For me messing about with making a map and detailing the geography of a world is the most tedious and off putting part of world building. Last night I was catching up on the new version of Dwarf Fortress and a thought occurred. Why not just use DF's detailed map generator?

It will spit out a good sized map with a great deal of detail, with basics like climate and what not given.

Has any one else tried this?

I have no intention of using the cultures and histories generated by the game, just using the map and filling it in with what I was already working on. Seems like it could save a lot of time.

Thoughts?

I am not familiar with Dwarf Fortress. Any links to these maps?

The Cartographers Guild

They have an astounding number of maps, some of which being beautiful works of art. It would be so easy to find (after a couple hours of search, since there are so many) a land map that would please your eye and you could fill at leisure.

If you hate making maps then just don't bother.

Go online and grab a map of somewhere could be a fantasy map from cartographer's guild could be a map of Montana or Spain.

None of your players will know where its from. Just rename the features and you are golden.

I won't go back to '80s ANSI screen tech. I'd rather just Google-search map images from the role-playing blogs that are everywhere.

Dyson's Dodecahedron has an insane number of beautifully done maps lying around. Most are urban and interiors but there are a fair number of wilderness maps too.

Quote from: Battle Mad Ronin;834528Dyson's Dodecahedron has an insane number of beautifully done maps lying around. Most are urban and interiors but there are a fair number of wilderness maps too.

That dude's a machine. Everyone should visit and check out his work. His little hobby is a total inspiration for DIYers, yet at the same time he's so damn good you almost do not want to even try.

Huh, so apparently someone created a program to make the ASCII output maps of the game more usable.

http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=4359

Dwarf Fortress makes some pretty good maps. Things have reasons for being where they are, though the ones I've seen tend to be fairly patchworky at a certain scale. But I think it's a good idea. You just need to be able to read the symbols.

Can you cut & paste out of the game? If so, you could have a giant ASCII file for the map, which you could then edit with a sufficiently cool text editor.

You could also use a custom font and/or search&replace to have more visually-readable symbols, and arrange them into square size so there's no aspect ratio distortion.

Quote from: jibbajibba;834498If you hate making maps then just don't bother.

Go online and grab a map of somewhere could be a fantasy map from cartographer's guild could be a map of Montana or Spain.

None of your players will know where its from. Just rename the features and you are golden.

Topographical maps sans political boundaries are good and often nigh-unrecognizable (unless you can see the whole continent or such).

In particulAr, if you want a certain climate or geography for your game, it makes it easy to have everything make sense and follow the laws of nature/science. For instance, you want a Mediterranean climate, take Southern California/Northern Mexico (or the Mediterranean obviously). And so on.

Hell, part of the fun of D&D is creating your own maps, sure just grabbing a already done map works, but if you have the time, sit back and just draw it all up yourself, even if your not an artist, just draw a outline and write notes where things are , it's up to you ,but if I'm running a game, I will enjoy the creation process building it all from scratch, breathing life into a new fantasy world for your players as the map grows with their adventures ,it's just a lot of creative fun for me , but I can understand not having the time to be a geek like me.

Translating a map like that can be a task. I once did that for the old Gamma World and took quite a while.

Heres one site with lots of mapping tools.

http://wizardawn.and-mag.com/tool_world.php

I wish someone had saved the old Wilgden site. That made some really good maps.

Quote from: Arkansan;834462For me messing about with making a map and detailing the geography of a world is the most tedious and off putting part of world building. Last night I was catching up on the new version of Dwarf Fortress and a thought occurred. Why not just use DF's detailed map generator?

It will spit out a good sized map with a great deal of detail, with basics like climate and what not given.

Has any one else tried this?

I have no intention of using the cultures and histories generated by the game, just using the map and filling it in with what I was already working on. Seems like it could save a lot of time.

Thoughts?

I think that with the tool you put forth in a latter post one would get fine region map by messing around in advanced world generation without 'having' to decipher ascii. Tarn's world generation algorithms have been pretty good for few versions and make a far more natural feel to the map... YMMV of course. I also like to grab a regional topographic map and twist it until it's hard to recognize.

Grabbing a map from online, whether real-world, Dyson, or otherwise, works well for giving you some geography to play with, sure, but DF also gives you history.  With the right viewer, you can get it to tell you about wars, heroes (and named, but not so heroic characters), where major battles were fought and who participated, monster rampages, etc.

I've been able to find other tools which will handle the physical simulations at least as well as DF does, but nothing which even attempts to match its social/cultural/historical simulation.

Quote from: Arkansan;834561Huh, so apparently someone created a program to make the ASCII output maps of the game more usable.

http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=4359

That's pretty impressive looking.

I use Campaign Cartographer in addition to Fractal Terrains. The latter is handy for randomly generating worlds, so sometimes I just spend time trying random seeds until I see a shape I like and then tweak details like temperature and sea level. It outputs maps for altitude, climate, temperature and rainfall and you can export the whole thing to Campaign Cartographer so you can add your own details. I have some samples here. I'm working on using Fractal Terrains as a base and maybe even generating a high rez image or two to use as overlays in Campaign Cartographer since FT images are much prettier. I'm not overly thrilled with the climate map, but I'd probably remedy that by drawing terrain and zoning out biomes using the climate map as a guide which is a handy way to figure out encounters.

Dyson does have some great maps and he's a fun person to chat with. Of course Google is your friend. If you want a big random map, I might be persuaded to crank something out.