Last updated on September 4, 2023
Welcome to Atlas Exandria, a suite of maps I created to help run my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns in the world of Exandria. A world of high fantasy, Exandria is the setting for the hit actual-play D&D series, Critical Role. When I decided to run a campaign for my daughter and her friends a few years ago, I chose Exandria for the setting.
Background
While I have been creating maps of Exandria for more than four years, I did not really get started until the release of the Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting Guide and my introduction to Wonderdraft by the Redditor, u/Korson. His interpretation of Exandria would serve as my inspiration and lead to me releasing my own interpretation in 2019. In early 2020, I started working on a much-needed update. Between the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount and the amazing work of Critical Role’s official cartographer, Deven Rue, it was time revisit my maps.
Canon Consistency
Atlas Exandria was created with the intention of supporting my campaigns and adventures. While I have made an effort to keep up with the canon universe, I did not create these as a canon reference material. They were designed to be “consistent” with the Critical Role universe, not beholden to it. They have been immensely helpful to me in my campaigns and if they benefit even one other Exandrian DM, I will be content.
Maps
Exandria
Tal’Dorei
Wildemount
Where are Issylra, Marquet, & the Shattered Teeth?
We know very little about the continents of Issylra, Marquet, and the Shattered Teeth. Therefore, I am not going to elaborate on these landmasses. The official cartographer, Deven Rue, has hinted that she has been asked to work on a new part of Exandria for Campaign 3. So, I suspect we’ll see an official map at some point in the near future.
Wonderdraft Sources
In addition to the full-size versions of the maps above, I also have the original Wonderdraft source files AND 2X exports available on Dropbox. You can find both at the following location.
Wonderdraft Sources & 2x Images
Notes
Large Files. The Wonderdraft source files are very large. The world map file is 48M and requires a great deal of power to work with. My ’15 iMac cannot handle it and I had to borrow my daughter’s M1 MacBook Air to even finish the files.
Merged Symbols. The forests and mountains on these maps were created by placing tens of thousands of individual symbols. I liked having a “full” look and it led to the majority of my performance problems and large file sizes. To combat this, I had to merge large numbers of symbols.
Label Bug. There is a nasty bug in Wonderdraft on the Mac that caused labels to disappear only to reappear three or four loads later AFTER you replaced them. This can cause duplicate labels to magically appear or existing labels to disappear when opening the file. While I have not encountered this issue on other maps, the problem persists in these. Windows users may have better luck.
Printing. All of the maps were created using printable resolutions (US). The continent and region maps are either 3300×2550 (11″x8.5″) or 5100×3300 (17″x11″). However, the 2x version of the world map is poster-sized with a resolution of 10800×7200 (36″x24″)!
Scale. The scale varies between the official maps from the Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting Guide, Deven Rue’s prop maps for the show, and the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. My maps are based on the scale of the 1.1 release of the Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting Guide.
Grid. I included the hex grid for the sole purpose of making it easier to calculate travel distances. The distance across each hex (face to face) is 120 mi (World), 60 mi (Continent, and 30 mi (Region).
Atlas Exandria Cartographer’s Guide
When I returned to my legacy map for the purpose of creating this update, I discovered that I had no idea what settings I had used to create the original map. To help maintain consistency across all of the different maps and help any future attempts to update them, I created the Atlas Exandria Cartographer’s Guide.
In this document, you will find all of the settings, colors, and style choices that went into creating these maps. This should help you make modifications to my maps or emulate my style for your own.
MrFarland-AtlasExandria-CartographerGuide
Credits
This project would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of numerous individuals. I have done my best to include everyone I could think of and apologize profusely if I have somehow overlooked someone.
Matthew Mercer and the cast of Critical Role: Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Liam O’Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, Travis Willingham, as well as Brian W. Foster, Dani Carr, and the amazing, Deven Rue.
In addition to the cast, the Critter community has been a tremendous source of inspiration. I’d especially like to thank u/Korson. His work introduced me to Wonderdraft and inspired me to create my own interpretation of Exandria.
Check out his massive map of Exandria here.
Sources
I used the sources below to create my Atlas Exandria.
- Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting Guide, Green Ronin – Out of Print
- Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, Wizards of the Coast
- CritRole Transcripts @ http://critroletranscript.com/transcripts/
- Critical Recap by Dani Carr
- Critical Role Wiki
- CritRoleStats
- The World of Critical Role by Liz Marsham
License
Atlas Exandria is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You may use, modify, and share my maps and module, but I respectfully ask you to link back to this page.
Thank you kindly,
Don Farland
t: @MrFarland
r: u/MrFarland – (my old maps were under my old Reddit username u/Dandyman28)
