Drawing maps

[Hand of Evil]

Honestly, if you want to draw maps, Cartographer's Guild.com is your best bet.

Second this and you may also want to check out Art Gallery, Cartography & Miniatures Painting - EN World D&D / RPG News

Most of the programs (Dunjinni, Fractal Mapper, Campaign Cartographer, AutoRealm (which is FREE)) and others comes down to the user, it is finding the best one for you and the one matches the work you are going to put into map making. Demo them!!!

Some others:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/20061121t
http://www.jailoco.net/jai.hordelings/dungeontilesmapper.htm
http://www.dungeoncrafter3.com/

 

[Mexal]

Try some of 0one's material - the 'tile designers' listed here - RPG Resource - enable you to make miniature-sized tiles, the main drawback is that you need to work where you have access to a printer as they don't save. (Well, you can do fancy stuff with screen shots and importing into the graphics package of your choice.)

If you prefer writing adventures to creating maps for them to happen in, try their Blueprints and Black & White lines for ready-made locations - all quite customisable.

 

[nedjer]

Love the Photoshop work

All seems a bit labour-intensive though. In the time it takes to learn and use a specialist pack like CC or painting software like Photoshop/ GIMP, it'd be easy to get to grips with vector software like Illustrator or Inkscape and build up a stock of re-usable and scaleable map elements. Throw in a bit of layering to add any raster art you want and do a bit of quick filtering in GIMP/ Photoshop to apply styling . . . ?

 

[jcayer]

I'm a dundjunni guy. I have minimal art skills and this works easy for me. I would disagree about the learning curve. If you want to just get the grid, some walls/floors, and a couple objects, run through the tutorial(1 hour) and it's a piece of cake.

 

[heruca]

Seconded. Dundjinni is most definitely NOT a difficult program to learn or to use, particularly when compared to other alternatives like Campaign Cartographer or Photoshop. If you spend 10-15 minutes going through the Jailbreak tutorial that you can download from here, you will be well on the way to making your own maps and feeling comfortable with the program.

 

[UniversalMonster]

Hand-drawn whenever possible. But I also have been using a random generator at Gozzy's. Here's some hand-drawn profile type maps.