Every game master has drawn a map from time to time. And many wish to have their maps available in an electronic formats. However, professional map-making tools cost a lot of money - so what's a game master on a budget to do?

Fortunately, there are free alternatives.

The first program I recommend is Inkscape, an Open Source (and thus, freely downloadable) vector-based graphics program. Vector-based graphics program store lines, curves, areas as a collection of vectors instead of individual pixels, and thus it is easy to scale vector-based graphics - perfect for maps, in other words. And as a bonus, any printouts of such maps will always be crisp and have smooth curves, no matter at which scale you print it out.

However, it's not so good with special effects if you want to make your maps pretty. For this, I suggest post-processing with a bitmap-based graphics program. One such program is GIMP, which is also Open Source, and remarkably powerful - it can do most of the things the commercial Photoshop can do.

But how can you use those programs to create maps? Well, there are many ways of doing that, but a good site to start would be this page with cartography tutorials. Hopefully these should give you some starters. And if you come up with some neat new tricks, please don't hestiate to add them - these tutorials exist on a wiki, so anyone who has ever edited one should be easily able to create new tutorials.


And as a side note, if you are interested in art in general, the whole website - the Art Tutorials Wiki is the perfect place to get started. It has huge lists of links to art tutorials on any conceivable subject. I should know - it took me long enough to collect them...

Jürgen Hubert

Good-looking art is vital for visualizing a setting. Unfortunately, I am unable to afford commissioning art for Urbis at the moment. However, I can still search the web for art that inspires me in the right ways, even if I can't use the art for the actual publications.



(Click on the second to fourth images to see larger versions)

The first image could be a major western port city, possibly even Dartmouth itself. The second image could be a permanent halfling settlement on the Great Lake. The third looks like a major elven settlement, possibly Lorendur. And the final image could represent a major construction site in Praxus.

If you know of any other good art that would be appropriate for Urbis, please share it with me! The general architecture of human cities should not be medieval, but similar to Victorian-Age cities, if possibly on a grander scale (as envisioned by Jule Vernes).

Jürgen Hubert

A friend and I are soon starting a new social networking/reputation network site. For this endeavor, we need all sorts of icons - including icons showing dice for a role-playing games network.

To get these icons, I've started a contest over at DeviantArt - go here to read the rules for the contest. The winner gets a 12 month subscription for DeviantArt - but if you participate and identify yourself as an ENWorld member and you win this contest, I'm willing to give you a $29.95 gift certificate for the ENWorld Store instead. But you should hurry - the deadline is on July 1st.

These are the current entries. Do you think you can do better?

Jürgen Hubert