Map-making for my World-building

Greetings and welcome once more to the tabletop multiverse.

In today's post I will be going back to discussing my world-building project, and map-making for said project to be precise.

In the last few days I have been practicing my map-making skills and learning how to use Campaign Cartographer, or Campaign Cartographer 3+ to be precise. As I am learning more and more about the program I am coming to the realization that it is a really good program for map-making, albeit a bit much to learn for a newbie map-maker such as myself. In the beginning I think I was struggling a bit with my own wish to be good at it straight from the get-go, and to be able to make really good maps, and especially the maps that I wanted to make, right from day 1. Of course I know that something like that isn't really possible, and I have moved away from that into finally actually practicing with the program and making practice maps. I still feel like I am learning something new every day I practice with it, which I suppose is good, and there are still a lot of question-marks that I need answered before I start going into making the actual maps that I need.

As I said before, Campaign Cartographer 3+ is a really good program, and it had better be considering the price. I am still a novice at the whole map-making thing and so I realize that I am probably making a lot of mistakes, and doing things the wrong way, when I really don't need to. If anyone out there is really good at using that particular program feel free to send me a message. I could do with some advice in finding good tutorials etc, as well as some pointers.

So, why am I so into making maps at the moment, you may ask? The reason is quite simple really. I have a lot of written material for my world-building now. Probably enough to fill 3 or 4 different continents, at least mostly, with cultures, civilizations, races, etc. Now I need the maps to get a better visual on how everything fits together. I have it in my head, but I think it will be immensely helpful to have visual maps to look at as well. I don't need anything super-detailed, but enough for me to get a view of the general layout of various regions, where the mountains and mountain-ranges are, the woods, rivers, lakes, major cities and towns, etc, and how it all relates to one-another.

I am sure I will get to that point eventually. I just need to learn how to do it first, and how to make decent looking maps that will work for what I need them for.

A couple of things I miss in Campaign Cartographer - though it might just be that I haven't found those specific functions yet - is a way to just mark something and then click to see what is effecting it at the moment, what sheet and layer it is on, etc. Sort of just to get a good view of it as I have on several occasions been bewildered as to why an item or thing on the map is behaving the way it is, or why a command suddenly isn't making it do what it did before any more. Another thing I am missing is a measuring device. Something along the lines of what AutoREALM has where you can measure distances in feet, meters, miles, kilometers, or even things such as 'days travel by horse' or 'days by sailed galley'. I know this exists because I have tinkered and experimented with AutoREALM a bit in the past, but not many maps have really been produced from it and in any case no maps that have had any real purpose or seen any use.

That's about it for this time, I think.

Until next time.