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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 5811754" data-attributes="member: 85870">Alzrius--As someone who was basically in your exact same shoes around 2 years ago, let me tell you my experience. I took a long, hard look at all of the available map programs I knew of at the time--Campaign Cartographer, Dundjinni, and Fractal Mapper. Being fairly computer savvy, I ultimately went with Campaign Cartographer, because it seemed to be the most powerful. And I went at it with a vengeance. I produced a series of maps for a campaign I was working on at the time, but man it was slow going. And no matter what I did, it just never looked as sharp or professional as the stuff I saw over on Cartographer's Guild. Then I found out that the real "pros" pretty much eschew stuff like CC3 and Fractal Mapper. They do everything by hand, or use one of the professional / semi-professional graphics programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, Xara, or in most cases a combination of several). Ultimately I became very dissatisfied with my purchase of CC3, not because I didn't figure out how to use it, but because the learning curve and time investment was too steep to produce stuff I didn't really end up liking much anyway.So, if you're wanting to produce high-end, pro-quality work, don't waste your money on any mapping software. Go download the GIMP for free (it's open source), and start going through the numerous tutorials on Cartographer's Guild. If budget is a concern, stick to the open source stuff. The GIMP is a must have, but you might also want Inkscape to do some vector drawing as well to import into the GIMP later. If you have a little bit of budget ($50-$100), I'd recommend Xara as someone already mentioned. It's a slick little program, but there's not nearly as many tutorials for it as the GIMP for fantasy mapping. NOW--if you don't care about producing super high-end, high quality stuff, but just want something to throw some maps together that look decent, and you don't want them hand drawn, frankly I'd go with Fractal Mapper. It's much, much more intuitive than CC3, and since you know going into it that the results aren't going to be super high-caliber, the speed more than makes up for the few bells and whistles that CC3 might have over it. Of course, if budget is no object, just go buy the Adobe Creative Suite CS5.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />However, one thing I will say in favor of buying a mapping software first---CC3 taught me a lot of the basic "tricks" behind how various effects happen when doing mapping, stuff like transparency, layers, blending, inner/outer glow edges, beveling, etc. I was much, much better prepared to start doing my mapping in Photoshop and Illustrator after having used CC3.One minor edit: I also ended up getting the CC3 and City Designer expansion, which came with some nice city building artwork pre-built that I could use in my other programs. I don't know if that justified the price of paying for both of them, but it certainly lessened the sting a little bit, since I can use all of their hi-resolution artwork in my other drawings, even if I'm not using the program.2nd minor edit: Also, regardless of which path you choose, A. you're going to lose a lot of hours to making maps, and B. you won't care in the least, because it's PRETTY STINKIN' FUN. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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