Very nice website

[Talon44]

I'm part of a team making a mod/extended campaign for a computer game, and would like to have a nice rendered overland map to go along with the story. I did a quick one up in Inkscape, a program I'm fairly proficient at, and could probably make it much nicer if I spent a lot of time at it, but I got to thinking that there have got to be some programs available dedicated specifically to fantasy mapmaking, if only to provide pre-made symbols and structures (mountains, forests, castles, blah blah). Google search found Campaign Cartographer, and while the images there looked quite stunning, the price tag was pretty steep for a program that would be used for only a fairly small portion of my project, which has a budget of about, oh, zero dollars. So I went to Amazon to read some reviews of the program and they were frankly pretty poor, criticizing especially the awful user interface. Inkscape took me long enough to master; God knows I don't need to spend another hundred weeks learning a whole new program. But one of the user reviews there mentioned this place as a nice site to learn more about some of the available map making options, and so here I am.

I guess what I'm looking for ideally is a place where I can download some premade vector art (again: mountains, forests, castles, etc.) to save me the trouble of having to make them myself. (Not only a matter of time - my oldish computer starts to moan when I have too many objects in a single Inkscape project, specially when there are lots of shadings and such).

Just out of curiosity, do people here go for commissions? And by commissions, I am referring to the unpaid, "for the fun of it" variety.

Well anyway, nice to meet you all and it's a great site. Love looking at all the cool maps, if nothing else.