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Think about what the purpose of such a map is. Medieval maps tend to fall into three categories: road maps coastal maps maps of the world If it's for pilgrims and merchants traveling by road, it'll have all the major roads marked, along with inns and convenient places to stop to water the animals -- and it won't describe the wilderness or the sea at ...

Maps are fun. Make maps when you want to. You don't have to map anything, ever. But you'll want to, because maps are fun. Maps are just another tool that you have as DM to convey information to the players. When you want to convey something that is best done spatially, a map is useful. Personally, I find I often sketch very rough maps all the time during ...

Real-world medieval maps tended to be a mix of indicative and artistic and in many cases draw by people that had never been to and barely heard of a place. They would have used in many cases information that was word of mouth from many people and could be contradictory. Hence the map you bought could be anything from a nice picture for the wall and useless ...

The irony games generator is long gone, as far as I can tell. When it dissapeared, I started coding my own generators. I guess they'd be better if I dedicated a bit more time to them, but at least they help me with my games (they might be useful for you too). And if you don't like them, check my "about" page. I try to link to other people's generators. ...

First, built the world (at least in your head). Land: Landmasses are formed by plate tectonics. Some areas are where plates push apart (like the middle of the Atlantic Ocean), whereas others are where plates push together and one ends up on top of the other (such as the Himalayan mountains). Fun fact, the Himalayan mountains are getting taller as the ...

To learn more about how the surface of our Earth works and was formed, you want to undertake an informal, ongoing study of geomorphology, the "study of landforms and the processes that shape them." For an informal study, Wikipedia is an excellent resource – free, easily available, translated into multiple languages, and fun to wander around and get lost in. ...

Dundjinni is quite intuitive and gives you good results for encounter maps Campaign Cartographer has a steep learning curve but provides many features. It lets you create anything from overland maps over city maps to dungeon maps. AutoREALM is a free alternative, but I have no experience with it. Hexographer is a tool to easily create hex maps. There is a ...

I use Photoshop mainly, as do many professional cartographers. I often use Illustrator in combination with Photoshop. Things like initial outlines of coasts and things I find best in Illustrator, but then move to Photoshop for the real polishing of the look and feel. Modern style floor-plan maps I've started to make in Flash, it's just turned out to be the ...

As @DavidAllanFinch said, our modern concept of accurate maps wasn't really common in the Middle Ages. They tended to be more figurative, lacked a lot of our modern methodologies, and further more, didn't try for a 1:1 representation, which was usually held in lower esteem than a moral representation. See a nice example here. In general, though, if you want ...

The maker of Hexographer has a new product out for dungeon mapping called Dungeonographer. I like these applications a lot. You can learn it and start making decent maps in an afternoon. You don't need any drawing skills or knowledge of how to use CAD or vector drawing. It is point and click for the most part.

Map anywhere where a player needs to make a decision based on geographical layout. If the characters are going to get up to a lot of mischief there then draw a map. Doing mischief will often mean deciding which roads to use, where to put a safe house, whether the guards can see the taven from the castle etc. Edit: If you're going to have a fight, you'll ...

I've looked more than once for replacements for their tools over the last few years. I've found a couple of decent replacements for certain items at sites such as Inkwell Ideas, which has decent random generators for inns, cities, magic shops, villages and small dungeon maps. There are other good resources here and there as well to replace the tools that ...

I would consult army manuals and websites. The military has a vested interest in making terrain maps, but even more so in making sure soldiers know how to read it it. Here is a link to an army study guide that outlines some of the major and minor terrain features that you'd see on an elevation map. ...

You don't exactly need plugins for this sort of thing: the most important skill for using raster software like the GIMP for map-making is learning how to use the existing functionality to get the effects you're interested in. However, depending on what you're going for, there are plugins that can help. The hardest part of making a fantasy city map is laying ...

I've answered under the assumption that you want to make small-scale tactical or local maps - on the scale of city streets instead of the whole city and surrounding countryside. GIMP strikes me as the wrong tool for the job. In my opinion, and based on the local-map assumption, you need a vector graphics program. Dig out a copy of OpenOffice.org Draw or ...

