Suggestions on what to use

[Tiana]

You're welcome, Peejosity. I've heard of Wonderdraft before (and even have it linked from my website I think) but haven't personally tried it. Many people say good things about it though!

[OWM]

As a GM, Deios seems like an amazing tool and I'm pretty sure I will use it for my homebrew game, thought I would prefer a one time payment than a subscription, but this will have the same effect as Inkarnate, you will start seeing a bunch of map with the exact same recognizable style coming from a lot of different artist.

Other World Mapper's UI lets you change almost every property: textures, line widths, line and fill colors, etc. so you can give your map whatever look you are going after and create your own presets and themes from them. And if we missed anything you can let us know and we can add it to the UI.

- Alejandro

[Gamerprinter]

I use standard vector drawing software for my professional map designs - in my case, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 365 ($49). While I own both ProFantasy Campaign Cartographer and Hexographer, I don't use either - both were given to me by the developers when I ran a map printing shop, which I don't run anymore, but still have the software. Basically, I don't use a map making program, per se, but standard graphics software. Consider I have over 1000 published maps via dozens of publishers - I've done multi-player maps for video game strategy guides, like Call of Duty. I'm currently working on a 15 map commission for Legendary Games, and I've created over 400 maps for them in the last 3 years. That said, I create all my maps from scratch (though I sometimes raid previously created maps to steal map objects that would work for my current commission without having to remake those elements. Most of my maps I create in as little as 2 hours, some up to 8 hours, but only one map ever took me longer than that to create - of course I am very fast at creating maps and have been using the same software for almost 20 years. I'm certain you won't be as fast as I am, at least not at the start of using it.

I offer 25 Quick & Dirty Map Tutorials Guide, a 175 page book that teaches you my techniques using Photoshop, GIMP, Illustrator and Xara, though I only use Xara and perceive as the best tool of the four. It might help you get started on your mapping...

GP