Hi Guys and Girls,

I'm going to start dm'ing a campaign soon and really want to go all out and make custom maps for the group so they can understand whats going on.

Does anyone know of any good map building tools or generators?

Any help anyone can provide on this will be very much appreciated.

Regards

Kln

Maptools is a free system for online play, but it includes... map tools that can be used to... make.. maps.

Photoshop of course.

Dundjinni is supposed to be good. Also free demo so you'll know what you're getting into be fore you pay.

Paper and pencil (says the guy who does cartography for a living).

If you're on Windows and can pay for it, Campaign Cartographer is the premier package. Prepare for a very long learning curve...but it can do some amazing things. One of the features I like most is the Fractal Terrain generator for planetary scale maps...it generates wind and rainfall data, it will even produce an animated gif the the spinning planet.

On a Mac I've been using iDraw for local maps. It lets you set grids to any scale (inches, miles, meters, kilometers), is vector-based, supports layers, imports and scales bitmaps, etc. And it's priced pretty nicely for this kind of thing ($50 I think). It's like a very trimmed down Illustrator or something, but it does everything I need.

Not being an artist by any remote standard I found the concepts alien and the learning curve for all this stuff somewhat time-consuming, but once you have the basics down it goes much more quickly.

Campaign Cartographer is a top-notch program. If you can afford it, and have time to invest in learning how to use it, it can do some amazing things.

I actually ponied up and bought campaign cartographer (and cosmographer) and whilst I have not yet completed any actual maps, i find it very easy to make basic maps in, and I see the potential for really really good looking maps with more learning.
I highly recomend it, if you have the cash.

Hey guys thanks for the input on this i'll have a look into these thanks.