What do you use to make maps for your games? I've been dicking around with wonderdraft but I've been having trouble making anything that looks good. It's fine if it costs money as long as it isn't prohibitively expensive.

Pencil.
Graph paper.

>>95928899
I was hoping it wouldn't come to that, but I guess it's hard to make a map in a fantasy world look natural if it's not drawn, huh?

>>95928889 (OP)
How does that river that separates into thre rivers work?

>>95929083
Wasn't sure how to represent it, but the Meznam rivers are supposed to be seasonal and only exist when snowmelt comes down the Alím and makes the lake flood in spring. I'm not a geography whiz, though, so I don't know if that's unrealistic.

>>95928889 (OP)
Wonderdraft.

>>95932333
Same

>>95928889 (OP)
If you mean world maps: I've used pen and paper and GIMP using pre-made assets online. Both are great, really depends on how specific you want to get.

If you're talking about battlemaps: I've used WC3 and SC2 map editors. The SC2 one is generally better because I can export a full map picture to a file type that GIMP can recognize and convert to and PNG, but I think I got WC3 to do something similar, and if not: I've been able to screenshot/piece it together with a bit of work. But, of course, your assets are REALLY limited.

>>95929083
>>95929133
Yeah no that does not happen but they could be some kind of estuaries meaning ocean water running deep inland usually meeting a river though. Think fjords for example. Melt from a snowy area could connet them for a shot while perhaps.
>t. Geography fag

>>95929133
Don't use geography to explain it. It wouldn't work. But since it's a fantasy world lean into the fantasy.
The rivers are like that because of an ancient irrigation project. Lake Selat is a reservoir with dams and canals which can be used to control the flow of water. This allows agriculture and civilization to flourish in the regions fed by those rivers, but whoever controls the dams controls their water supply.
Or it was made that way by the god for some reason. It could be something symbolic or connected to history. Or just "God made it that way."

I get the coastlines from a little python program I wrote. Then I'll either make the proper map in Hexographer, or I'll draw it on a battlemap I have.

>>95929083
nigga is that the only question you have?

>>95928889 (OP)
Wonderdraft or Hexographer depending on my needs. I don't think there is anything better other than being an actual artist.

>>95938776
Tiene mucho ruido con los arbolitos y montañitas... tal vez aclara dónde hay pinos raleando y dónde es terreno de colinas?
Mostrat montañas y montes -que meten ruido- y no nombrar a ninguno parece un pecado, quiero conocer la historia.

>>95938833
En general se me hace difícil encontrar un balance entre el ruido y que el mapa no parezca vacío. Muchas veces más es menos en este tipo de cosas pero la obsesión con rellenar cada espacio vacío siempre está ahí.
Respecto a los nombres, muy cierto. Más que nada es por el hecho de que onions extremadamente perezoso y poco imaginativo con ellos :^)

>>95928889 (OP)
I hear inkarnate is pretty good. Never used it myself but some of the maps I've seen posted around here that used it looked very nice. Pic unrelated.
>>95932333
>Netheril
>Chult
I will give you a pass because your map is actually pretty cool, but don't think I didn't notice that shit.
>>95932338
Fucking love this one too.

>>95928889 (OP)
I use Otherworld Mapper. Here I have the upcoming island deathtrap for a post-apocalyptic mecha game. Having emerged from the Cascadia Subduction Zone during the great quake, the island was colonized by the emerging people of a failing survival arcology, hence the weird naming scheme.

>>95928920
Yes. Nothing destroys the 'sense of being there' more than when the GM drops a modern computer generated image on the players to show where they are in the ancient or medievalish themed fantasy world. Have you seen what medieval maps looked like then? They didnt have CGI or satellite photography, just dudes using innacurate knowledge they had learned themselves or got from strangers of the area and trying to roughly record it on a canvas/animal skin with a pen/brush using homemade ink or paint. You could say "A wizard did it" but passing off any inconsistencies with 'magic' is just lazy.

Also, if you do an incomplet and innacurate map that looks like some bloke just recorded what he could remember of his travels twenty years ago, it offers the DM more flexiblity, to introduce extra stuff (as needed) into the world throughout a campaign. If you have everything tied down to within a yard you have fixed the world in stone and may find it difficult to introduce new locations, change it over time, or have it react to the players actions. Vagueness can be a good tool in a game.

Computer generated maps are good for scifi games though.

>>95941844
The way around this particular issue is for GM to have the "real" map for himself and give out an incomplete scribble of a treasure map to the players. This way the GM has a clear picture where the pieces lie and things are moving while still preserving the sense of 'geographical unawareness' in the players.

>>95928889 (OP)
I had a friend who used fucking ArcGIS.

>>95933529
That sort of thing is unusual but not unknown. A broad, flat area becomes a lake and there are them a few different outlets. Probably the region between the Meznam Rivers is a big estuary sort of guy. The Yangtze is an IRL example of a river that does weird shenanigans with lakes and distributaries.

>>95928889 (OP)
For general maps CSP/Gimp/handdrawn, for detailed hexcrawl maps I found Hexographer pretty pleasant to use.

>>95941844
this so fucking much
also the least significant an area is, the more precise you can have your map
a single village, town or a city? very precise
a county-sized region? somewhat precise
an empire-sized region? somewhat imprecise
a continent? distorted shapes and distances, lots of blank spots
world? literally just made up shit

and as a GM you can fill in the blanks or entirely redraw entire regions of your map as your story goes
a map is not a setting, so it's not the point you should be starting at

>>95928889 (OP)
Pen and paper into a digital map maker. I used Inkarnate for this and its pretty solid for what it does. You gotta work within some limitations, but its not difficult to work around it.

Rolled 8 + 1 (1d20 + 1)

I roll and draw them on the spot. If you want your map to look good then learn to draw or use any of the thousand map makers available on the internet.

>>95928889 (OP)
If you mean battlemaps, I build them in roll20 from props and textures. It's how I've done it for years, but really given roll20s very low storage space it's probably a bad idea, and I should start doing it differently.