Because they don't exist. Learn Photoshop. It's fun, will add to your skillset, and provide you with beautiful maps after a small time investment.

Campaign Cartographer.

It's the only one out there, and it's not that great.

Fractal Terrains.

>>9684515

Seconding this. Attached is a map I made using the FT free demo (names adding using the high tech that is MS Paint).

>>9684589
That's pretty good. All I could manage was great big clumps of shit.

Use the tutorials you find here to help you create maps in GIMP and Photoshop without too much effort.

http://forum.cartographersguild.com/index.php

Pic related, it's my shitty map.

>>9684613

I played around a LOT with the starting settings until I got something half-decent, and then added some extra features (mainly the two mountain ranges on the main continent) manually.

That way it's almost tectonically plausible, as well as giving the culture a good reason why engineering in the broadest sense (mining, digging, road- and bridge-building) is seen as an honourable profession.

>>9684623

It's a bit busy, and I'm not sure about all the symbols (I'm thinking a variety of cultures, plus the eagles are Imperial outposts?).

On the other hand, it looks cartographically sound (no rivers flowing uphill, and yes, I'm talking to you, Professor Tolkien), and I like that each culture has its own distinctive sounding names. I can see Germanic, Latinate, possibly slightly Indic, Elvish, Slavic and Norse in there.

use Civ IV map editor, screenshot maps, stitch together or something of the sort. I've done it before and it works pretty well.

The weird thing about Fractal Terrains is... whenever I try to create a whole new world of my own, after I've done, I use the "rougher" tool to make it not a pile of shit... and all it does is to reveal some random map from under my own.

It's spooky. And annoying.

>>9684674

Cool, any examples of your work?

>>9684623

Looks like a unicorn's head.

>>9684623
Did you do that in GIMP or PS? I have a bitch of a time doing dashed lines in PS. Just easier to import linework into Illustrator.

>>9684735
It's like... the tool name is "rougher" but it should be "delete fucking everything and make it like it used to be." If I make everything 100% sea, create my map, then use the "rougher" tool, all it does is to sink my whole goddamn world into the ocean.

>>9684785

You know you can just edit the sea level afterwards, right? "Rougher" more or less randomises your elevations, so there's a chance of sinking, but if you do, just dial the water down by a few tens of meters, and it's all still there.

AutoREALm is free

It's not exactly next gen but has some pretty cool functionality

>>9684670
I tried to make it as comprehensive as possible and I left the legend out because it's just for my group. The aquilas are provincial capitals of the human-controlled empire, and the pillars are of course their towns. Dwarves are hammer/axe/sickle (communistic archaeology buffs), Eladrin are towers (remnants of an ancient magocratic empire that was shattered by civil war), Goliaths/Shifters are masks (Viking/Inuit fusion, hunting culture and ancestor worship), Drow are spiders (Chinese/Indian fusion with caste system and highly specific social rules), Tieflings are pentagrams (Germanic/Old English fiefdoms). Entire continent and all cities are under Imperial rule, and of course roads are very important. Dragonborn live on another continent, have an Islamic empire going, see map.

I had planned on going back and making it more detailed or even doing zoomed-in ones for each province, but it was taking too damn long to load up as it was and I can't afford a new machine or a processor upgrade.

>>9684743
unfortunately I mainly did that sort of stuff on my laptop, which was stolen last year. I could look out for some of my old maps, but I can't seem to find any of them.

>>9684623
>GIMP
>Photoshop
Any easy-to-read-but-quick tutorials on how to make maps in Paint.NET?

the maps in civ IV are quite good though, realistic, and I can use them to figure out where cities and villages would be. Using a map from in the middle of a game, usually no later than the medieval era works perfectly for a fantasy RPG map or the like.

HexMapper
The Gimp/Inkscape
AutoRealms
Campaign Cartographer
Pen and Paper

Oh, and someone told me once that the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 editor makes for great maps but i'm not so sure about that.

>>9684798
Doesn't work. It doesn't randomize anything: when I press it, everything goes down, and no amount of raising ground is going to help.

For overland stuff to play on Hexmapper
For overland stuff to that looks nice any of those mentioned in this thread already. (CC3, Fractal Mapper, Gimp etc etc)
For local area maps there's Dundjinni.

Whatever you'd choose i'd recommend stopping by at the Cartographer's Guild site.

>>9684911
What is a good software if you just want to make maps?

