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The Cartographers’ Guild is a forum created by and for map makers and aficionados, a place where every aspect of cartography can be admired, examined, learned, and discussed. Our membership consists of professional designers and artists, hobbyists, and amateurs—all are welcome to join and participate in the quest for cartographic skill and knowledge.
Although we specialize in maps of fictional realms, as commonly used in both novels and games (both tabletop and role-playing), many Guild members are also proficient in historical and contemporary maps. Likewise, we specialize in computer-assisted cartography (such as with GIMP, Adobe apps, Campaign Cartographer, Dundjinni, etc.), although many members here also have interest in maps drafted by hand.
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Hi there. You will need to draw a lot and write notes on top of those drawings, so anything that will let you draw using layers is indispensable (gimp, photoshop, krita, etc). Then you need two more handy programs - g.plates and g.projector. Despite the similar names, they have little in common. G.plates is an academia piece of software to draw "plates" in a sphere and visualize their movement (spherical movement is difficult to imagine). G.projector is from NASA and allows you to create maps using many different projections. As to the starting set of plates, anything goes, as literaly anything will be changed so many times before you settle into something you like. There's a couple of threads going on now, with tectonic starts, why don't you just join the conversation?
Hey, I see that you've done some plate tectonics based mapping. I'm looking to get into that, but am having a hard time figuring out (a) what software works for that, and (b) how to generate a starting set of plates. Do you have any suggestions?? Thanks in advance!!
