Does Every Fantasy Book Need a Map?

When I began building the world of Shadows Before the Dawn, the map was not a beautiful piece of fantasy artwork. It was a collection of shapes drawn on a whiteboard in a very small apartment in South Korea, where space was limited and apparently the most sensible use of one wall was to cover it with invented countries.

At that stage, the map was there for me. I needed to know where the kingdoms were, how far characters had travelled and whether somebody could reasonably reach a city without accidentally crossing half a continent along the way. It did not need to look impressive because nobody else was supposed to see it. This was fortunate, as cartography is not one of the many skills I discovered while writing a fantasy novel.

The finished map was created by my good friend and fellow writer Chris Wards, who took those early drawings and turned them into something that looked as though it belonged inside an actual book. It became part of the world in a way my whiteboard version never could, and seeing it properly illustrated was one of those moments when the strange collection of ideas I had been carrying around began to feel real.

I love having a map in the book, but the process made me wonder whether fantasy novels actually need one. We have become so accustomed to opening a fantasy book and finding a continent waiting inside the cover that its absence can almost feel suspicious. Where are the mountains? Why has nobody labelled the dangerous forest? How am I supposed to know which kingdom has placed itself in the worst possible strategic position?

Maps have become part of the language of fantasy, but that does not mean every fantasy story needs one.

A map is a promise

There is something immediately exciting about opening a book and discovering a map. Before you know who the characters are or what the story is about, you can see the shape of the world they are going to inhabit. You notice the mountain ranges, the borders and the names of places that sound as though something terrible happened there several centuries or millennia ago. In Shadows Before the Dawn, that is just the case...

A good map creates anticipation. It suggests that the story extends beyond the first page and that the places mentioned along the way have some relationship to one another. Even if the characters never travel to every part of it, the map gives the impression that those distant regions still exist.

It can also encourage a particular kind of readerly obsession. Some readers will glance at the map once and continue with the book. Others will study every name, measure journeys with their fingers and become deeply concerned that a river appears to be flowing in a direction rivers do not normally choose.

I understand both approaches. As a reader, I enjoy knowing where I am, particularly when a story involves several locations or characters travelling separately. A map can make a large world easier to hold in your head, and it gives you something to return to when armies begin moving and everybody starts discussing the northern border as though you were paying close attention during the earlier political conversations.

However, placing something on a map also creates an expectation. If there is a tower marked in an isolated valley, readers may reasonably assume that somebody will eventually visit it. If one country occupies half the continent but is never mentioned, people will wonder what it is doing there. Every name suggests history, and every border suggests that somebody once argued about where it should be.

A map does not merely show the world. It quietly makes promises about it.

The map was useful long before it was beautiful

My early map existed because I needed to stop my world from shifting beneath the characters’ feet.

When you are writing over several years, it is remarkably easy for a journey that once took two weeks to begin taking three days, or for a city to move slightly west because you have forgotten what you wrote six chapters earlier. The characters may know their world instinctively, but the author is often searching through old notes trying to remember which side of the mountains they are supposed to be on.

The map gave me a fixed version of the geography. It helped me understand how the kingdoms related to one another and why their histories had developed in particular ways. Mountains could create isolation. Rivers could support cities. Distance could make alliances difficult and invasions extremely inconvenient.

It also forced me to confront decisions I might otherwise have avoided. If two nations had spent generations at war, I needed to understand what lay between them and why neither had simply gone around it. If a community was supposed to be isolated, I had to give that isolation a physical reason rather than relying on everyone in the world politely agreeing not to visit.

This is where a map can become genuinely useful to a writer. It takes the vague sense of a world and gives it boundaries. Ideas that seemed perfectly reasonable while floating separately in your imagination are required to exist beside one another, and they do not always cooperate.

Of course, mapmaking can also become an excellent form of procrastination. There is always another village to name, another border to adjust or another mountain range to add because the empty space looks slightly lonely. You can spend an entire evening deciding where a road should turn and still technically claim to have been working on the novel.

At some point, the characters do need to leave the map and enter the story.

What a map can never replace

A map can show where a place is, but it cannot make that place feel alive.

