Old Style Dungeon Maps?

Hey folks.

I want to design my dungeon maps to look like the old style blue and white maps from Basic and 1E D&D. I'm not looking for high art or photo realistic maps at all. I really like the more primitive look from the old maps, and I want to recapture that feel for my games.

Can anyone tell me the best way to create those maps? Is there a program available that can do what I'm looking for? I've checked the sites of the mapping programs that I'm familiar with, but none of them use that old style in the samples.

Any advice is appreciated. I'm happy to elaborate on what I'm looking for if that will help.

I would try autorealm. It's easy to use and free!

You can make them really easily in Photoshop, if that's a program you have access to.

palehorse said:

You can make them really easily in Photoshop, if that's a program you have access to.

Click to expand...

For that matter, you can alwyas use MSPaint... All you're doing is making lines and squares. You just have to find the right blue-tone color palette.

That said, I find Fractal Mapper does a pretty good job. I like using the old blueprint style maps for DM maps that don't need to be pretty. With FM, I can pump out a dungeon using that style in just a few minutes.

For example, this took me less than 5 minutes to toss together...

Thanks for the replies.
I don't have access to Photoshop, but I did download Gimp a few weeks ago. I'm not very proficient with photo/art programs, so it's a bit of a struggle for me to create anything in that type of program.
I've played around with Gimp some, but I can't get what I'm looking for. I know it's because I just don't know how to make the program do what I want it to, but I haven't had much luck trying to learn on my own. The things I can accomplish in the program look all right, but the way I do it is so labor intensive and time consuming that I might as well just do the whole thing in colored pencils. I have trouble just creating a grid that looks like I want it to, and I still haven't figured out how to make the grid blue.
I was hoping there was a less powerful but more "dummy" friendly program out there. I'll download Autorealm and give that a try. Fractal mapper definitely has the look that I want. Maybe I can get a copy and try it. Is it high power/user unfriendly like the old versions of Campaign Cartographer? My only experience with that software was the stripped down version in the AD&D Core Rules product. I'll also keep beating my head against Gimp. Maybe I'll have a breakthrough.

Since I first started using it almost a decade ago, I always found that old school dungeon maps were probably the easiest thing you could do when CC2 still had a steep learning curve, even without the Dungeon Designer add on - easier than more traditional non-CAD paint and illustration programs (at least at the time). I have no problem recommending CC3 highly for this kind of thing today - it's designed to do this specifically.

Your mileage (and budget) may vary.