One of the easiest ways to bring your campaign world to life is to give your player’s a sense of where they are in relation to the rest of the world. If they know that the ruins of the ancient Death God lie to the North of them, the old lighthouse to the South West and the ‘Caverns Of The Pirate King’ to the East, it gives them a real sense of being part of the world in which your campaign is set. This is why, when stumbling around the web the other night looking for AD&D 2nd Edition resources (long story…) it was such a joy to find the wonderful overland mapping tool Hexographer from Inkwell Ideas.
Over the years I have used quite a few mapping tools ranging in complexity from Campaign Cartographer to the relatively simple Photoshop. None of these tools really meet the key requirements for a great map editor, namely, achieving a quality result in a simple to use way. The first thing you notice with Hexographer is just how full featured the free product is. The free version comes with a surprisingly large icon set covering not only the basic terrain types (forest, hills, swamps, etc) but also degrees of each (dark forests, pine forests, dead forests, etc).
The second thing you notice is just how simple it is to create large maps quickly. A simple point and click interface draws the icons for each terrain type onto the map. Click and drag and you can fill large sections of the map with the selected terrain type in seconds. Adding towns and cities is just as simple as other items and also comes with a large selection of items to choose from.
For those of you playing sci-fi based roleplaying games there is even a space version of the map featuring appropriate backgrounds and icon sets.
The list of features is quite long, and rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll just quote the website:
Basics
- Easily add terrain to a blank map by just clicking the hexes.
- Drag over hexes to add terrain more quickly.
- Optionally, use the random terrain generator to create a map.
- Optionally, sketch in the basic terrain layout and run the terrain wizard to fill in your map based on your sketch.
- Use feature icons to designate cities, castles, forts, mines, caverns, etc.
- Draw lines to make your coastline look rough, add rivers, roads, trails, etc.
- Add text of pre-set styles to name cities, rivers, countries, mountain ranges or anything else.
- The program automatically keeps text above lines, lines about features, and features above terrain.
Customization
- Hex numbers can be turned on.
- You can put the hex numbers on the top of the hexes or on the bottom; you can make your numbers row by column or column by row; the row and column numbering can start with any number; you can change the hex numbers’ font color/size/face/style; you can set the separator between the row and column numbers to anything or nothing.
- Use an icosahedral map template.
- Customize terrain and features by resizing or removing the icons or changing colors.
- Customize the color and width of pre-styled lines. This allows all of your rivers, roads, borders, etc. to be consistent. If you drew each line with the appropriate button, you can later adjust the color or width and all the lines on the map made with that style will update properly.
- Customize the font face, style, color, and style of pre-styled text. Just like with pre-styled lines, if you add text using one of the styled buttons, it will update appropriately.
- The map can be oriented so that the columns are stacked nicely and the rows are staggered or vice versa.
Special Features
- Maps can be seamlessly sent to a web service to be printed as a poster or art print.
- Trace over a map from another source.
- Pre-styled lines and text are associated with the tags “natural” “infrastructure” and/or “political.” Arbitrary lines and text can be associtated with any of these tags. Then, each of these types may be turned off. So you could complete you map then decide to save a version without any political markings.
And that list doesn’t cover the paid version!
Hexographer comes in a free version which works in your browser and a paid for version that works offline and has extra features.
After having a play around with Hexographer make sure you look at their Random Tavern Generator (a map, a menu and more…) as well.
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