It cannot tell the reader what the streets smell like after rain, how people behave when a soldier walks past or why two neighbouring villages pronounce the same word differently. It cannot explain what a border means to someone whose family lives on the other side of it. Those things emerge through the characters and the way they experience the world.

This is where fantasy writers can sometimes become too dependent on the material surrounding the story. We create maps, family trees, glossaries and pages of history, then assume their existence has done some of the storytelling for us.

It has not.

A reader should not need to consult the map to understand why a journey is dangerous. The writing needs to convey the distance, exhaustion and obstacles involved. They should not have to examine a border to recognise tension between two kingdoms. That tension should be present in the characters, politics and choices being made.

The same applies to scale. Drawing a large continent does not automatically make a story feel epic. A world feels large when events have consequences beyond the immediate scene, when cultures differ in meaningful ways and when the characters understand that they occupy only a small part of something that existed long before them.

The map can support all of that, but it cannot create it.

It is similar to worldbuilding in general. The work behind the story matters enormously, but readers only experience the parts that reach the page. They do not know that you spent three days calculating the historical movement of a fictional border unless that border now prevents somebody from getting home.

The particular misery of maps on a Kindle

Printed maps are wonderful. You can keep a finger on the page, flick to the front and check where everyone is without completely leaving the story.

Maps on a Kindle are a different experience.

You are reading happily when somebody announces that they must travel east towards a city you vaguely remember seeing. You decide to check the map, tap the screen, navigate backwards and eventually find an image that was designed for a full printed page but is now displayed at approximately the size of a postage stamp.

You zoom in. Half the continent disappears.

You drag the image sideways, overshoot the city and arrive at an ocean. After several attempts, you finally locate the place you wanted, only to realise that you can no longer remember why you were looking for it.

Then you have to return to the exact point in the book where you started, by which time the flow of the scene has been thoroughly interrupted and the characters have presumably completed the journey without you.

This is not necessarily an argument against including maps in ebooks. Readers still enjoy them, and a clear digital map can add something to the book. It does mean the map needs to survive being viewed on a much smaller screen. Fine details, elaborate labels and subtle textures may look beautiful in print while becoming an archaeological challenge on a phone or Kindle.

It is another reason the story cannot rely on the reader consulting it. The map should be there for the people who enjoy using it, not as compulsory reading before they are allowed to understand chapter twelve.

Not every fantasy world needs to be mapped

Some stories benefit enormously from a map because geography shapes everything that happens. If the novel involves long journeys, political borders, military campaigns or several groups moving through the world at once, a map can give readers a useful sense of direction.

Other stories are more intimate. They may take place largely within one city, one building or one community. The edges of the world might be deliberately uncertain because the characters themselves do not know what lies beyond them. In those cases, a detailed map could add very little or even reveal more than the story wants the reader to know.

A map does not have to show an entire continent either. It might depict a city, a battlefield, a system of islands or the internal structure of a place that could not exist in the real world. The right map depends on what the story needs, rather than what fantasy tradition tells us should appear behind the title page.

There is also value in leaving spaces unexplained. Not every forest needs a name and not every coastline needs to be completely visible. A partial map can reflect the knowledge of the people who made it, including their mistakes, assumptions and fears.

The map is part of the storytelling, which means its limitations can be as interesting as its detail.

The story must work without it

I am glad Shadows Before the Dawn has a map. It helped me write the book, gave shape to a world I had been carrying for years and eventually became something readers could explore for themselves. Chris took the rough geography from that South Korean whiteboard and gave it a life beyond my notes, and I will always be grateful for that.

But the novel still has to work if somebody never looks at it.

That is the test I keep returning to. A reader should be able to follow the journey, understand the danger and feel the scale of the world through the story itself. The map can deepen that experience, but it should not be holding the entire thing together.

So, does every fantasy book need a map?

No. It needs a world that feels consistent, places that affect the people living in them and geography that serves the story rather than decorating it. Sometimes a map is the best way to support those things. Sometimes it is simply a beautiful addition, and sometimes the story is better served by allowing the world to remain partly unknown.

If you do include one, make sure it earns its place.

And perhaps spare a thought for the person trying to inspect it on a Kindle. They have suffered enough.