Cartography and Mapping Resources and Advice

Future Villain Band · September 03, 2014, 09:46:44 AM

So if you knew someone who was going to get serious about cartography and mapping for a d20/D&D/PF game, which resources would you recommend? What do you use? How good is good?

I was looking over the old maps in I6, Ravenloft, and thinking that I really need to get mapping. I have a Mac, so a lot of off-the-shelf gaming tools are out of reach, but I do have access to GIMP, a scanner, etc.

Obeeron · September 03, 2014, 10:56:25 AM

Get your mustachioed self to http://www.cartographersguild.com/

Awesome site, seems like a solid community. I can get lost in there.

estar · September 03, 2014, 11:04:24 AM

http://www.cartographersguild.com is your friend in this regard.

Also Inkscape can do a lot of CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator can do.
http://www.inkscape.org/

In conjunction with Gimp you can probably adapt 90% of the tutorials on the site.

Kashirigi · September 03, 2014, 11:22:49 AM

If you are quite serious about cartography, you may want to check out QGIS (http://qgis.org). Combined with Wilbur (http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/wilbur.html) or any other terrain generator you can perform almost any cartographic task. Illustrator or Inkscape will help also.

A slightly older version of Wilbur will run just fine on a Mac using Wineskin winery, o, of course, in a virtual machine running Windows.

If you're looking for a decent image editor for Mac, you may want to check out Pixelmator. I have heard nothing but good things about it.

If you have some cash lying around, you may also want to check out Ortelius for Mac.

Silverlion · September 03, 2014, 06:11:45 PM

Seriously, everyone suggested the Cartographer's Guild, and I find it pretty invaluable myself. Still need to finish my other continents, but so much TIME and work went into the first one.

arminius · September 03, 2014, 11:23:15 PM

If you have a Mac, then WINE will give you access to a lot of Windows stuff without needing to run Windows.

And then if you're willing to buy a Windows license, Bootcamp will run it natively, while VirtualBox is getting better & better at virtualization (challenging Parallels and VMWare Fusion), for free.

Will · September 04, 2014, 12:14:26 AM

Wow, that's weird. I was just digging for stuff, too.

A lot of my setting maps are in Fractal Mapper, which has pretty much been abandoned for years and is clunky. I've been looking around for options.

A bunch of people really like just using Illustrator and Photoshop. Which is awesome if you could afford those... Paint.net seems to be a really nice, easy Photoshop alternative for free (layers, critically!)

I'm digging up an old copy of Campaign Cartographer, but it's CAD-based and I remember going 'wtf' about the interface.

Finally, Hexographer, if you don't mind fairly functional hexmap-oriented maps, works really _great_ for free, at least in the tinkering I've done so far.

BarefootGaijin · September 04, 2014, 09:18:45 AM

Wow. As an aside, I searched for "Ortelius".

I found a map of Iceland.

It is rather groovy!

mcbobbo · September 04, 2014, 09:38:27 AM

Definitely the cartographer guild site.

Also, learn to love the GIMP. Layers are your friend...

jedimastert · September 04, 2014, 09:38:35 AM

I believe there are Java based versions of these programs: dungeonographer, hexographer

They can be bought here:
inkwellideas

Will · September 04, 2014, 10:04:51 AM

So, I'm sure if I took a month I could learn the ins and outs of Campaign Cartographer and I'd make kick ass maps or something.

But Hexographer took maybe 20 minutes, so... think I'm going to use that.

Future Villain Band · September 04, 2014, 10:48:25 AM

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;784938Wow. As an aside, I searched for "Ortelius".

I found a map of Iceland.

It is rather groovy!

Holy cow, the setting I'm trying to map out is based on Iceland. I've been looking for a map like that.

Good find. That's really cool.

And to the rest of you, thanks for the advice -- I'm going to try to figure out how to use WINE to add to my library, but right now I'm just putzing around with GIMP and trying to use Sketchup to make isometric maps of my continent.

BarefootGaijin · September 04, 2014, 07:36:55 PM

Quote from: Future Villain Band;784975Holy cow, the setting I'm trying to map out is based on Iceland. I've been looking for a map like that.

Good find. That's really cool.

And to the rest of you, thanks for the advice -- I'm going to try to figure out how to use WINE to add to my library, but right now I'm just putzing around with GIMP and trying to use Sketchup to make isometric maps of my continent.

If you do a bit of searching, Maps of the Ancient World - Ortelius - A Selection of 30 Maps from The Osher and Smith Collections is rather wonderful.

GameDaddy · September 05, 2014, 03:45:38 PM

Another good resource;

The Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/

Lynn · September 05, 2014, 11:04:27 PM

Quote from: Will;784878I'm digging up an old copy of Campaign Cartographer, but it's CAD-based and I remember going 'wtf' about the interface.

That was my experience as well. Its a CAD program with some tacked on content design tools for games rather than a tool designed for its actual target market.