>>9685129
Photoshop/GIMP + Experience with image manipulation

Here's a map tutorial I picked up on /tg/ a while back. I've not tried it but I intend to shortly:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7Z6T50IV

http://forum.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?4721-Dungeon-tiles-a-small-project

this. contains pre awesomed images that you n piece together in photoshoop. only good for interiors, but awesome nonetheless.

>>9685290

Virus, don't download.

>>9685423

Poster is a faggot who replies that to every link on /tg/, ignore him.

>>9685467
How do we know he isn't telling the truth?
This is 4chan after all and /g/ tells me never to trust a link given out on this web server.

>>9684276
Pen and Paper.

Fuck maps!

I want 3D landscapes and camera flights, weather, light, and lenses. I want CAD castles Google Earth towns. I want forests, streama, and mountain ranges. And I want sound.

Damnit I want my imagination to appear on my screen so that my players can see where they are.

>>9685512
Well it sure would make things easier.

>>9684670
>no rivers flowing uphill

How can you tell on a map? If you see a river that goes from a place of one elevation to a lower one then how can you possibly tell that it's flowing uphill unless the creator specifically states that it does?

>>9685626

If it goes from a mountain, across a valley, and to another mountain it must be flowing up at least one of the mountains.

>>9685655
Or two rivers.

>>9684999
>>9684800
>>9684623

there are a bunch of little things in these maps that make the cartographer in me twitch.

on the other hand, it is the autistic level of detail in these sorts of things that made me dislike cartography in the first place.

for 'alternate' map generators:

the Heroes of might and magic 3 random map generator. make one for a skirmish game, save, open in map editor, trace.

pros:
- paths and roads, 'ressource stations' if you wanna have a game with that kind of stuff...

Cons:
- 'ressource stations'... if you dont want that kinda stuff, plus random shit monsters and such

still, it makes for some nice maps. you can basically transcribe a route for D&D describtions. works well for that if you're a little creative

"as you travel from the small hamlet, you come by the local mill and in the distance you can see tiny black dots in the sky around the [random name] cliffs, they must have a roost up there"


alternatly, for larger world map generation, fireup Dorf Fortress and export a picture of the map. easy peacy.

>>9685626

Don't also forget that rivers don't flow from one ocean to another.

Things you need to know for a local map:

- gravity

Things you need to know for a global map:

- tectonics is nice
- climate patterns; deserts on the west coast, the placement of winds and ocean currents, etc. fiddly and annoying and impossible to get right, but hey.
- cartographic projection. if the two first points are for making a nice world, this is so that you have a nice map, plus a world that actually fits on a globe right.

Things no one here is going to tell you you need, but would be really, really nice to have because fuck, there is not enough of it:

- linguistics, and some conlanging skills. For a map, all you need to do is make up naming languages (basically, just names and words and maybe some basic morphology and a smattering of noun-phrase syntax)
- at the very least, some knowledge of linguistic phonetics.
A basic tutorial:
http://www.zompist.com/kit.html
Also came out recently in a long book form:
http://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html
Around ten bucks on Amazon. I bought it (cuz, hey, what are friends for, if not buying your book?), and it's a fairly standard Linguistics 101 book with conlanging bits. If you can't get your hands on it, just get some basic linguistics book, anything with "Introduction to linguistics" in the title. Most will explain phonetics, IPA, and basic linguistic typology, at least enough to give you some taste of the linguistic diversity out there.

Pic is a map I made.

What is a good program if you just want to make maps?

>>9685987
This is awesome.

>>9684860
Why are all of these European?
Where are the Asian stuff?

Can you make a map in Paint.NET?

>>9686120
lol

because any map made by asian software would _not_ create realistic worlds.

have you even _played_ a JRPG?

>>9686320
What the fuck is a JRPG?

>>9686325

Japanese Rape/Pet Game. You raise a unique magical monster, and use it to intimidate women into sex. Very popular.

>>9686307
Yes it can.

>>9686345
ahahahaha
no

JRPG, Japanese Role Playing Game.

>>9686320
Depends on how mythical you want your realistic world to be.

>>9686375
Not much "role playing" in there, though. You can't design characters yourself instead of given a bunch of teenagers with spiky hair, can barely tell your characters what to do, their equipment is extremely limited, the plot is a singular line where you can never even decide what the guys want to say, and so forth.

>>9686440
Because every JRPG is required to follow this guideline by law or suffer the penalty of death?

