I have a map of the Crusades in which the British Isles look as large as Asia Minor, and a Viking Age map where Greenland looks like its own continent. Flattening out bits creates distortions, e.g.
The Earth and most Fantasy worlds are… (drum roll) round. Spherical Worlds Like most of its rivals, Hexographer handles spherical worlds by offering a Icosahedral (Traveller-style) template
However, Hexographer is still much more usable than most similar packages.īeyond that, I think there are four interrelated requirements: spherical worlds, qualitative landscape, vague details, and child maps. It was like being six years old, making a castle-strewn landscape on the beach.Įventually, I noticed “missing features.” For example, you can only have one map open at a time and there’s no capacity for selecting chunks of the map and then rotating or cutting and pasting them (I am told this is coming). The maps look nice, and after an hour of tinkering, I was scrawling away merrily, creating continents and islands and peopling them with my imagination. Though it has one or two eccentricities, Hexographer easily passes both these tests. We want to work “in flow,” creating and revising without fiddling about or needing to stop off to swear at the interface and trawl a badly written user manual. Inspiring and Easy-to-use It was like being six years old, making a castle-strewn landscape on the beach.Īssuming that the resulting maps look good enough to be inspiring, the basic requirement of a cartographical creativity aid is that it should be as easy-to-use as a word processor. This is where Hexographer excels and looks to be on the way to becoming the mapping equivalent of Scrivener.
Campaign cartographer 3 resize map software#
So we writers and GMs need map making software that works as a “cartographical creativity aid”. Now how long will it take them to carry the wounded elf back to the city?” Instead, I am interested in… Hexographer as cartographical creativity aidĭuring the creative process, a map is both where you discover stories and where you choreograph and timetable them: “ That lake is in an interesting spot, suppose a dragon lives there.
However, as a writer and gamer, I am not really interested in squandering time on producing pretty maps, except perhaps at the very end of the creative process. (I should also mention that Hexographer can handle city and settlement maps, with symbols for towers and walls and so on, and also Traveller-style hex-space maps. Obviously, this is more than fine for a roleplaying campaign, though with fewer design options than on offer from much much more expensive packages.ĮDIT: JUST DISCOVERED THAT YOU CANSWITCH OFF THE HEXAGONSīeyond that is a matter of taste, though I think the clarity of Hexographer maps has its own aesthetic value. This is no good for your self-published Sword and Sorcery novel, but fine to hand on to a designer hired by your publisher. Hexographer can produce pretty maps, as long as you don’t mind them on hexagons. They make the pretty maps that go out in the front of a Fantasy novel, or are packaged up with an RPG campaign or scenario. Most Fantasy cartography packages are really “cartographical graphic design tools.” However, first let’s get the business of pretty maps out of the way… Hexographer as cartographical graphic design tool Hexographer can produce pretty maps, as long as you don’t mind them on hexagons. What makes it distinct is that it explicitly treats maps as collections of hexagons (though you can place items freehand as well), which makes it almost perfect for writers and gamers. However, with a range of symbol sets to choose from, it’s grown into a flexible Fantasy cartography tool. It began as a tool for creating Mystara-style maps and cheerfully emulates the World of Greyhawk feel. Hexographer very much has its roots in old-school roleplaying. It’s hard to make changes neatly, difficult to produce different versions of the same map, a fiddle to create small scale local maps, and ultimately a chore to curate all the bits of paper.įor most of us, digital is our friend, which is why I am reviewing Hexographer, a relatively inexpensive Fantasy map making tool. However, there are practical limitations. It’s great fun to draw a map using pencil and paper. Most of us have had posters of Middle Earth or the Hyperborian Age on our walls and almost all of us have scratched out maps of imaginary places, either for the joy of it or as a DM/GM or Fantasy writer. I dare say that we Black Gate types love maps and charts of imaginary lands.Īs kids, we pored over the maps in CS Lewis’s Narniabooks or Tolkien’s The Hobbit. …began as a tool for creating Mystara-style maps and cheerfully emulates the World of Greyhawk feel.