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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dykstrav" data-source="post: 5311066" data-attributes="member: 40522">Hand-drawn with a pencil and graph paper, almost exclusively.Why? Well, I actually got my hands on a copy of Campaign Cartographer 2 when it was new and took a shot at it. I was quite willing to use it and satisfied with the results until I realized that I was spending inordinate amounts of time drawing a map that I was going to use for one adventure. I sat down and considered the purpose of a dungeon/adventure map. Since I'm not publishing my homemade adventures, I came to the conclusion that the maps are technical documents, not artwork--they don't have to be gorgeous as long as they are functional. After all, I'm not going to be able to transfer all of that detail to the battle mat with wet erase markers. That basically put an end to my days of using computers to generate dungeon maps. I think that it's a far better use of my time to work on the adventure and hastily sketch a map with pencils on graph paper.The only exception I make is for overland maps, settlements and the like. For those sorts of maps (which I will use repeatedly), I do actually consider it worth it to me to take an entire day or so to work on a map and make it look presentable. It's basically a handout for my players and I'm going to use the locale repeatedly, so I feel that the extra time is justified.Nowadays, I usually use dungeon tiles to represent a dungeon. So instead of sketching out the dungeon complex first, usually I'll actually get the tiles out and play with them on a big table to make the encounter areas, then figure out how they fit together. Sometimes I sketch it onto graph paper. But it's getting to where it's easier for me to just take a few photos and sort of stitch them together, because it's easy for me to have that photo open in actual play (my notes are usually all-laptop these days).</blockquote>

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