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What's a good fantasy mapping program?
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<blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 5812597" data-attributes="member: 151"><p>My experience has been that there is no one single program that will meet the criteria you have, but some will do some tasks well. There are issues, depending on what you want to do. First off, the recommendation of Cartographer's Guild is Spot On. There are a lot of really nice maps there, though you'll find far more geography maps than dungeon layouts. If you're looking for tactical maps, you won't find as many as you might like, but you will find plenty of city maps and world maps.</p><p></p><p>Like you, I don't possess a lot of artistic talent...and more importantly I have little desire to spend hours on maps for the game. I don't need them to be on the level of a published module, necessarily....but I want something nicer than just some pre-rendered tiles and a hand-drawn map.</p><p></p><p>I tried Dundjinni back in the day and it had a decent interface but lacked so many features that it wasn't really useful to me. I haven't tried some of the others. I settled on Campaign Cartographer 3. The extensions of Dungeon Designer and City Designer have been very useful for me. As kitsune9 mentions, the Joe Sweeney youtube videos are a fantastic help in making the program usable, something the developer knows as they've hired him for some content generation. CC3 is powerful and flexible, but NOT intuitive. You have to learn how to use a CAD program and there's no way around that.</p><p></p><p>However, the best value for CC3 is to subscribe to the Annual (and buy the older ones). It releases new tools and styles, one a month...and some of them are super useful. Many of them recreate styles of well-known game designer mappers or famous cartographers (such as John Speed) and sometimes they provide just cool stuff, like the pirate ship tutorial, a premade inn dungeon map and tools for buliding your own battlemaps for 4E.</p><p></p><p>You can see some of <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=276287" target="_blank">the maps I've made for my campaign in this thread</a>. Making these maps usually took between 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on details.</p><p></p><p>One nice feature of using a layered CAD program is the ability to customize versions of your maps. I often make a 'player version' of some maps and then a 'DM version', with some stuff on a layer that I hide before exporting it and giving it to the PCs.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="WizarDru, post: 5812597, member: 151"] My experience has been that there is no one single program that will meet the criteria you have, but some will do some tasks well. There are issues, depending on what you want to do. First off, the recommendation of Cartographer's Guild is Spot On. There are a lot of really nice maps there, though you'll find far more geography maps than dungeon layouts. If you're looking for tactical maps, you won't find as many as you might like, but you will find plenty of city maps and world maps. Like you, I don't possess a lot of artistic talent...and more importantly I have little desire to spend hours on maps for the game. I don't need them to be on the level of a published module, necessarily....but I want something nicer than just some pre-rendered tiles and a hand-drawn map. I tried Dundjinni back in the day and it had a decent interface but lacked so many features that it wasn't really useful to me. I haven't tried some of the others. I settled on Campaign Cartographer 3. The extensions of Dungeon Designer and City Designer have been very useful for me. As kitsune9 mentions, the Joe Sweeney youtube videos are a fantastic help in making the program usable, something the developer knows as they've hired him for some content generation. CC3 is powerful and flexible, but NOT intuitive. You have to learn how to use a CAD program and there's no way around that. However, the best value for CC3 is to subscribe to the Annual (and buy the older ones). It releases new tools and styles, one a month...and some of them are super useful. Many of them recreate styles of well-known game designer mappers or famous cartographers (such as John Speed) and sometimes they provide just cool stuff, like the pirate ship tutorial, a premade inn dungeon map and tools for buliding your own battlemaps for 4E. You can see some of [URL="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=276287"]the maps I've made for my campaign in this thread[/URL]. Making these maps usually took between 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on details. One nice feature of using a layered CAD program is the ability to customize versions of your maps. I often make a 'player version' of some maps and then a 'DM version', with some stuff on a layer that I hide before exporting it and giving it to the PCs. [/QUOTE]
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