Which is best? Campaign Cartographer? Dundjinni?

TanisFrey said:

I have been mapping a bit more old school. In part because I have little artistic talent. I have been using Hexographer, it allows you to use the only BECM hex style maps. You can some features be hand drawn like rivers, roads, coastlines and political borders or you can have them snap to the hex corners. If you just want a random map, it will do that and you then add in things like city/town/village/fortification locations. It has options for DM only icons and you can embed child maps (zoom in for certain locations). It even allows you to import a hand drawn (or real world) map for a base for your map.

I find it extremely useful because I have little drawing talent. Everyone has a different abilities and this may be useful to others like myself or you just like the style.

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Thanx TanisFrey!
First when I saw the Hexographer I was really sceptical. I had all that beautiful maps in mind. But yeah, this mapper is easy to use and it fits my needs totally. Great!

Andaran said:

Thanx TanisFrey!
First when I saw the Hexographer I was really sceptical. I had all that beautiful maps in mind. But yeah, this mapper is easy to use and it fits my needs totally. Great!

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Not a problem. One of the nice features is there is a free and a pay version. The free version you must be online to use but can save the maps to your PC. The pay version lets you use it any time and do things like create embedded child maps. He also has Icons and other images so that you can do a city/building interior/dungeon maps.

First advice, join the Cartographers' Guild website, this is a site dedicated to the creation of maps for fiction, RPGs and other uses. Most if not all of the professional cartographers in the RPG industry are members there.

In that site are lists of all known mapping applications, costs, where to find them. Also on the site are tutorials for most of those mapping applications.

If you're looking for something simple to use - Hexographer is not bad.

If you don't mind CAD (I hate CAD) - CC3 is a good choice.

If you like stamping programs (I don't) - Dundjinni is a stamping program.

If you ask a pro cartographer what they use - most likely Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, Illustrator...

If you ask me, I'll say Xara Designer Pro 7 (which is what I use) which is a vector drawing program like Inkscape or Illustrator, but has very powerful beveling, transparency, works well with bitmap images, and I find to be the fastest to create effective maps.

Here's a link to my Cartography thread here on ENWorld - again all created using Xara software. Note there are also many illustrations, especially at the end of that thread, they too were created in Xara.

Join the Cartographers' Guild as your most important decision!