That, or redraw with ink & nib-pen (or brush), with a slightly-off scale (don’t trace). Then you get to add all of the map-art joy.

My only real problem with using “ancient technology” is that I often want to make an incomplete copy for my players to use, and that’s a little harder without a computer. I also tend to get very proud of my finished maps, but don’t get to share them all because they’d give away too much! (Here be dragons… no, really).

The problem that I find with maps is that they lend you to be dependent on them. I think that you can lose the ability to fudge things to make it work better when the maps are too concrete. Of course if you go for realism, then concrete is the way to go. I just don’t like limiting myself by being too attached to my maps.

If you’re looking at a nation scale map, I like tracing its outline at most of the size of a sheet of paper and making photocopies, then filling in. That lets me make mistakes and toss bad copies– which can be good if you decide to start coloring in terrain.

My large maps in a straight image editor, just got too large, and my computer couldn’t handle them. I either had to choose a low resolution, or a small area, neither of which was desirable. They looked quite snazzy though.

Which actual program is this? ArcView, ArcEditor, etc? Looks handy!

I am in love with this resource and use it a lot for my game.

Phil.

I really like the Chalkboard one. That’s something I can work with, even when designing cities!

I used to draw all of my campaign maps in photoshop(equivalent) with layers for all of the different features: urbanization, forest, dungeon sites, roads, etc.

Now I just use arcmap. Sure, its a wee bit of overkill, but for having all of your maps at whatever scale you want, it can’t be beat.

That said, for around the table play, using the 1″ grid paper pads for meetings (the 1 square meter or so things). Toss a clear sheet of acrylic over it, and you can mark it up with whiteboard markers, and it comes with a grid already. A set of coloured sharpies goes a long way.

As to actual regional mapping, spend time looking at real world maps. Have a look at a basic physical geography or intro geology textbook. Mountains and rivers don’t just happen at random, and if you want something that looks real you have to respect certain placements. Think about how weird Moridor looked with that square box of mountains.

Also consider scale. Without knowledge of how to calculate longitude, distances on maps were fairly approximate, especially over water. (look at early maps of north America, and how that white space in the middle lead it it being a very wide continent). Have a look at Inuit maps where scale is dependent on the importance of the feature, not the size of the feature. Look at people’s quick drawn map to the corner store. Perhaps a fixed scale isn’t the most period or flavourful option.

And finally, make handouts of maps. Probably with a lot less detail than your actual campaign map, but it adds a lot to the players to have, hold, and annotate their own map. Especially when it is just a little wrong. Cheap maps may take liberties.