Map Making Tools

[Millennium]

Hey, does anyone know of any decent free (or cheap) map making tools?

[charlieluce]

With the disclaimer that I haven't tried either of these out personally (I don't use maps a lot of the time), I do know of RPTools' MapTool and AutoRealm, both of which are open source and thus free.

[Spence]

Free usually doesn't get you much when you talk mapping though there are a few that will throw a hack and slash castle together. For myself I mostly do modern/scifi/supers games which makes for purpose mapping software rare. I use Campaign Cartographer which allows you to build your own symbols and tools (which most good commercial mappers do as well).

But in the free arena I usually avoid any program that does not have actual screen shots on the site. Any program that hides it's nature and usability until AFTER you load it is suspect.

It might help if you mention what genre you are looking for and what style of maps you are trying to make. Overland maps can come from any mapping program, but city and/or building/ship floorplan/deckplans are very genre/time period specific.

[Koosemose]

No new suggestions, but I can attest to AutoRealm being a high quality mapping program... though I can't say for certain how suited it is to more modern style maps, at the time I was using it alot, I was more interested in fantasy style maps.

[Marshal Law]

I use a very old free copy of Paintshop Pro for all my map-making, making full use of the layers to make moving furniture and stuff easier.

EG, this is the asteroid base of a band of pirates for my Star Wars campaign.



The original is bigger, and includes the hangar area which is not shown in this version (for reasons of space). Photobucket squeezes the pic so some detail is lost. In the above version you can see the secret escape tunnel at the top, that runs from the boss' room to the hangar, and also gives access to the armoury and store-room. There are 3 barracks each sleeping 8 men, plus quarters for 4 sergeants and 1 lieutenant, with the boss and his mistress sharing a double room.

[Skari-dono]

With the disclaimer that I haven't tried either of these out personally (I don't use maps a lot of the time), I do know of RPTools' MapTool and AutoRealm, both of which are open source and thus free.

Although I haven't tried the AutoRealm, I highly recommend the MapTool from RPTools. I have made some cool maps with it but you can do so much more than just maps. You can use it to play online with your friends who also have the program. For a free program, you are really getting a lot. The best thing, in my oppinion, is that it is updated fairly frequently, so you get rid of many of the bugs very quickly.

Before you start using it, I recommend taking a look at the tutorials which are included at their site. They really help.

[Rabidwolf]

I need a map maker with modern art, dundijinni is not an option. Any sugestions?

[bcholmes]

I'm probably engaging in horrible zombification of a thread that has died of natural causes, but I'm surprised that no one mentioned Inkscape as a candidate. Inkscape is a general purpose vector art program (with support for including PNGs), and it's open source/free.

It's a bit deficient as a mapping tool, in that it doesn't come with any "out of the box" mapping symbols, but it's pretty easy to grab some symbols from sites like Open Clip Art. Here are some maps I made:

http://bcholmes.org/rpgs/gig.svg

and

http://bcholmes.org/fading_suns/world_vera_cruz.svg

and

http://bcholmes.org/fading_suns/resources/cathedral.svg

These maps use an Internet standard -- SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics -- which is supported in every reasonable browser (but not IE, although it's close to giving in). SVG is the native format of Inkscape.

It's also available for most platforms. I use it on my Mac.

[kipling]

I have not looked at Inkscape yet, but you can apparently download it here
And Open Clip art is here. (And hi, BC--it's John McMullen in my secret ID.)

[bcholmes]

(And hi, BC--it's John McMullen in my secret ID.)

Oh, hey. Good to "see" you.

[Millennium]

Long time since I checked on this. Thanks for the tips guys!