Map

Have you ever created a custom map for a campaign? If so, how did you go about making it?

Bonus points for anyone willing to post said maps.

Other urls found in this thread:

www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/demo.html
volafile
youtube.com/watch?v=kT1TvSHiu5I
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I like hexographer. Generate a map until you find one you like, clean it up and add whatever you want to add.

Used GIMP and a lot of patience.

Phone posting so no maps, but I love using hexographer to get the biomes and land and then translating it to a gimp hand-made map, both are great tools!

Any suggestions on how to make a small city or something like a town in a space station?

I just draw it on graph paper like a real American

Yeah sorta. I've been working on mine for a bit however I've kinda stopped at the penny as the setting is just made of ideas and cool setpieces I wanted to do. Another problem is naming, literally no idea what to name any of these.

And finally, as you can see its a bit of an hot mess.

I made this map. I know it's not very decorated, but it's supposed to represent an entire continent.

Sorta on topic because I'm in need of making a map for my next game.
Do we have a topographical map of the earth's oceans? Or will I just need to make it up?

Unless your players are turbospergs and these are the kinda players you want to feed, don't bother. Just do whats cool.

The key guide is nice by the map is a little bit blobby and also a island continent,

I only ever gm'd one campaign so I didn't have much experience in making a good map
This map is actually traced real location that I have rotated, I don't know if anyone would be able to guess where its from though
Also I was pretty shit at naming stuff

Nice Greece

That's the Peloponnese.

What kind of space station? Orbital or on some floating solid?

You'll want to think more vertically than horizontal like a regular city/town. Give thought for the functions of the space-station, life support, fuel, computer systems that keep it steady in Space, communications etc. Stack all these functions in a big pile and weave your city in and around them. The tech level you're aiming for will matter a lot too. If you;re going Space Opera super-science then the Engine may be a single room with an unending Catalyst of super-fuel, whereas if you're running low-tech Sci-fi then the Engine may be the size of a city-block.

I have two universes/ campaigns. My fantasy setting was done free hand and avoiding looking like earth. One continent reminds me of Michigan+Britain, almost.

My sci-fi setting I kind of mortified the North American continent and changed the geography.

I tried employing climate/ moisture changes. I did that by using hadley cells. And my mountains, I tried to give them a cohesive feeling that matches other continents. Western facing coasts near mountains get Mediterranean/chaparral weather zones

I have the sloppy versions on my phone. I traced it on my editor with a stylus to make states and borders. I'll post what I can find

Ugh, phone stripped the data. Oh well

Floating solid I been planning to run a game in space but I'm just currently stuck on a "world" map they can look at.

Nope
Its actually a section of the Falkland islands

I just spent 9000 hours in paint, making a map of a river delta. It is really not the best. There are roughly 200 provinces set out, and if possible I could go for some critique.

I used Campaign Cartographer 3 and I do not recommend it. The end result looks pretty good to me, but the hassle in getting there was too much.

Ye

Huh I was just looking at site now how does the modern stuff look? If they have any.

Like an asteroid? I did a doodle!
Alternative to landing for fuel could be hoses that fuel the ship.

This can give you a cityscape but also leave an option for cavern type cities where gambling/whoring happens. Or a weapon hidden inside.

Last bit

>In the end, all continents are island continents

Except for flooded Mars, that stuff is fun.

Soild.

A mutiny could be fun here. Have someone steer this into a planet or have an outbreak of alien zombie thing

I just pic up a piece of paper and starting drawing random geographical spaces until nothing else fits comfortably anymore.

200 provinces in one single river delta? That would make the delta the size of the United States alone. I like the delta's look, but the river behind it looks a little scrawny to produce such a vast spread of water

I just glimpsed at it, so I'm not 100%. It looked alright tho.

The provinces can be of different sizes. Look up the HRE. Single cities were their own province.

Terraformes Venus could be pretty top tier.

Is there a good way to figure out hilly areas in relation to mountains as well as logical paths for rivers to take?

There's two types of hills: The ones made by the ice sheet and the ones who are essentially smaller mountains.

So that's your options. Make them around around mountains or in areas where it was very, very cold and had huge icebergs sliding around..

