Province-level map making

[Atezca25]

Hey all,

I'm making maps for my upcoming 5e campaign. I have a world map and a town battlemap (for our starting town/home base) but I need to make a provincial map that surrounds the town and conforms well to a certain number of hexes (we're using roll20). I don't really have a lot of time to start custom making all maps we use. Is there some easy tool/software that will let me pump those out?

Thanks

[jfrazierjr]

How did you make your other map? Are you willing to pay? What quality do you want? How much time do you want to invest both in the short term and/or long term?

for "starting", you can always just make a very simple map.
For example, when I first started a campaign, I did something like this because of the time involved(10 minutes):

Simple Map.png


Should be easy to know that the pointy things are mountains, the roundy things are hills, the blue thing is river/lake/sea, green things and forest, and black squares are towns/cities.

5 minutes in GIMP which is totally free. On the other hand, using the same free software or other paid software and TIME, you can product a stunning map. You can get a fairly decent looking map using Fractal Mapper or Campaign Cartographer(amoung many other software) super quick due to the built in images the provide for "stamping" down mountains, hills, etc by investing cost in real world dollars(but at the cost of learning the software and limited symbols in the base price, as well as not quite a stunning possible maps). Both FM and CC have a limited number of free symbols included in the base cost, but an expanded selection for additional money(CC has far more extra content for sale vs FM though, and much of it is better quality.)

If you need a map real quick, just use paint of something else to get them an idea of whats where and if you feel like making it BETTER later, you can work on that over time using whatever software you prefer and can pay for.

[Atezca25]

How did you make your other map? Are you willing to pay? What quality do you want? How much time do you want to invest both in the short term and/or long term?

The world map I made out of a screenshot of fractal world website (http://gmworldmap.com). For the town map, I used Inkarnate, however the sizes of each document that it provides were too small for a town map, so I used it to make pieces of a town map, here is the work in progress from roll20. I probably won't do it that way again, but it works for now.


Attachment 92833

I forsee myself needing to make a series of provincial maps as the party adventures around, especially after the first 6ish levels, and I don't have a lot of time to commit to making it beautiful from scratch. If there is also a way to do it on the cheap, I would prefer that. Our group will also potentially be rotating DMs, so I'd prefer to be able to pass all of the tools and documents I have onto my successor without a huge lack in visual quality. I know this is basically asking for me to have my cake and eat it too.