Fellow GMs, which maptool do you use?

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Alohan

Alohan

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I'm looking for (preferably free) software to make dungeon maps with but I honestly don't know which are the best. Previously I used DungeonDraft and Mipui's Map Maker but both left something to be desired.

So fellow GMs what software do you use to make dungeon maps with?
 
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I have a touchpad and stylus thing that I specifically bought to do mapping using Krita or GIMP or somesuch, but I haven't done much more than take the shrink wrap off it. Sooooo many buttons. :shock: (In GIMP, not on the pad)
 
Crayolas on printer paper, scanned in. You can also use your phone to take a picture of your artmap and then change the file type for annotations as needed. It's sorta low cost to free? It also circumvents the learning curve of the map maker program. :thumbsup:
 
I bought all the Campaign Catographer programs back in the early 2000s and used those for a while. Then I switched over to Illustrator and Photoshop for a number of years. Now I’ve gone back to CC again, buying all the new versionS last year. There are advantages and disadvantages to either method. These days, CC works very well for me, but they’ve made significant improvements since my first foray.
 
Yeah, for many, many years, I was all about the colored pencils on 17x11 graph paper. I universally scorned software solutions; heck, there was a two-week stretch where three separate forum topics on TBP were on the "Help! I just changed computers, and my favorite mapping software needs a key to unlock, and the company went out of business!" riff, with three separate software programs yet.

Last year I finally broke down, scanned those maps in, and went to work in the freeware paint.net. And here are the benefits: I can save in any format (thus dodging the proprietary formats that have been the bane of mapping software), I'm not restricted to my old plastic mechanical drawing templates for shapes, and I can change those old maps -- something that's quite hard to do with colored pencils/graph paper. Since the origin of my regional maps were the 1970s Judges Guild Wilderland maps, this was something of a bugaboo of mine, and I could finally do something about all the illogical or inconvenient bits -- never mind, for instance, JG's apparent fear and hatred of a geographical feature called "lakes," the paltry number of watercourses emanating from mountains, and by the bye, the notion that mountain ranges could be a handful of miles wide.

And the same thing could apply for dungeon maps. I still have the 45 year old maps from my 1970s megadungeon, and they're all in Pentel markers. Impossible to alter. But if I wanted to use it again, simple to scan and give it its badly, badly, badly needed update.
 
My favorite tool is Tableplop. Super easy to use. Does exactly what I need and no more.

Mipui Map Maker and Dungeonscrawl are also useful for general concepting, but they are harder to work with.
 
Honestly: A lot of Google Image Search. We're doing a lot of VTT lately, and got suckered a bit by the colorful maps. When I'm not finding some maps directly for the pre-written adventure, I'm often picking interesting "battlemaps" and structure my scenes around them.

But I've also used quite a bit of DungeonDraft, for those occasions where I need a specific scene and can't find anything like it.
With some tedious work, even someone like me can produce semi-decent maps:
temple.jpg

But I'm trying to have a better workflow for simple, "Dyson"-esque maps. Lo-fi ones that make more room for imagination and are quicker to produce. And thus also mesh with things like the aforementioned watabou Dungeon creator (image below) or the new Foundry "DungeonDraw" module that's super-quick for improvised maps (works a bit like Dungeonscrawl).

watabou.jpg
 
I use software for world maps but Micron pens and a graph paper notepad for dungeons. I am open to the idea of using software if it looks good and doesn't export to a weird proprietary format.
 
Thank you all for the replies, this gives me ideas. I didn’t think so many people still drew maps by hand, I’m surprised.
 
These days I mostly use Fractal Mapper if I'm doing my own, but for many years I used CC1.
 
Tools I have used recently:

Pencil and paper - trying to make a map for Cold West Iron Marches. Never got very far...

Roll20 tools - various off the cuff maps

Dave's Mapper ( https://davesmapper.com/ ) - dungeon maps for my OD&D play by post

Microsoft Paint - to modify some of the Dave's Mapper maps after saving a JPG of the map

Other than that, not much. I tried to use Corel Draw at one point, I never actually used the map I was working on. Back in college I used Mac Draw to make some battle maps, sadly I never managed to extract those in a way that I could recover them... I played with CC (starting with an early version) but never had the patience to get very far. Ultimately for me, digital mapping tools have turned out to be way more work than hand drawing outside of very crude maps done in Roll20 (and even those are more work than drawing on a battle mat with erasable marker...). These days I mostly look for other sources of maps... That's why I love Dave's Mapper. It can be used to fairly quickly create a reasonably interesting dungeon level (and then I've done some mods to make connections between levels work). I also love Dyson Logos and have used at least two of his maps.
 
