Any recommendation on a map tool for mapping my fantasy world and including it in my book? I know some just hand draw it in, which I could do but my drawing stinks. Any Suggestions?
Hmmm. . . Gimp 2.0 is free photo-editing software, kind of like photoshop. It can be tricky to use, and it's not made for creating maps, but it gets the job done if you put some time into figuring it out. Alternatively, if you want it done faster and don't care as much about the shape of landforms, you can go to a website offering "free fractal world generators", use the randomizer there to create a basic map, and edit with whatever programs you want, or simply use it as-is.
Go to the Cartographer's Guild (a forum - google it). They have a hell of a lot of really great tutorials, and there are threads there that tell you about all the different types of software, what they're good for, and whether they're free or not. I also suggest using The GIMP. It has pretty much everything Adobe Photoshop has, except it's open-source.
Hi, Actually I was wondering much the same thing for acouple of my books, and while I didn't impliment it as an idea for fear of copyright infringement, I still think you could use one of the world editors from say Civ II etc. Simply make your map and screen dump it. Then overlay it with text and lines etc through something like powerpoint text boxes. As I say it should work well and look really cool. It's onlythe fear of copyright infringement that held me back. Cheers, Greg.
I did mine with paper and pencil. I started with the basic shape, but let the pencil wander a bit to be more natural. The mountains are irregular lines made up of inverted V's and the rivers are, of course, just squiggly lines. Forested areas were done with a pencil held on its side and rubbed after to grade the effect. I then scanned that into the computer and used Paint to insert pictures for sailing ships and sea creatures on the seas, and then Ulead for the words. Here's mine. http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z156/Thome216/Thome-B/Anshaeran-complete.jpg
Awesome map Thom. I draw mine out too (though they I don't see them out to the end like you did) and it works really well. For geographic logic I just use real North-South logic. Top being cold, mountains and pine forest. As you descend, there can still be mountains but generally temprate climate with 4 equal seasons. The farther south I go, the more it turns lush jungles and eventually sandy and dessert. Obviously you dont have to have all those, but depending at what point the continent finds itself on your world, they have have all or some of those features, but in that order. I like the idea of the Civilization game map - if you just use it as inspiration and turn it into a pencil copy I dont think you can be accused of copyright - it's randomly generated, therefore infinite, and as a result, anything could fall under "possible civ generated maps" so you don't have to worry. Foxe
Thank you. :redface: I usually print out onto 'aged' paper, like you can find in Staples. Crumple it up, rip it a little and even burn the edges slightly, and you have an 'old' map. To find the shapes you want, you could also use a real world atlas. Find even just a partial section of a real map and copy it's outline, filling it up with your own world.
