However, if you follow both the 'getting started' guides that come with the program and follow the many online tutorials, you'll get past the button shock very well and will be able to design some astonishingly detailed and professional looking maps. It doesn't work like raster drawing programs like Photoshop, so you have to get yourself out of that frame of mind to use it.

As I said it's based on CAD, a map-design program for engineers, so it's very powerful-and can be very complicated and overwhelming on first glance. I own CC3 so it's what I can speak about the most. It can get expensive if you want all the add-ons, but they have some good package deals. The various add-ons are around $25-30 more each (Dungeon Designer, City Designer, Cosmographer, etc).

IIRC, it's around $40 for the core program-which is a steal considering it's based on CAD, which is very expensive (and powerful). If you purchase the full version, you can buy its dungeon design add-on for much fuller and detailed dungeon design. CC3 defaults to overland terrain design, but even with the basic tools in the demo you could adjust it to dungeon design if you wanted to. Likewise, there's Campaign Cartographer 3, which is also paid software, but again, there's a free demo you can download. I've never used it but most of its users have reported back positively. The full version is pay (around $40.00) but you can download a demo. I can't make heads or tails of it, but it looks like a good program for what it does, and it is free.įor very simple things, there's random dungeon generators online and the like-just do a Google search and you can get some neat results, though not necessarily very complicated programs.įor just dungeon design, there's Dundjinni. Looking primarily at buildings and dungeons, but if it can do terrain then that would be awesomeįor basic battlemaps, a lot of folks are enjoying MapTools, though that's more of an online tool (for people to have detailed battlemaps for play-by-post). BQ wrote: Hey does anyone know of a good (and ideally free) map making software to download.

Map making programs free