r/JerryMapping

I had never heard about Jerry before watching Quinns PMG documentary. It kinda blew my mind seeing someone else have been doing (somewhat) similar stuff all along.

I began my world building project in 2010, and from 2015 I started mapping out the world on sheets of paper. What started as 40 roughly sketched A4 pages on my wall is now some 80 pages (and still growing), digitized and many partially rendered. I have shared some images before, but the work has been more about the process than the product.

Inspired by the PMG- video I decided to print out all the map sheets I have made so far (even though only some 20ish are «finished») just to get a feel of what they all looks like side by side on the wall after some 8 years as individual sheets on my computer.

Just to be clear, I’m no Jerry (by far), but hope to show those in the beginning of their own mapping journeys that effort over time gives results!

Pic 1: first sketch in 2015.
Pic 2: CU sketch.
Pic 3: from today - some progress made.
Pic 4: CU of progress (same area as pic 2)
Pic 5: just to show where on the larger map the map tile in pic 6 is from.
Pic 6: png of (somewhat) finished map sheet.

Good to get that off my chest.
Thanks for your time.
I’ll see myself out.

This isn't quite a map, but this was inspired by Jerry's deck. For the past little bit, I've drawn a card from this deck to decide what i do in my sketchbook every other day.

Less eventful than the first 5 days.

Started with a trade route opening up. Got the joker and ignored the white space action and just worked on revisions to the cards document. With the seven of spades, I kept the focus on the widower, and I had him build a farm tile behind his house. Maybe he wants to grow medicinal herbs. For the nine of spades, I drew a fence around the Kaelor family hut for them to use for an animal pen. For the ace of clubs, I already have a different ace card that moves the seasons along, so i'm ignoring this one. I'm not sure what I wanna replace it with. I just shuffled in the discarded clubs and took a break for that day as it was already too late in the evening and I had to get to bed. I did notice that the next card would have been a 9 of clubs so it looks like Kaelen narrowly avoided a crisis of faith. Maybe fleshing out more details of their religion could be an area to add more functions to the cards.

Inspired by r/JerryMapping (https://www.jerrysmap.com/), I created a custom mini version over two days. I used a deck of cards and a token (bottlecap) with a defined set of rules, and it resulted in this map!

I actually started this last year when I went to an exhibition of Ursula Le Guin’s maps she makes for her writing, but only finished it after watching the People Make Games vid.

Jerry, you are an inspiration and I appreciate you loads!

Got inspired when I stumbled over this sub and decided to give this cool new thing a try. Put together this kit over the last few days with some fineliners and colored markers for the map, and built a basic rule deck start with; I’ve still got plenty of cards left over to expand where necessary.

I’m gonna go for an ecumenopolis, or a world-city, in a cyberpunk style. I think it’s gonna look really awesome and be a lot of fun to mess around with. Can’t wait to get started!

Hi, I discovered the Jerry Mapping stuff last week, not through the People Make Games video, though I did watch that to get a better understanding, but Reddit just happened to suggest the subreddit to me, and I thought it was cool so I got started drawing.

I'm doing a more "illustrated" map, right now just in pencil. Less useful for worldbuilding, but since it amounts to just drawing a buncha rocks atm it's nice to have something to draw where I can just turn off my brain while I wait for my coffee to be in a state where I don't burn the inside of my mouth.

I also kind of think of this map as something closer to those old medieval maps that were in no ways used to geography or navigation, but moreso symbolic.

I think the in-world context of the map maker is someone sketching the landscapes from somekind of flying machine.

How I started

Starting out the first thing I was gonna draw was either a crater or a plateau, cause I like those geological features. I went with crater and just kinda sprawled out from there. I decided that whatever this world was, it ended a long time ago. Right now, I'm just drawing the rocky fossilized remains. Also I thought it would be cool if w/e caused the crater/killed the world was just a sword falling from the sky, so on the first image you'll see a tiny little line in the crater that's intended to be a sword. I kinda thought that might give a good sense of scale, but again, it's an illustration, not a map to be used for navigation or information tracking.

Plans?

I don't really have a plan, but i've got 6 panels so far, and sometimes I'll look at screenshots for Shadow of the Colossus or any 3d Zelda game as a reference/inspiration.

I'm thinking of at some point adding colour with paint pens and ink pens. I'm also considering drawing things like settlements or monster lairs on small cards and gluing them over the base layer, and then blending in the newly pasted features with what's around it.

Cards/Rules

I don't have any cards made yet, I am having a hard time deciding on what to put in the cards. I also don't have much in the ways of plans for any kind of rules. My initial thoughts on cards is to have some dedicated to adding colour, some for landmarks, some for settlements, and some for changing the landscape itself.

Coordinates

Also, I'm using an x,y coordinate system for keeping track of the order. Positive x is East, Positive y is North.

It looks like the order the pages got uploaded in is (0,0), (1,0), (0,1), (-1,0), (1,-1), (0,-1).

Advice / Recommendations

Any advice, criticisms, or recommendations are welcome :)

I ordered my very own piece of the Jerry Map! Now framed and at my cubicle at work.

one person made a tool that they'll share when they're ready, which is what i used to put all the tiles together into this image. each panel is 21x21cm, so its a bit big :3

there are currently 4 tiny cities: Chan-ge, Lajar, Maldad and Yeast.