>>9686375

No, that's not what JRPG means at all. >>9686345 has the right definition.

>>9685987

Map stolen.

Also, since you seem to know a little about conlang, how would I go about making a language that sounds/looks like Polish/Hungarian pronounced the English way?

>>9686500
No, they just need to have some ROLE-PLAYING in there. You know, picking a role for yourself and playing it? By JRPG definition, EVERY game ever is a role-playing game, yet they're not all called RPGs.

>>9684623
You did _that_ in Gimp/PS?

Wow...

Thread saved on hard drive.

The only tip I have worked out is to use Google Maps for the names. Jerusalem (I think anywhere in Israel) is good for Middle Eastern names, most countries use the Arab script.

My maps look like shit, thanks tg.

>>9686528

> Map stolen.

No it's not. I understand your concern, though, and have left you a message in the place where that map was not stolen from. Not going to link to it though, because I happen to like my anal virginity.

Anyhow, a Polish/Hungarian conlang with an English accent? Well, first off, Polish and Hungarian don't really have very similar phonologies (in a European sense). Hungarian has long vowels and long consonants, Polish doesn't iirc... Polish is Indo-European, Hungarian is Uralic, but I guess there's been some loaning of phones happening in central Europe. They have similar-looking orthographies, sure, but <sz> and <s> behave in the exact opposite matter in the other languages: the backwards way in Hungarian, where <sz> is pronounced like an ordinary coronal /s/, and <s> is pronounced like a post-alveolar /S/. I don't actually have any idea what an English accent in these languages would sound like, either.

My suggestion is to just read up on the phonologies of these two languages on Wikipedia, and use that as inspiration.

>>9685987
Quite a beautiful map you made there.

>>9686767

No, I meant I am stealing your map. For use in a later game. Not accusing you of theft, I'm saying it's very good and wish to use it.

Anyway, my idea was to take a mix of Polish, Hungarian, Czech and other East-European languages, read them as pronounced by an English person, then write them down quasi-phonetically. e.g. Wrocław becomes Roe-claw. My question is more do you think it's feasible to get an entire naming scheme for cities/people out of this or will it just end up looking and sounding ridiculous?

>>9686809

> No, I meant I am stealing your map. For use in a later game. Not accusing you of theft, I'm saying it's very good and wish to use it.

Oh! Well, feel free, for personal use, yadda yadda etc. I do have plans for it, though, so don't go and vandalize the Washington dildo with it or anything.

> Anyway, my idea was to take a mix of Polish, Hungarian, Czech and other East-European languages, read them as pronounced by an English person, then write them down quasi-phonetically. e.g. Wrocław becomes Roe-claw. My question is more do you think it's feasible to get an entire naming scheme for cities/people out of this or will it just end up looking and sounding ridiculous?

Well, it'll sound and look English, won't it? Can't say much beyond that. Go with it.

If you want to make a semi-realistic world, you can build it first with a program called world machine. This lets you create a heightmap with a lot of tools, and it's easy to use, change and undo.

Then you just set the colors to whatever you want (like woodlands), and have a look at it in 3D. If you're satisfied, and if you're lazy, then copy paste a top view into photoshop and edit from there. Or use photoshop to create your own version using the worldmachine map as a guideline.

I never made an actual, finished map, though. But for quick generation, it's perfect, and it gives a pretty good result.

created in photoshop, based off a photo of some chipped paint.


An alternative method you could try:

get a fractal generator - a freebie demo is available for "profantasy Fractal Terrain Generator" at

http://www.profantasy.com/products/ft.asp

or google it if you dont want to follow a 4chan link.

take that, and play around with it. you cant export high res with the demo, but you can screengrab and stitch it together. you can use that to create interesting landscapes with a bit of effort, from a whole world, to a tiny area.

>>9686917

>>9686924
and here's the original inspiration - some chipped old paint on a train, that someone posted up on here saying "does'nt this look like a map"

>>9686926

All three taken from an RP setting which had grown up pretty organically as various players contributed locations and settings and suchlike. I took the descriptions of relative locations and did my best to make them fit together as a whole, then tried to make it look like one of those woodblock-printed maps from ye olde tymes.

>>9686938
I remember that. I thought it was too marshland-ish.

>>9686938

Ha, that's pretty fucking uncanny.

Fractal Mapper is pretty awesome.

>>9687633
the trick with fractal generation is to know when to get inthere and modify it manually.

pure fractal worlds are generally very, very bland and generic. you need human random creativity to bring it to life

>>9685512
http://www.realmcrafter.com/
maybe?

