How a Victoria-based illustrator builds region maps your table can actually use.
Fenn Marchetti draws maps the way cartographers drew them before satellites — as arguments about how a place works. Rivers run downhill, trade roads avoid the worst passes, and the biggest town sits where two of those roads cross. "If the geography makes sense, players invent stories in the gaps," he says.
Working out of Victoria, Marchetti builds every region at two scales: a painterly hero map for the table and a clean, labelled version for the GM screen. Both ship as layered files so a GM can hide the spoilers and reveal them as the party explores.
He's wary of over-decorating. A map crowded with icons stops being a tool and starts being wallpaper. His rule of thumb: one clear landmark per region the party can navigate by, and everything else earns its place.
His most-licensed set, a chain of frost-bitten coastal holds, started as a personal sketch of the BC coast with the names filed off. "The North people imagine," he laughs, "is mostly just home in worse weather."