Hello from sunny England...

[El_Phantasmo]

... and good afternoon! Why did I state "sunny" in the thread title? Because it's a very rare occurrence!

I'm new to cartography and the art of map making, though I've been doodling maps and the like for a long time for my RPG games (Mostly Exalted, Fading Suns, SLA Industries and the like - typically not the class-based stable of D&D games).

I'd recently been looking through some old gaming stuff on a PC I inherited from a friend (Their own games and write-ups etc) and, luckily, there was an old version of Campaign Cartographer on there. After a bit of a play and the quite aged hard-disk giving up the ghost I started to look at purchasing my own copy and will shortly be getting round to that when the joy of payday arrives again. Until then I'm tinkering with my partners Photoshop and the Jezelf tutorials I found on here (Which are excellent - I was most impressed when I actually created something on Photoshop last night that wasn't a stickman!).

I'll mostly be doing game maps though I'm very tempted to invest in ProFantasy's CC3, CC3+, Cosmographer 3 Fractal Terrains ... as well as the City Designer 3 and the symbol packs. However as the father of a 2 year old who appear to think he can fly my disposable income is limited so it'll be bit by slow bit that I acquire it all.

My biggest aim/goal is a fully realised city of Mort from SLA Industries. It's a vast, vast city, across many, many layers - From the SLA page on Wikipedia;

"SLA Industries itself is a fictional corporation run by a mysterious and seemingly immortal creature called "Mr. Slayer", whose upper management team includes two other creatures like himself, "Intruder" and "Senti". The corporation is headquartered in "Mort City", a densely populated city-sprawl larger than Eurasia and surrounded by the urban ruins of the "Cannibal Sectors". It is all located on a vast planet (also called "Mort") that had been stripped of its natural resources to the point that the ecology had been utterly destroyed."

So, far beyond my current skills, but through my own game maps and the excellent advice here I hope to tackle it one day!

[Chick]

Hello, El_Phantasmo, welcome to the Guild!

Before you invest in any given software package(s), I recommend you read the thread in the Software section and the Getting Started with Mapping threads in the Tutorials and here. There are many different software packages available, some even free, and you might want to do some checking before you decide which one is right for you

[El_Phantasmo]

That's good advice. I'll take a look now, lots of information to digest across the forums which is always good, can't hurt to be informed.

I've looked at a couple already through Googling "Cartography software" and such - CC was the one that stood out initially. Thankfully I have a wonderful partner who's very good with Photoshop too!