I give them an outline of the coastline and they fill in the landmass with their notes. If I was doing an exploration of the new world style game then I would just give them an updated coastline map showing only what they explored each session. Remember there is realism, and there is gamable. The blank coastline map without a grid (maybe a scale) seems to ...

You could actually use the AutoREALM icons, if you don't mind a bit of fiddly work. It is quite easy to vectorize simple graphics. Inkscape (free alternative to Adobe Illustrator) has such a function to trace bitmaps by various attributes of the original image (colour, brightness, edges and so on). You can make a map that's just the AutoREALM icons you want ...

The easiest tool I have found to create floor plans is Undermountain Games' DTiles: Dungeons. It is not really a mapping tool as such but I have used it as such by down-scaling on the screen and doing screen grabs. For Example:

Yes and No. And it Depends. You generally want a large overhead view of the village or forest to get a general sense of scale or extremely unique points of interest (like a waterfall, or mountain top.) You will also want maps of "key battle points" or other points of interest. But by no means do you have to know who lives at 12 main street, or how many ...

Amit Patel has a nice blog that has a section regarding hex maps. I especially like the Isometric cube coordinate system. Regarding icosahedrons, consider each facet to be a triangular hex map where edge hexes(FJM, NLI and BCD) are shared between two facets and corner hexes (A, E and O) are actually pentagons common to all five facets at the vertex. O ...

I hate to say it, but is there any reason why you just aren't using Photoshop (or a free equivalent like Gimp)? You seem to be a more advanced mapper, and that is the route that I would recommend. I don't know if Photoshop elements would be enough to fit what you are looking to do, but I can't think of a better graphics program for large scale mapping.

I like MapTool. I've also been known to use the GIMP to tile together images, but that's only worthwhile if you've already got tiles. I've actually used the toolkit from the original Neverwinter Nights to generate a map, but this is rather slow and whatnot. I've also messed around with other things but they're mostly random in nature, so I'm assuming you ...

GIMP or not to GIMP... GIMP is, for what it does, highly powerful, and very awkward to learn. There are stamps for GIMP that were designed for doing RPG mapping at an "old school D&D style map" level, both color and grayscale... http://inkwellideas.com/worldbuilding/worldbuilding-resources-hex-map-gimp-brushes/ And a tutorial for you... ...

I use Inkscape for all of the maps for the most recent adventures for Gods & Monsters, mainly House of Lisport and Helter Skelter. Layers are your friend, and grouped layers are even better. They can make it very easy to use the same map for your own use as game master and for the players use; all you have to do is hide the layers with secret info. ...

You could take a look at Rolemaster. The rules contain (among other things) some basic algorithms for terrain creation. Also of course you should rely on your common sense. Obviously you are aware that water does not flow uphill - at least not without the use of magic or some such. Common sense will get you a long way. Regarding improving your skill: ...

To understand more about how geography is formed I'd recommend the book World-Building. It starts from the point of forming a planet and continues on from there. The following blog post covers the basics Worldbuilding: Geography: Start with Geology (Land masses and Mountain Ranges) Just add Water (Lakes and Rivers) Into the Woods (Forests/Temperate Land) ...

I've had some success with PyMapper and Tiled. PyMapper is a bit tricky, but is great if you have dungeon tiles and want to pre-determine layout. Tiled is fantastic for generating arbitrary maps, as you can use any image as a "tile reference" and lay out the map exactly as you like.

You can't put anything underneath the "draw" layer, as you've noted. Your best bet is to create the platforms as tiles/tokens in a separate program, then place them as tiles. You can them place dropshadows as tiles ordered below the platform tiles. Torstan's Backgrounds pack might be useful to you in this regard. From the File menu, select Add Resource to ...

Most are probably lost to the public; the author may or may not have backups of the backend scripts that actually do the heavy lifting. Most could be readily recreated from scratch by a competent programmer, as well. Several have been, by Inkwell ideas.

Take a look at Old Maps Online; which has a large collection of historical maps available. One Caveat; despite the timeline slider going back as far as 1000AD; there don't appear to be any maps from before the mid 16th century available.