Making nice campaign maps

[Cas Liber]

In the old days I made maps of my continents etc. with different coloured pencils etc. I was wondering whether there was a freeware simple nice map maker that I could make continents and towns etc.
Cas

 

[Aus_Snow]

Autorealm is a decent place to start. It might even do everything you want it to. Free as in beer, too.

 

[Cas Liber]

thankyou very much for that. That was precisely what I was looking for

 

[Aus_Snow]

Hey, glad to help. It's the best free downloadable purpose-built solution I've come across. Some folks have had luck with such things as MS Paint, or the GIMP. But most of the time it's just a whole lot easier making maps with, well, a map-making application.

 

[questing gm]

Someone recommended to me Inkscape. Don't know how good it is yet.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Someone recommended to me Inkscape. Don't know how good it is yet.

It's pretty good. It requires a bit more work than dedicated mapping programs, but it is free and more flexible.

Here are a bunch of useful cartography tutorials for Inkscape and GIMP. I'm also working on a large regional map with Inkscape - you can see the current version here.