I was tossing up whether to drop this post in Member Introductions (as I'm new) or here but here won out, so, uh hey to everyone and sorry if this is a faux pas. I'm a Dungeons and Dragoner with a side of graphic design, so obviously I use Photoshop for mapping (and borrow the A3 colour laser printer at work to print them out ).

I was prodded in this direction after I showed a little map-related project to a friend. Honestly, though, I think there are Photoshop gurus enough here that I reckon someone's already tried this idea. Ah well. Que sera sera and all that.

What I've done is set up a bunch of Photoshop layers with copious quantities of filters. Draw on the "Grass" layer with a white brush and you get grass, draw on the "Water" layer and you get water and so on. Took a while to set up (and it's still a work in progress) but now that its done I can run off custom maps in a couple of minutes. This little creek crossing took me three (it's shrunk here but is an A3 map on my hard drive)...

Creek crossing

I'm completely baffled by your attachments, alas, so I'm afraid I linked from my own webspace. Here's a bigger (4xA3) map of a gully entrance. The cliff edges need work, though. I don't like the bare, grey rock.

Gully entrance

The only problem I'm encountering with the maps is, now that I'm using them for dungeons as well (Like this cellar), I need lots of things that can't be created on the fly by Photoshop like barrells, chairs, fireplaces, fountains and so on.

Has anyone here done anything similar? Anyone interested in sharing cool layer effects?

- Joel Fagin