Megadungeon Mapping

[bryant]

If I’m going to draw maps, I want them to be old school maps. Black lines, graph paper, no shadows, no textures. You can pretend this is because I am unartistic if you like; you will be correct in large part. Still.

Just about nothing does good old style maps. Dundjinni is really oriented towards neat battlemaps. RPG Map Maker is unpolished and is a paint program rather than a draw program. Map Tools is nice but is also more of a paint program, I think.

So OmniGraffle. You can set up a nice old school graph grid and you can include that grid when printing or exporting images. Snap to grid is easy. If you do everything as lines, it’s not too hard to add a hole in a wall. I figured out how to do round rooms. Caverns and river lines may be hard, but I’ll cross that obstacle when I come to it.

… OK, the thumbnail is kind of unimpressive. There’s a full-sized map behind it. The sans serif map key typeface may be a bit ornate for the feel, but otherwise I’m quite pleased.

Oh, and I’ll be rekeying for less encounters. I know my density is too high for the areas in the south.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

for that matter, what about Visio? At least with that you could enter a true scale and then put in items at their true size, print detail portions at 5' per quad or 10', even overlay some hexes...

[bryant]

I'm on a Mac! OmniGraffle Pro actually gives me all that if I want it, though.

[rob-donoghue.livejournal.com]

And it does it without making me want to harm myself. :)

I hope you're putting the elements for this into a stencil, just to speed future fun.

[bryant]

Oh, absolutely. I was surprised and pleased at how easy it is to make stencils.

[merlinofchaos]

I use Fractal Mapper and I bet it could do this kind of stuff without too much trouble. It does do dungeon mapping, though of course there is definitely some bent toward doing colors and the like, I'm pretty sure it's not too difficult.

At its heart it's basically a vector drawing program, and it will excel at doing your caverns with a fractal poly line.

[bryant]

Fractal Mapper is exactly what I'd use if I were on a PC. It's really strong, and I love the fractal poly lines. (I've messed around with it a little years earlier.)

[bluegargantua]

You've probably already seen this but here's a system for creating a sort of mega-dungeon in broad strokes (including it's history and major monster groupings) which you can then fill in with more detail as you go along.

later
Tom

[head58.livejournal.com]

I haven't cracked it out yet but I'd probably just use Excel to make squares, set a faint border format to the entire page, and use transparent Autoshapes for rooms/hallways/etc. And save copies of everything as templates on a separate sheet for easy copypasta.

That, or get a pack of graph paper and some #2 pencils.

[bryant]

Pen and paper is the past!

http://www.penpaperpixel.org/tutorials/tabletopprojection/ is the future.

[head58.livejournal.com]

So you'll have that installed for next week's D&D game, right?