Quote Originally Posted by King Thor View Post
Hi All,

I am a total noob and just found this site. I'm not sure what the going rate would be, but I would love to get some maps made up. I have an overall campaign map, about 12 small city maps and a larger town map. Each of these fit on a single piece of graph paper. I guess I would scan these and then send them to the artist?

I'm not sure of a rate or anything. I am debating purchasing some programs to do these myself, but with my current lack of time (demanding job + 11 month old), having someone else do them may be easier for now until I get a grasp on the software (I'm still not sure what software to purchase!).

Anyway, thanks in advance for your thoughts, I hope I have posted this correctly in terms of forum etiquette. If not, mods please delete.

Thanks!

KT
If you want quick and sort of pretty, then either Fractal Mapper(nbos.com) or Campaign Cartographer(profantasy.com) cost about the same ($40 or so) for the base software and you can quickly make maps using the included symbols. Fractal Mapper is far easier to use IMO, but Campaign Cartographer has MUCH more content available for purchase to increase your variety of symbols for map making as well as a wider base of people to help, however, the user interface it very unintuitive to most Windows users.

If you are more into learning artistic techniques(thought time increases a LOT), then GIMP and Inkscape are both free open source options. GIMP does raster applications, while Inkscape does vector. These two free products map fairly well in functionality to Abobes Photoshop and Illustrator respectively without the 500+ price tag (and of course, there are things one does the other cant do and visa versa)


While there are TONS of other programs, these are the ones I would suggest because of price and availability of resources(ie, tutorials) for helping people out.