First draft of the world map for a campaign I'm working on. Criticism would be helpful. 1 hex = 12 miles.

that is a butt in two-tone (or layer) green gym shorts

Thing about hexmakershadooble is that its very hard to really make out what is.

Other than that, good first try. Nice mountains, interesting places outside the fuckhuge desert.

It's a bit odd there's a massive desert on the coastline and jungles on the inside of the continent. I guess winds are blowing southwest and southeast?

>succson

Not odd at all, it could simply be that the land isn't fertile and then hot weather did its work, that's pretty much the reason the sahara exists.

Yeah, the desert is intentionally fuckhuge. I was thinking about adding some light vegetation along the south coast, though.

The Sahara does extend to the coastline but only to an inland sea, on the north and a salt sea to the east. To the west, the winds blow west, so rain almost never falls on it.

It would make the most sense unless all the above apply. Water is wet and wet makes green, unless the winds are only blowing south at least some water would come off the ocean there.

Used Inkernate to make a small map for a small horror campaign, wanted something that was just stereotypical.

>Isle of twilight
>Darkheart
>Mortglem
Good stereotypes, edgy.

Bonus points, half my group is new to horror so to them these are not steriotypes and the other half is very experienced and love them.

Yeah i made a world for my 5e group and weve been using it to stage our settings for our sessions.
I made the map by starting with a layer of plates and formed islands/mountains/landmass from that. Tried to make it as realistic as possible taking into account enough factors for it to be as immersive as i can when it comes to biomes. Ill dump the maps i have when im home if anyone is curious.
There are two major continents, north and south, and in the middle is a third continent along the equator that is home to a massive deathworld jungle biome. Theres a big desert in the shadow of the mountain in the north and vast plains/marsh on the southern lands.

Anybody using Hex Kit? I just downloaded it and so far I like it much more than Hexographer.

>have to buy it

I use Hexographer cause it's free.

Once upon a time, but it was a bit limited with Inkarnate's limited toolset, and I'm not one for geographic logic.

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I use this: www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/demo.html

It can only do one continent at a time, so I shopped a few together.

The link is expired, which sucks cause I'm interested in using a hex map but I hate hexographer.

So say for this image, I have high mountains in brown, low mountains in tan, and hilly areas in peach, the black arrow is wind direction, red is the direction of the sea plate subducting - does the hilly area look like it'd make sense? How would the rivers look? I assume the corner of the valley there would have a lot more erosion and probably collect a ton of water, right?

This link should work:
volafile org/r/ehmxt084

Sweet, thanks dude.

Anyone that can help?

No prob. Here's the YouTube tutorial I used when I got started with it.

youtube.com/watch?v=kT1TvSHiu5I

I used Inkarnate. Pen and paper also works.

Neato

I suck at drawing and using normal programs, so I buyed Campaign Cartographer to do my map. It's still not super pretty, but it comes out good enough for my taste.

This one is for a campaign set in the Age of Decadence world (yes it's french).

is there anyway to make the map bigger with inkarnate?

This is fun

Why would you (or anyone else) recommend it over Hexographer?
Are there any downsides to it?

I made this and it took me 3 evening on gimp.
I don't know how I should feel about the result.
My player were rewarded with a settlement and since they wanted to micro-manage it I made a map.
It's the first time I do this.

It looks prettier. Hexographer uses crude computer graphics, while Hex Kit uses hand-painted assets. Hex Kit also has a wider variety of hexes. The cumulative effect is that Hex Kit maps have a atmospheric, fantasy vibe whereas Hexographer maps are sterile. I find Hex Kit to be more user-friendly as well. The only thing I think Hexographer does better is that it's more suited to a sci-fi or contemporary map.

Compare & with &

I take peninsulas and then cut them from the mainland and fancy up into a map.
Here's one I still need to work on, but I got the outline done.
It's a peninsula in Tasmania.

I like to work top-to-bottom mostly: Quickly design an area around where I'm interested in playing, then work out the details in the immediate area, then go even further down in scale and detail those ... and so on, some four or five "steps" in.

Initial sketches are done with pencil on paper, then scanned in, but the actual work in putting it all together is done in QGIS.

