberate errors to fool invaders. The old king has died, and nobody remembers which errors were on purpose.
- The borders that spell a route. Trace the borders of the three kingdoms in the order they were drawn and you get a path to something. Somebody figured it out a century ago and redrew a border to hide it.
- The ring of standing stones. There is a stone circle in every realm, and on the map they make a shape. Someone is visiting them one by one, in order.
- Two maps of one country. The map the crown uses and the map the smugglers use. Same land, different roads, and only one of them shows the tunnel under the river.
- The once-a-generation island. Marked on the oldest charts, missing from all the new ones. The fog lifted this morning, and there it is.
- The road to nowhere. A well-made road, paved and walled, leading to a place on no map at all. The milestones count down, and someone has been keeping them clean.
Cozy maps
Small places where the stakes are a ruined pie or a lost cat. Cozy maps are tiny and full of love.
- The shire of seven villages. Rolling hills, seven villages, and one pub that all seven claim. The annual pie contest is the closest thing the shire has to a war.
- The bakery on the bridge. A little town whose heart is a bakery built on the river bridge. Everyone crosses it twice a day, so everyone's business ends up on the counter.
- The library at the end of the lane. A village whose library is older than the village, lending books to distant towns by post rider. One book comes back with a letter in it.
- The windmill valley. Farms, a millpond and a windmill on the rise. The old miller retires, and a stranger arrives with the deed and no idea how a mill works.
- The inn at the crossroads. One inn where four roads meet, and nothing else for a day's ride in any direction. Everyone who comes through has a reason, and the innkeeper collects them.
- The island with one ferry. One lighthouse, a handful of cottages, and a ferry once a week. A visitor misses the boat, and now has seven days to make friends or enemies.
Haunted and wintry
For October and the long nights after it. A map is half the atmosphere.
- The village under the reservoir. A valley flooded for a dam, the village still down there under the water. In a dry summer the church steeple comes up, and so does something else.
- The graveyard on the hill. The town's oldest graveyard sits uphill of every house, and the wells all draw from the water that runs down from it.
- The lantern paths. A marsh village where the safe paths are marked with lanterns. One night, somebody moves a lantern.
- The last town before the ice. The furthest town in the frozen north, one road out and the first snow coming. Whoever is in town when the road closes is staying till spring.
- The midwinter fair. Once a year the lake freezes hard enough to hold a market on the ice. The ice is a little thinner this year, and the fair is going ahead anyway.
Turning an idea into a map
Whichever one you pick, the move is the same. Find the single feature the idea depends on (the causeway, the pass, the stair, the reservoir) and place it first. Then put down only the places your opening chapters touch, three to six of them, and the roads between. Name those, and leave everything else blank. The blank parts are not unfinished; they are where book two lives.
If you want more on the craft side, our guide on how to make a fantasy map for your book goes deeper on borders, naming and scale, and how to create a fantasy world covers what sits underneath the map. For October, we wrote up haunted town map ideas for a Halloween story, and for the snowy months, cozy fantasy and winter village maps.
How to make one in Inkling
Inkling has a map maker built into the same desk as your draft, your characters and your storyboard, so the map is a click away while you write. Open it and pick a ready-made layout: an island realm, an archipelago, warring kingdoms, a mountain kingdom, a sprawling empire, a desert empire, a frozen north, volcanic land, marshlands, or a small, cozy shire. Or start a city map from the real streets of a city like Prague, Lisbon or Amsterdam, with every name stripped off so it becomes yours, and switch between Today and Fantasy town.
Then make it yours. Stamp in castles, towns, lighthouses, ruins, taverns, a graveyard or a wizard's tower, all drawn in one bold ink style so the map looks like one artist made it. Add a dragon over the pass or a sea serpent in the strait. Carve the land into realms with colored borders you can redraw or split. Paint forests, dunes, marsh and snowfields, draw rivers, and let roads find their own way around mountains and water. Name what matters and leave notes on each place. When the map is ready, press Write a story here and Inkling starts a new story with the places you named already in its notes.
It is free to start: keep two maps and download two, no card. If your world outgrows that, a Map Pass is $29 a year and keeps every map you make. See the map maker.
A few questions, answered
How do I come up with a fantasy map idea?
Start with one thing the land does to people. A pass that only one army can hold, a river that floods a village into another kingdom, a town with one road in. Pick the geography that creates the pressure your story needs, then build outward from it. The ideas on this page are all built that way.
What makes a good fantasy map?
A good fantasy map shows the places the story actually visits, makes travel and distance feel real, and puts the danger where the characters have to go. It uses one consistent drawing style, colors lightly, and leaves room on the edges for what the characters have not discovered yet.
Should I make the map before or after I write?
Either works, and most writers do a bit of both. A rough map before you draft gives you plot (borders, barriers, journeys), and the map grows as the story names new places. Keep it close to the draft so you actually check it.
Can I make one of these maps without drawing?
Yes. Inkling's map maker does the drawing: start from a ready-made layout or the real streets of a city, stamp in castles, towns and creatures, paint terrain, draw rivers and borders, and name what matters. You decide; it inks.
Is Inkling's map maker free?
It is free to start: keep two maps and download two (with a small Inkling credit), no card. A Map Pass is $29 a year (or $4 a month) and keeps every map you make, with unlimited downloads without the credit, print and poster sizes, SVG, all twelve real-street cities, every layout, and the Gilded Night style.
All of it. In one place.
This isn't five apps stitched together. Your storyboard, your cast, your maps, your covers, and the story itself all live on one desk, right beside the words. Nothing to sync between tools. No five separate subscriptions. Just everything a writer needs, finally in the same place.