Making overland maps

[Sunfist]

Guys, I'm trying to make a map for the island in which my campaign takes place and I was wondering if you guys knew any free software to do it?

I looked in the threads that were here, but some of that is really old info - even some dead links.

Also, I was wondering about personal experience you guys might have had with any.

Again, I'm looking to make an overland map; I don't need a dungeon map creator, etc.

[Barrok]

A few links for you

Cartography at Alien Picks (http://cartography.alienpicks.com/)

cartography at freedownloadmanager (http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/cartography_software/)

Campaign Cartographer 3 - not free (http://www.profantasy.com/)

Cartographer's Guild (http://www.cartographersguild.com/) - this site is really worth checking out.

[dberg_usa]

Terragen is a free 3D virtual world/terrain generation program. While I've never used it for Cartography. It seems to fit that purpose very well. The imagery is nothing short of stunning. You can get varried levels of elevation with it, which I thought would be awesome in game play. Basically you could zoom to the region you want to display and actually see what it looks like. The really cool thing is that its free for personal use.

This link is to a Terragen planetary terrain map which has been set as an MPG-4 movie. It gives you a fly bye/away view to help understand what the application is capable of doing. It should help explain what I'm trying to describe.

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/tg2/tgd_mars_movie.html

Here is a mountain top castle I added to a Terragen image (Photoshop & Terragen)

http://www.kotll.com/General/FreeArt/Terragen-Castle_320-X-240.jpg

I think you could easily use Photoshop to add road, cities and other stuff to a more top down view like in parts of the mars movie.
Best of luck with it

[Sunfist]

Oh my Gosh, thanks, guys! Those links look very helpful.