Does anyone know of a good program to use in creating maps for a homebrewed world?
Dunjinni looks good, and you can find TONS of clip art on their forums.
I use Powerpoint however. It works pretty well, and I already know how to use it. Plus it has animations that let me create fog of war and whatnot.,
I am a fan of just using something like Photoshop or GiMP for a more hand-drawn or painted look, or Illustrator for something more like the old hex-grid and symbol-based maps.
If not at all predisposed towards art, you may find it worthwile to check into Campaign Cartographer - there are good tutorials for how to get great results from it, and it doesn't actually require you to draw anything, just click where you want the computer-aided drawing to be.
+1 for Campaign Cartographer. It gets a bad rap because there's a fairly steep learning curve and it's definitely pricey. But if you put in the time to become proficient with it, someone without any drawing skills can produce some excellent looking maps. But, yeah, if you're short money and/or time, it's probably not the way to go.
Starcraft/warcraft map editor, they have various theme, doodad, fog of war, path etc... you can even bring the character in it and see each individual line of sight etc... and it's very easy to learn the basic, and as you master it you can start doing very cool thing.
- Draw in pencil on blank paper, mark the location of all the shapes and textures that you need. Borders, woods, doors etc.
- Take a picture of the drawing with your phone or scan it in.
- Email it to yourself.
- Create a big image file with GIMP (300dpi) and paste your image into the GIMP layers.
- Stretch and smoosh your pencil undersdrawing to fit the way you want it.
- Draw and paint stuff over your pencils with a new layer.
- Add text with the text tool
The hard part is learning GIMP, but it is free an well worth it. Professional stuff can be done with GIMP. Like so:
Dungeonographer/Cityographer/Hexographer is a java-based program that creates some "old-school" style maps of everything from a standard dungeon to a full on continent. I lack any semblance of artistic creativity but this made it relatively painless to handle all of my needs for my campaign. I found it to be a really easy program to jump in and use, but the more advanced tools can take some practice getting used to.