What do you think about Campaign Cartographer? Is it good?

What's a good way to go about creating encounter maps and dungeon maps? I can handle world maps and shit fine but I have no idea how I should go about drawing up the gritty.

Any chance you could share what you have right now? Would be easier to have input.

I ain't got shit for dungeon maps. I normally DM locally so I've made campaign maps before in Photoshop to share with my group and just did encounters by drawing on a laminated grid. I might have a chance to DM for a group online soon though, and I have no idea how to go about encounter maps here.

You have roll20 account?

For dungeon maps on a grid, you can get away with Gimp or photoshop, and 30 minutes of fooling around with layers.

Set up two layers, one layer for the floor, and a layer on top of that for the walls. Choose a floor texture, and fill the appropriate layer. Same for walls. Then erase the part of the wall texture that you want to be passable terrain.

You can then go in and add details if you want, but that's just ribbons.

donjon.bin.sh/4e/dungeon/index.cgi
Your home for random and not-so-random dungeons. Save an image and just either use a texture on it to make it look good or fuck about with it in Photoshop.

>Not hand crafting your campaign maps on real vellum
Pleb

I think I might actually do this after some though. It might not look as nice, and might have inconsistencies. But whenever the players complain about map inaccuracies and distances not lining up with the map, I can tell them the cartographer was mapping places he never heard of.

Fug. Sort of want to do a bunch of these as city-maps with plot hooks. And maybe pages from a bestiary.

It's good for cheesy maps that don't need to have practical use.
It's horrible when the map has to be functional

You can just use Dwarf Fortress, then Isoworld.
As the players move to different area's, load up different parts.

They'll never know.

Unrelated, does anyone have any good roll20 top down yuan-ti tokens? Portraits in a circle aren't really my thing and if they were I can make them.

...

Looks like this will work fuckin' gloriously.
>kickstarter.com/projects/battlegrounds/mapforge-battlemap-creation-software-for-tabletop

This could pass.

I use Tiled.
mapeditor.org/
You just need tiles and tokens to do some nice work in it.

I've used dwarf fortress world's and made my own maps of them before, but had never heard of isoworld. Does it still work with the newest dwarf fortress?

Thanks, these are good starting places.

Maybe?

>Tiled.
Mah nigga.

It probably should. Just export Biome, not site map, Elevation, elevation+water, and Structure map.
If you use a version with DFhack, you can link to it actively.

Gives you something like this, except with roads and the like.

If you want quick and easy, Hexographer is really the only safe bet. Campaign Cartographer is decent, but it's a little... Expensive for what it does.

On that note, does anyone have a good source for a whole bunch of roll20 tiles? The built in options are not the best

Try PDF share thread.

Its decent though its difficult to learn to use.

If you just want to slap together a map quick and easy for your players I suggest using inkarnate (inkarnate.com).

If you want to take your time and make something nice practice using PS and get good with it.

Autorealm is super quick and easy for making (admittedly ugly) maps. It's also free.

Donjon.bin.sh has a world map generator.

This set has several yuan-ti tokens.

marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/1114/darkwoulfes-token-pack-vol24-beast-of-the-bogs

AutoREALM is a great first step before moving your map into Photoshop/GIMP. I use it to draw terrain.

It's a shame it's so buggy and unstable.

Hexographer's free version annoys the shit out of me. I just want to do one bastard map, I don't want to pay for a full license. If I had a way to try it fully like once, I might ACTUALLY buy this piece of shit.

In fact, anyone got a serial or cracked pro version so I can try it out?

>This program is sold as "easy"
As someone who has used both Photoshop and CC3, it's easier to get good results with PS.

Just go to the Cartographers' Guild and follow a tutorial.

100% better results than following any CC3 tutorial you might find.

I speak from experience.

CC3 is unintuitive as hell, and some things just don't seem to ever work right.

I want to learn it. I want to learn it so bad. But it just doesn't work right, ever.

Pic related: Left is CC3, right is from an ancient version of Photoshop, following a tutorial. PS took like a quarter of the time to make. The CC3 map is a zoom-in of a portion of the PS map.

Wow, how can CC look THIS bad? Did you spend only like5 minutes? I could do better with context free...

>Did you spend only like5 minutes?

No. I followed the video tutorial on their website, though with my map instead of theirs.

As I said, I probably spent more time on CC3 than I did on the Photoshop map, if you ignore all the prep work (I did a lot of work mapping out wind patterns and climate zones and fault lines/plates before making the map so I could get the biomes and mountains and islands right).

Since the CC3 map is a zoom-in, the prep-work probably counts for both anyway.

I just backed it after seeing your link, it's what I've been looking for for awhile now. Thanks for sharing.

Anybody know of any good sci-fi focused mapping softwares?

If anyone has a link to Cosmographer thatd also be spiffing

It's good for fancy maps, but absolutely horrible when you want to grind them or do something similar.

bump for same question

>Hexographer's free version annoys the shit out of me. I just want to do one bastard map, I don't want to pay for a full license. If I had a way to try it fully like once, I might ACTUALLY buy this piece of shit.
What, you like, NEED to resize the map? Desperately?

I use free Hexographer and I can honestly say I've never come up against a limitation of it. If it didn't let you save maps or some shit, I'd understand you, but, what the fuck?

>I use free Hexographer and I can honestly say I've never come up against a limitation of it. If it didn't let you save maps or some shit, I'd understand you, but, what the fuck?
This fucking reply happens every time someone asks for Hexographer on Veeky Forums since 2009. Just keep your complaints to yourself and post it if you have it.