Drawing your villages??

[DMdomination]

I wanted to ask everyone on this. I use PS CS3 to draw my dungeons and Dungeon Crafter II to draw my buildings but i am looking for some way to draw my outside village maps or just general outside maps. I tried drawing them on graph paper. Problem is the graph paper lines do not match up with the grid in FGII, which is the same reason i've had to use programs to draw my other maps. So is there any special way or special programs that ya'll use for drawing outside maps and or village/town/city maps? Thanks in advance for your help, time, and effort.

[Malovech]

There are a variety of options:

www.dundjinni.com

www.profantasy.com

PF is just about to release City Designer 3, which is an excellent city/village mapping add-on for Campaign Cartographer. CC is a CAD mapping program, so it has more of a learning curve then Dundjinni. If you are a Photoshop user, however, you should have no troubles picking it up.

[Griogre]

If you want to draw some of your own villages you might want to use gridless or drafting quality graph paper. Alternatively you can resize the map after you scan in the map. Xorn has a tutorial on Map Rescaling here: https://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/ag

Xorn, never mentions it, but resizing a map to the grid size you want - has the side effect in that it *puts* the map on an integer grid and because the FG grid size can only be integer numbers this will make it possible to get the grids on a map and FG's grid to align.

Another problem with using graph paper, which he mentions very briefly, is the grid is usually not "true" to the edges of the on most graph paper. Just look at the lines around the edges of the paper are they equidistant from the edges at the top, bottom and sides? Usually they are not, so you need to rotate the image a bit.

In addition to the links Malovech gave to map making software, there are a ton of maps on WotC’s website in their map a week archives and map galleries: https://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/ag

You may also find this map generator helpful: https://www.drachenzahn.de/city_map_...city_maps.html