Inkarnate

[Arkis [UWS]]

Hi

anyone who uses Inkarnate (www.inkarnate.com) for making maps?

I did one for a friend of mine and it was quite interesting and funny.

udo

[Sithra]

I've been using Inkarnate for a few months now. I started DMing a pathfinder game online. Normally I've always done very minimalistic maps and depended on a theater of the mind for battle maps, but one of my friends talked her husband into joining that has aphantasia. Rather than put off by this, I took it as a challenge to step up my game. So I found a few generic battle maps for the first few adventures - things like taverns and crossroads for encounters are easy. But I was increasingly frustrated having to shoehorn the encounter design into whatever maps I found online.

So I initially tried the free version of Inkarnate and made some basic road side encounter maps. It felt very liberating compared to trying to force a plot around other people's content, so I spend the $5 for a month of service. I ended up doing more regional maps for creating settings, and that's an area where I feel Inkarnate really shines. Specifically, their stamps seems to be the main feature as it creates wonderful shortcuts for people like me that can't draw to save their life, and the isomorphic stamps in general are much better looking than their top-down view ones.

In the 4ish months I've been using it, they've had a number of significant updates that have dramatically improved things. Combined with becoming more familiar with the program, it's made it pretty quick for me to be able to pump out maps quickly whenever I need for my weekly adventure prep. I can't really give you a good comparison between inkarnate and other software options, but I will say the more I use inkarnate the more I'm impressed with it.