I've recently come to the conclusion that, as much as I like drawing regional maps by hand on graph paper, I need something else. Something electronic. I need some mapping software. Now, I've fooled around with one for an afternoon (CC3, I think). But, I just wanted to ask the minds here at the Paizo Collective (thanks for that term, Fatespinner) what you all thought about various mapping softwares. Whsat would you recommend? My only experience with this stuff is the aforementioned afternoon, and I barely qualify as "computer literate." With that in mind, discucss!
Thanks in advance.
Whsat would you recommend? My only experience with this stuff is the aforementioned afternoon, and I barely qualify as "computer literate." With that in mind, discucss!
I use both Campaign Cartographer and Dundjinni and I love them both for different reasons:
Campaign Cartographer has a steep learning curve because it is CAD software and is very powerful, and a lot of people avoid it for that reason. It does come with a really good user's manual with a tutorial to walk you through creating a map of a continent and this covers most of the basic applications that you will need. What I love Campaign Cartographer for is creating world maps. When everything is done you can zoom from world scale, right up to city scale without having to open new maps. You can also link maps, which is incredibly useful if you use a laptop at the game table. Say you have a small scale map of your kingdom. If you were to create a map of every city in that kingdom you could link them to the city icons on the kingdom map. All you need to do is click in the city icon to open the city map. Likewise you could then create large scale maps of buildings in the city and link those to their icons on the city map, and so forth. You could also create dungeons and link those maps to ruin icons on your kingdom map. You can also lock out certain things if you want to give your players a copy of the campaign maps, but don't want them to see everything you have on your master map. For example if you've put resources on your master map (such as mineral deposits, etc.) or the locations of ruins or treasure hordes that you want to keep for yourself, you can just toggle those on a list of things to hide and create player maps with as much or as little detail as you want.
Dundjinni is incredibly easy to use and you can create great looking maps very quickly. There is an online tutorial that guides you through drawing a map of a jail. There is also a rudimentary user's manual available online. I really like using Dundjinni for tactical scale maps, and you can print them out at miniature-scale with a 1" grid. For my Savage Tide campaign, I made a miniature-scale map of the Blue Nixie with all its decks. I also use it to create dungeon rooms and corridors, printed on cardstock for durability, which I can lay out on the game table and create pretty much any dungeon on the fly. To give you an idea of what Dundjinni maps look like, most of the maps in Dungeon magazine look like what you will be able to produce with this software.
I should point out that you can produce large-scale tactical maps using CC, and small scale world maps with Dundjinni, so you don't need to buy two different software packages - I just prefer using each one for different purposes.
Thanks Sean. Just in the interest of getting a broad sample, anyone else here have an opinion on the matter?
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I've been using CC for Jzadirune so far in a PBeM, and been pretty happy with it. The learning curve is pretty severe -- I made some early mistakes on the map that I regret. It would be nice if they had a tutorial for dungeon creation, as well.
I haven't tried Dundjinni; I hadn't heard of it when I plunked down the money for CC (with Dungeon Designer). I had also tried Autorealm, but from my limited experience with it, it seems much less versatile than CC.
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I love Dundjinni. I use it for everything I do. It isn't really great at world maps but there is alot of user created graphics that are made for that, I just don't do alot of world maps so the need isn't big for me to have it.
BUT....
I can make some of the most beautiful overland, dungeon, house, castle, and wilderness maps you have seen. Stuff comparable to what is in Dungeon mag and ready to be printed out in 1"=5' scale with a couple clicks.
I love this software and because of it I haven't felt the need to buy any other software since.
Hope it helps,
FH
It's fairly inexpensive (as these things go), and provides high-quality results. Most important for me, the ability to draw different features on different layers is exceptionally useful -- you can hide or show whatever layer(s) you want, and edit each layer independently (roads, hills, water, place names, whatever).
On the downside, it's a lower-end version of a high-end product (Photoshop), which means there's a lot to learn.
My two cents :)
Good luck.
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I haven't used Dundjinni. I have used CC2, which I like for some things*, but not really for dungeon design. For that, I prefer Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately, those are too expensive for me to justify for home use.
My solution has been to pick up Inkscape for object drawing and Photoshop Elements for manipulating bitmapped images. Both support layers (which are extraordinarily useful), and each is very good at what it does. Inkscape is free, and if you don't want to spring for Elements, GIMP does many of the same things and is also free.
* The fractal river/coastline tool is very nice. The ability to randomly place buildings along a road in a city is very nice. The ability to link maps is very nice. I don't regret the purchase.