aldantefax posted:

from the last thread:


tl;dr: Wonderdraft, Inkarnate, Dungeondraft, Photoshop/GIMP/Paint.NET, use other people's maps, use randomly generated maps, don't worry as much about making your own maps if you need a lot of them. Figure out your needs. Longer form answer below.

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What are you looking for here? Do you want to make your own maps for a specific game, or is it a module, or for a novel or something? Do you want to improve your maps for a game that relies on grid combat, like GURPS or D&D?

If you want to make maps that look pretty good for dungeon mapping to use at a physical table with lots of rich image assets and you print everything out for us in color, then something like Dungeondraft is pretty okay. Otherwise, a free image editor should be fine.

If you want to make battle maps that fit your specific vision on a virtual tabletop software that already allows for a grid projection like Roll20 or Tabletop Simulator, then I think you could take map assets and throw them onto there and do the grid projection and call it a day. "2 Minute Tabletop" is great for this and rather than spend time making my own maps, I stitch together maps and then use multicolored pens to customize or link them in a virtual tabletop.

Campaign Cartographer 3 is mostly intended if you want to create things for publications and is mostly a CAD program. The "Tome of Ultimate Mapping" is very useful for teaching it, but it's primarily making publication-grade material and it requires a lot of time to learn and prepare maps. It's 'worth it' if you want to commit to making money with map design, but for everyday map creation tableside, I agree probably not worth it.

For world maps, that also again depends. Wonderdraft is great, I hear good things about Inkarnate, but I also randomly generate world maps via Dwarf Fortress and then either redraw them for world maps or use as-is.