Quote Originally Posted by Ruinweaver View Post
Hello all

I'm a 35 going on 15 (I'm a high school teacher) bloke from Warrandyte near Melbourne, Australia. I grew up playing in abandoned gold mines in the nearby bush, and couldn't help been caught in the then new D&D craze.

I have designed umpteen pen-and-paper maps to go with my campaign worlds, but never one using any software. I just got FM v8, and now I'm trying to figure out the best place to start.

I've read the tutorial in FM, but it seems to cover only the basics. I want to make realistic looking world and then regional maps.

Does anyone know any more indepth tutes on FM v8?

Cheers
Welcome to the Guild Ruinweaver! Unfortunately, the FM community is rather small on samples, and even smaller on tutorials.

Define "realistic"? I have yet to see any FM or CC world maps which match my definition of realistic. Don't get me wrong, you can make some beautiful maps with either software package, but for me, the real strong point of both of these programs is their raster images for making town and battle map style maps , their ability to create some great fractals and the ability to fairly quickly throw up a world/region map that conveys the information needed such as where mountains/forests, etc are located.

Here is a good sample: http://www.nbos.com/products/mapper/...le-nazrain.jpg

Also, if you want to get a good idea of how someone actually made a map take look at Christopher Rodrigues Macias post of Eberron http://www.nbos.com/nox/download.php?id=76. You can download the map in FM native format and hide/show layers to see the techniques he used which are quite good for FM (he even used FM 7 which had some features missing that FM8 could have used to make this map quite a bit better)

Also, make SURE you get the hugh CSAUC from http://www.gmsapprentice.com as the included art will make a hugh difference in the number of fills and town/battlemap symbols you have available.

Joe