>JRPG is not Japanese RPG

Google disagrees with you
first 10(first 20 too) results on google "Japanese Role playing game"
first result on google "JRPG, an acronym for Japanese role-playing game, refers to either: The majority of console role-playing games, a genre of role-playing video games ..."

urban dictionary at result #15 doesnt even have your "rape/pet game" definition listed.

Are there any programs geared towards more abstract pictographic (i.e. not 'satellite view' style) maps? Think the briefing sequence maps from Ace Combat. Wonderful would be a program that can generate one world and produce maps in different styles. I'm no cartographer or artist, so doing everything manually in paint isn't really an option.

>>9688021
>urban dictionary at result #15 doesnt even have your "rape/pet game" definition listed.
That's because the guy claiming that is a troll.

Dwarf fortress generates an entire world on command, there's an image of the entire world you've created somewhere in your save file. The only issue here is it may take a little decoding but it's color coded so you should be able to get a decent sense of where things are.

>>9688201
....
....
....
Air?

>>9686375
>>9688021
>>9688099

Wow, you guys are particularly thick. Shouldn't you be in /a/ or /v/ or wherever all you Final Fantasy fans live?

>>9688238
They don't seem too dumb to me.

>>9688021
>>9688099

I posted that comment as a joke hours ago. You fags are still hung up on it?

Also, JRPGs are not role playing games, they are tactical combat games. Just like 3.5 & 4th edition D&D. Now post some maps or some shit.

>>9688213
You know, for elementals.

This

sort of

thing

>>9688592
>>9688603
>>9688620
God that looks epic.

>>9689286
Ace Combat has some truly excellent briefing UIs. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njyJOLMA5Ws
Any tips on that kind of vector-style rendering? Or on converting existing maps into vector lineart for manipulation?

Someone archive this stuff!

>>9685987

http://naeddyr.deviantart.com/art/Ysi-Earth-Map-II-119934356

At least rename your picture before posting it if you don't want us to find your SUPER SECRET DeviantArt account.

>>9688592
>>9688603
>>9688620

>>9688201
I live in Air.......

>>9690752

Belka means squirrel in hungarian

>>9690507

Oh, c'mon, why would you do that? What is with that palpable evil glee?

Well, at least /tg/ is relatively well-behaved.

Now, let's just hope no one figures out my furaffinity account.

>>9691166
C'mon, whyd you tell us you have one if you dont want us to fin-WAITAMINNIT youre trying to trick us onto a furry site!

Terra, another time.

>>9691166

Welp, if your the guy who that DeviantArt account belongs to, you should tell us more about the story you're working on - it's pretty cool looking.

>>9691423

I don't know, man, but I'm not about to check.

>>9691458
i have this one where its the map of Earth, but inverted, so the oceans are land and the land is ocean, but i cant find it

>>9691484

Did you mean this?

At least for me, it's really hard to see this as anything but an ordinary world map, because I'm so used to it.

>>9692666
Is there such a map in existence that has the oceans as land and the land the same? I want a map that shows the entire world with no oceans.

>>9692782
All desert and wasteland, probably.

>>9692849
Is there a map of it?

>>9693180
like this ?

>>9685987
A truly impressive map.

>>9684860
>Campaign Cartographer
I downloaded this on Piratebay and when I open up the extracted file. All of the folders are blue. Why is this?

Whoever made op's map is poor at naming places.

1. Throw mud at ground
2. Impersonation
3. ???
4. Profit

Dawn of Worlds.

Get your party to do it with.

Also the game it's self is fun as shit.

>>9685987

Wow. That map is really, really impressive. I wanted to run an Indo/Thai/Chinese 3.5 campaign using just Tome of Battle and Tome of Magic classes and that is absolutely perfect.

Thanks a lot for posting that, Anon.

>>9693231
You could still see the ocean. I want a map that shows the geography of the land and the land underneath the water. I don't care if it's a desert wasteland.

>>9696345
Seconding this.

>>9696345
Well, there's no ocean on that map. I could find you the same map in levels of grey, but that would still be the same map.

>>9698021
I'm looking for a map that shows the geography, but removes the ocean to reveal it's geography as well so the entire world is just land.

>>9686307
Yes.

A wild Star Fort appears!

(because medieval=/=fantasy)

>>9698872
What is the routine at creating a map in Paint.NET?