Another newborn saying hi

[jfrazierjr]

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

[jfrazierjr]

Here is an example map I made in a few hours using FM8 about a year and a half ago, only using the vector tools a few texture fills.

My plan at this point is to go back through and remake this in GIMP at a fairly high resolution in the near future to make a more realistic map. Since my DM does not use any mapping software at the table, a good high res print out can be much prettier and realistic than anything in FM 8. Now, if I was DM'ing, I would probably use FM8s native format to take advantage of the map linking at the expense of beauty.

The first map is the original my DM created in Campaign Mapper (stripped down version of CC from about 10 years ago) and my version second.

Joe

[ravells]

Welcome to the Guild, Ruinweaver! As Neon said, our FM8 user numbers are still very small but I think it's great to have users of all sorts of different software here. I think I'm the only Drawplus user here, so you're not alone!