Howdy all, and good evening!

[abethegm]

Howdy from Texas y'all! Now that I've got that out of the way let me introduce myself.

If you couldn't figure it out from my ID, my name is Abe. I have been in the gaming hobby for a bit over three decades and have loved almost every minute of it! I started off with Dungeons & Dragons for role-playing and BattleTech for miniatures gaming. Along the way I've probably picked up and played several dozen different games if not more. I have always loved the idea of developing my own characters, plot twists and worlds in every game I've been involved in.

One of my weaknesses in that regard has been the fleshing out of the world and developing all the details that will really bring it to life for my players. I've tinkered around with a couple of programs that were purpose built for specific games like Heavy Metal Pro for BattleTech. Inside that realm they do really well. However, I am currently searching for the minimum number of programs, and thus expense, that I will need to fully develop world maps, smaller village & city maps all the way down to individual rooms and buildings. Advice on this is definitely welcome, and I'll be perusing the current threads as well.

In addition, I am looking for all the little details that a fantasy world needs to thrive and survive. Things like, "What does a village have to have in it in order for it to flourish and survive? How close did medieval houses get in villages? How big were they?" I know a lot of these are probably better left to the historical buffs, but I figured I'd let y'all know some of the bare minimums of things I'm going to be looking for while I'm here.

I hope to 'meet' a bunch of y'all and learn a lot from you as well.

Best wishes to everyone,

Abe...the GM

[ChickPea]

Hi Abe, welcome to the Guild.

There are a few areas of the forums that will help you locate the info you're looking for. Have a browse through the Reference Section (you need to click down near the bottom to make it show more than the last 30 days). That might help with your worldbuilding questions. For actual mapping advice, have a look in the Tutorials/How To area and see if anything catches your eye. There are threads dotted all over the forums though, so Search is your friend.

As for apps, we published a blog post a few months back that was a round up of graphics software, so have a read. Arguably, for most people, it's either Gimp & Inkscape (free software to develop your maps from scratch), Campaign Cartographer series (not free, uses symbol libraries) and Photoshop/Illustrator (generally more fully-featured than Gimp/Inkscape, but at a premium. Used to develop maps from scratch). If you're only starting out and don't want to spend too much without knowing what you're getting into, give Gimp and Inkscape a try. There are loads of tutorials for Gimp especially that'll help you get going.

If you have other questions, just ask, and good luck with your mapping!

[abethegm]

Thanks for the welcome ChickPea! I'll definitely wander down those roads and see what I can discover. I appreciate the leads.