I used to use Microsoft Paint, then tried Photoshop (which really didn't work out) and now I use Campaign Cartographer. It does have a steep learning curve if you want to get into the advanced stuff, but you can knock out simple maps very easily with a bit of practice.
 
AsenRG said:
Clearly, you hadn't factored in the effort of actually learning to paint in a program...:grin:
Click to expand...
I think he's using random generators like lazy old me. Then I don't need to draw or learn a new program. I just mash a button until it looks ok enough.
 
Bunch said:
I think he's using random generators like lazy old me. Then I don't need to draw or learn a new program. I just mash a button until it looks ok enough.
Click to expand...
I would as well, if they produced something that looked ok enough on the first 20 tries:shade:.
 
For my world maps, I typically start off with pen and paper, and when I'm reasonably happy with what I've done, I'll scan it, pull it into Photoshop and diddle with it there until I'm happy. I have found a number of nice brushes on the Cartographers Guild forums that I could use, but I prefer to take and draw my own mountains, trees and other features and then I'll scan those as well and create custom brushes to use, that way my style (such as it is) stays the same as my hand-drawn work. At the moment I'm in the hand drawing and making decisions phase of prepping for a new fantasy campaign for when I get tired of the FrontierSpace campaign I just started this past weekend (I really want to do SciFi/SciFantasy, but I have a hard time maintaining interest, although we seem to be off to a good start so far :smile:)
This is my initial doodles for a region and possible starting area. Subject to many changes before I make up my mind :smile:
Pardon the crappy photos, I work on 12" x 12" cardstock and have shaky hands for holding the tablet to take a pic.
 

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Bunch said:
I think he's using random generators like lazy old me. Then I don't need to draw or learn a new program. I just mash a button until it looks ok enough.
Click to expand...
Not entirely, but its not a coincidence that Fractal Mapper is my program of choice.
 
Map tools used tonight...

iPhone to take a picture of a map too big for my scanner. GIMP to get rid of the sepia tone added to the map and to turn it to light grey so it can be used as a battle map. Turned an 11"x17" map of a village into a battle map for Roll20... With 1m hexes (for RQ) scaled to the right size. Resulting map is 255 hexes by 165 hexes... So to have a physical map of the village for 25mm miniatures would be 110"x170"... Now there's a cool benefit of VTT...
 
In terms of both large regional maps and dungeons I've used Hexographer, Dungeonographer and Campaign Cartographer to good result (at least to me!), but man does CC take some time to get a hang of. However, after I've made the basic map in either program I always import it into GOOD OLE' MICROSOFT PAINT to touch it up. I have Inkarnate and a few of the others one mentioned in this thread but I find them difficult to get into.

I do 99% of my maps in black and white, firstly because I like the gloomy aesthetic but also because it's a lot easier to hide your mistakes and you don't really need to worry about sheet effects or the intricacies of colour. Since the pandemic began my group has spent maybe 80/20% playing online/in person and while there are certainly benefits to online play I've found that it's forced me to make maps for things I wouldn't have before. I feel a visual element helps my group engage in a way that just seeing a few lines on a piece of graph paper doesn't.

Also, I find that map-making is my most beloved creative tool. Often I just doodle until something I like emerges and then from that more creative elements spring up. Here's one I made while bored at work, it's not great but it's already made me think of using it for several different games. Is it an OSR hexploration of a ruined city? A Sorcerer game where Demons are spirits of the sunken city's pre-human inhabitants?

SWAMPOGAMPO.JPG
 
Ravenswing said:
and the same thing could apply for dungeon maps. I still have the 45 year old maps from my 1970s megadungeon, and they're all in Pentel markers. Impossible to alter. But if I wanted to use it again, simple to scan and give it its badly, badly, badly needed update.
Click to expand...
I'd love to see these (and the key) - how would you feel about sharing them? There are almost no 70s megadungeons shared online - apart from the four earliest - so real evidence for what people did is very thin on the ground.
 
Supervisor194 said:
Illwinter's Floorplan Generator on Steam is pretty cool. It isn't free but it is pretty cheap.
Click to expand...
I've used this and dungeonographer and they are both easy for people with no skill in art or graphic design.
For larger stuff, I have worldographer which allows me to use stamps on hexes for terrain and then stamps for cities and crap. It also has fractal drawing if you want realistic coasts and rivers.

Lately though, I often just google search and then steal a map, maybe dropping extra objects on top of it.
 
Worldographer isn't bad. I even managed to get a pretty reasonable match to part of Britain for my Mythras Fantasy Briton campaign. You have to be willing to deal with hexes, of course.
 
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