Abstract travel maps

[jmucchiello]

But why 8 hours? That's a very recent concept for doing things. Dusk to dawn, whatever that happens to be, is how long the PCs ought to be travelling. Not some arbitrary 8 hours.

8 hours makes sense. The extra time is taken up with breaking camp, finding camp, making camp, rest stops, water stops, etc.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I've used abstract maps for most of my mapping for about two decades. I'd love to have nice well done maps with pretty landforms but my drawing talent is close to nonexistent.

So in general I sketch out a rough landform border for the landmass or region. Then throw in some features and landforms drawn as symbols. Add population centers as geometric shapes with lines connecting them and distance between. Then fill in little terrain notes like swamps from here to river/geyser fields/infested with interdimensional space weasels/etc.

 

[S'mon]

Your idea is fine, but you don't need drawing skills to make a nice map. Check out the Arr-Kelaan free hexmapper software - requires zero talent, & makes maps like the old Mystara/Gazetteer ones:

http://home.paonline.com/zaikoski/ak/TOOLS.HTM

Personally I think flowchart style maps are particularlt good for cities, labyrinths, and other very complex locations. They're particularly good in PBEMs - if you run a dungeon in a PBEM you don't want to waste time on "We turn right", "We take the left fork" etc, just the important stuff.

 

[Asmor]

Your idea is fine, but you don't need drawing skills to make a nice map. Check out the Arr-Kelaan free hexmapper software - requires zero talent, & makes maps like the old Mystara/Gazetteer ones:

http://home.paonline.com/zaikoski/ak/TOOLS.HTM

Personally I think flowchart style maps are particularlt good for cities, labyrinths, and other very complex locations. They're particularly good in PBEMs - if you run a dungeon in a PBEM you don't want to waste time on "We turn right", "We take the left fork" etc, just the important stuff.

I actually used that program to make the base map for my last campaign.

It does its core job better than anything else I could find, but that's not saying much. Unfortunately it's very spartan and incredibly unstable (to the point where I literally had to save after every brush stroke, because it was not especially unlikely for the thing to crash during the second!), and any utility is mitigated by those factors.