Are there any good tools for designing dungeons? Or is good old graph paper still the way to go?
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Dungeon-making tools?
- Thread starter Night Goat
- Start date
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2007
- Messages
- 785
Have you tried Grid Cartographer?
I tried it but found it too limited. I'd like to be able to place furniture, pits, raised and lowered surfaces, etc.
Some people swear by Dunjinni and/or campaign cartographer.
I torrented the d&d tiles that wizards released in sets around the time 4E was out. Imported the PDFs into photoshop and cropped them around the individual tiles. And made sure they were all scaled so one square was (I think) 80x80px. Then I turned them into backdrop libraries in Maptools (rptools.net) and built dungeons with snap to grid set to on.
Other alternatives would be going to http://www.cartographersguild.com/ and looking around. Maps, tutorials for maps and tools for maps are kind of their forte.
I torrented the d&d tiles that wizards released in sets around the time 4E was out. Imported the PDFs into photoshop and cropped them around the individual tiles. And made sure they were all scaled so one square was (I think) 80x80px. Then I turned them into backdrop libraries in Maptools (rptools.net) and built dungeons with snap to grid set to on.
Other alternatives would be going to http://www.cartographersguild.com/ and looking around. Maps, tutorials for maps and tools for maps are kind of their forte.
Xathrodox86
Arbiter
Graph paper is the way for me. Can't beat the classic.
For online: Grid Carthographer is fun, but I rarely use it. I rather search for a ready map on the interwebz and just change a few things. For quick encounters, I just draw on Roll20.
For offline: Graph paper to make the map, then explain what they see and find on the main battlemap. Sometimes I use a water-based marker or just "props" like "this pencil is now the wall here."
If you want to add stuff... well, just like Ulminati said. Dunjinni.
For offline: Graph paper to make the map, then explain what they see and find on the main battlemap. Sometimes I use a water-based marker or just "props" like "this pencil is now the wall here."
If you want to add stuff... well, just like Ulminati said. Dunjinni.
Keldryn
Arcane
I use Campaign Cartographer with the Dungeon Designer add-on. It's incredibly powerful and lets you do virtually anything you can think of. It's also expensive and has a rather steep learning curve.
If you want to be able to draw what you want, from small dungeons to geographic maps I reccomend Fractal Mapper
For smaller dungeons or even to play both online and live, Maptool can be used to design simple maps, you can import resources in .png formats to be used as actors/PC tokens and objects/furniture. It's actually fairly robust, you just need to fiddle with interface/docs to realize all you can do but once you have, you can do things like this in 5 minutes.
Literally, this is part of a map I had to draw real time for an improvised ambush my party had some time ago. This took me exactly 6 minutes (It's really simple) and the screen is just a detail of the whole map, I assure you you can draw a whole lot in one hour once you get the hang of it.
This little gem allows us to explore at an amazing speed, it takes into account LoS, illumination and measurement. It also has Fog of war, it's perfect
Edit: if you're curious I can post some more screens of Maptool in action, it's so
For smaller dungeons or even to play both online and live, Maptool can be used to design simple maps, you can import resources in .png formats to be used as actors/PC tokens and objects/furniture. It's actually fairly robust, you just need to fiddle with interface/docs to realize all you can do but once you have, you can do things like this in 5 minutes.
Literally, this is part of a map I had to draw real time for an improvised ambush my party had some time ago. This took me exactly 6 minutes (It's really simple) and the screen is just a detail of the whole map, I assure you you can draw a whole lot in one hour once you get the hang of it.
This little gem allows us to explore at an amazing speed, it takes into account LoS, illumination and measurement. It also has Fog of war, it's perfect
Edit: if you're curious I can post some more screens of Maptool in action, it's so
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Also, you can grab some from various online galleries. Here's two to get you started. Mostly various illustrations to copypasta for PCs/NPCs, but both also have subgalleries with scenery pictures and good old fashioned top-down maps
http://thraen.minus.com/uploads
http://razir.minus.com/uploads
http://thraen.minus.com/uploads
http://razir.minus.com/uploads
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