Mapping your Realm

[Buttercup]

I happened to be in a really cool used bookstore last week. I found an old book with medieval maps of the holy land. They are beautiful, grossly out of scale, and filled with imaginary creatures and locales. In fact, the map I mention in a thread in the Plots forum is lifted partially from this book. This method was so easy and so successful for me, that I plan on scrounging more used book stores for other books of old maps.

What are everyone else's methods for coming up with maps of your realm? I don't mean, do you use Photoshop or draw by hand. This is more of a 'where do you get your inspiration' type of question.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I just start mapping adding what I think I would like there to be but ideas come from things I see on the History, Discovery, Travel channels and every now and then E!'s Wild On. Mostly the Travel channel.

From that I form a general idea what I am building then start mapping.

 

[Nopau]

Maps

I use old maps and maps from old games and or books, modify them to my needs. Most are scanned in so I can edit them and print them out. It is much faster than some mapping tools I have seen.

 

[Kamard]

I use paint.

Huzzah for paint.

Oh. I have a pile of symbols I cut and pasted from campaign cartographer that I use to fill it out with pretties.

This is where you ask me why I don't just use the expensive Campaign Cartographer program I bought with my hard earned shinies.

Because it hurts my poor head, thats why.

As for how I design my maps, I simply keep fiddling until it looks vaguely natural. I often surf about.com to steal their outline maps and then cut and paste to my content.

 

[Aeris Winterood]

Maps

I use CC2 for all of my home brews.

This is gonna sound very weird, but I am a geology buff, so I think of what kind of place I want to design and then think about plate tectonics, and crustal movement... add mountains here... plains there...

I also take into view mountians and seas, has to do with weather patterns... Oh well! I go overboard with my worlds anyway!

 

[Buttercup]

I wouldn't mind going overboard with my worlds if I could manage to understand Campaign Cartographer. I've got that program, Fractal Mapper, Autorealm and NeverWinterMap.

But when it comes down to it, I just draw them by hand, scan them and run them through photoshop to add the text.

 

[Aeris Winterood]

CC2

I wouldn't mind going overboard with my worlds if I could manage to understand Campaign Cartographer. I've got that program, Fractal Mapper, Autorealm and NeverWinterMap.

But when it comes down to it, I just draw them by hand, scan them and run them through photoshop to add the text.

It took me a while to figure out how to 'properly' use CC2. I had never used any programs like such but now that I do know how to use it, it is alot of fun. I have alot of fun just creating new lands. I probably have 20 different continents right now, and only use one of them for campaigning! I have an awesome Greyhawk world for CC@, and I have updated it to conform with the 'new' edition.

 

[RavenSinger]

My campaign uses the geography of Northern and Central California. So I have spent many an hour online trying to find a good topographic relief map of the area that doesn't have cities and roads and things. Thankfully I found something passible, and now I just have to get my hands on a copy of Photoshop to put in the names of towns etc.

I tried using CC2 as well, but there was no way I was going to get a result that was going to be accurate enough for what I want, in the amount of time that I have. Frankly, I find the program somewhat cumbersome. And though I am by no means an artist, I would rather just break out the colored pencils and graph paper.

--RavenSinger

 

[Emiricol]

RS, I would be grateful if you could email that map to me for my GW game! If you can, please send to emiricol @hotmail .com. I spent hours searching for such a thing, and never did find anything I could really use

 

[Buttercup]

And I would love to know where one finds good topographical maps on the web that don't have place names on them.

Please share your secrets!