I do the same thing, make the map with Hexographer, basically complete but with no hex lines.

Then I export it twice, once with just the labels and once with just the background colours.

Then I import both into gimp as layers and go mad with the smudge tool and shit until it doesn't look too much like hexes any more. Tends to look a bit like brush strokes if I do it right.

Next time, I'm probably going to give Dungeon Painter Studio a go, its world map stuff looks kind of nice.

This

>not using any sheet effects
>making the map look like absolute garbage
>not scaling your text or symbols with Ctrl key
>text literally touching corner of town
>blaming the program
The field of bones with the obelisks flanking the canyon, looks pretty cool at least.

Where did you get your paper background?
Also are those custom brushes and font?

Do you have more images of the surrounding areas? Maybe a fault line?

I want to say the mountain could make sense but depending on the fault line, you might need mountain islands. The gradient seems like it's right for the wind but the wind and water would erode valleys though the mountains. These valleys are where water would run down to and collect. The streams merge at hill areas for a larger river or lake and flood into it. From there, it takes the path of least resistance to the ocean unless it's cradled by a recessed ground level.

I suggest looking up pictures of flood basins and maps of flood basins. This picture is Los Angeles, CA. My geography prof used this as an example. Before urbanization it had flood plains because it's surrounded by mountains and it pooled on the plains before streaming to the ocean. On the left the ground is higher and so Santa Monica gets a little stream as most water travels south.

Here's my free hand one with my phone editing. I made the mountains and filled them in color and added water. I tried keeping a pattern to the mountain ranges across continents and including continental drift.

Yeah, there are going to be a few islands off the coast following the path of that southern mountain chain. If this thread is still alive by the time I get home from work I'll get some more of the surrounding area there. The closest place I can think of that matches on Earth would be the Po Valley in Italy, just with the Apiennes and Alps switched. I wanted the smaller mountain range to be more along the lines of the Appalachians, old and more easily traversed.

I figured that area would be enough for a decent campaign since each square is 10 miles.

The fact that a Frontier is its own island is slightly strange to me, but I guess it makes sense on some level.

I spilled weebshit all over some Dark Souls for a mini-campaign, and it quickly became one of the more memorable things I ran for my players.

This was a quick cobble-together done in Inkarnate. I wish there was a better option for the artistically retarded such as myself.

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Did somebody say maps?

am workin on something

I like this. How did you get the texture and what tool/ program did you use?

Nice as well

Islands would be good to work with so it doesn't feel so cramped and they can feel like they traveled far. The mountains could serve as a buffer with more danger of venturing out. If you need to expand further, mines and hiking will slow them down as you "load" the rest of the map

Yeah I'm mapping out a Silver Marches campaign area using it. I'm mostly just playing with it but it's WAY more intuitive then Hexographer.

Does anyone have anything good for making dungeon maps? I've been trying this Dungeon Painters thing but it's kinda clunky.

I'd be interested in being able to generate dungeons and such to clean up later, or something along those lines. Bonus points if it can make stuff for use as battlemaps, though I don't mind if it's just something rough to start off with.

Have some random battlemaps I've got in my collection.

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Is it swampy? I like the shape but I would give the land a slight widening

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Google maps/old maps + a hex overlay in GIMP. It's free and really easy with the built in opacity slider.

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photoshop and custom brushes

It's done in photoshop. First I created a satellite style map (with a help of Saderan tutorial), then overlayed it with a paper texture.

yep, supposed to mirror the swampy terrain of ancient germany. the land widens quite a bit further south, i just havent gotten to finishing it

Bon travail!

Inkarnate

looks like head profile of bear

Ooh, are you French? Could I trouble you to help me translate a couple of place names properly? "The Sacred Glade" and "The Unbreakable Barrier". Would be much appreciated.

That'd be a good nickname for the area

Cool! It's hard to get that texture right. It reminds me northern Europa without the ice but if I recall, Denmark and north Germany have this too

Drats! Time to pirate and watch YouTube videos lol

Well, to be honest it looks as good as it does is in a big part thanks to using a graphic tablet. I couldn't replicate it just with a mouse.