Mapping Beautiful Realms for Dungeons and Dragons, Rifts, Warhammer, and More!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder! Yep! That one big eye in the middle above the snarling grin!

Mapping beautiful fantasy-adventure realms and creating worlds for gaming hobbyists is a real pleasure with MS Visio.



There are many other programs/ applications on the market that will do the work for you in creating your next dungeon adventure, but there's something about doing things from scratch, and making one's own objects in Visio that other applications just don't offer. I think it's the sense of adventure in creating the world map itself which draws me in to map making in the first place.

This screen shot is my work in Visio. Here I am working on an idea for a girl's role-playing game concept. I have quite an extensive collection of objects which I custom made myself for reuse, tweaking, and reconfiguration of role-playing game maps and mazes.

So, with Visio I can create exactly what I want--Including beautiful landscapes.

Visio combined with a paint program, maybe photoshop type apps (You can get clones of photoshop for free on Linux Mint OS) great tool for mock-ups of realms, dungeon maps, mazes, user interfaces, mechanical constructs like catapults and trick doors, and so on.

A combination of cartoon-ish illustrations and map with call-outs. Not only visually fun, but useful to keep track of where inventories and items are placed in the realms. Beats printing on paper every item and its location. Why not draw it?

Akiz illustrated this house map on a freelance project for 9Portals RPG eBooks. Awesome!

Another map by Akiz.This realm looks a lot like something from a classic old school game.

Akiz's 2-tier designs. Awesome freelance artist.

4 towers by Thomas P. Walton, including a map key with notations.

Thomas P. Walton provides us with an example of quick linear maps for RPG.

Thomas P. Walton obviously enjoyed the old C64 days of computer gaming. This looks something like that, but it isn't. It's entirely an MS Visio drawing.

Thomas P. Walton shows us how to organize portals in an area setting, and reference controlled documents for the encounters and monsters emerging from specific portals. The where and what of a true matrix document.

Thomas P. Walton's love of the pure art of simple maps. More of an eye-candy picture than that of a functional map.

Matrix map, plain and simple. Thomas P. Walton. 2010.

Thomas P. Walton was a fan of the original text-based game during the 1980

's--Zork. Well, this isn't Zork, but it is made in the spirit of the game.

An example of mechanical sheets for constructs. In this case, a castle tower by Thomas P. Walton. 2010.

I love classic computer games and Atari--Dont' you?! Thomas P. Walton's visual stimulation of color combination and simple golden frames, features icons which are easy and quick to recognize.

Create entire realms. This is a very simple forest drawing by Thomas P. Walton. It takes about an hour to put it together.

A call-outs map detailing doors, traps, portals. Thomas P. Walton. 2010.

Constructs and space ships. Thomas P. Walton. 2010.

More constructs and robots. Thomas P. Walton. 2010.

The Yama Realm. Thomas P. Walton was a fan of the classic Oriental Adventures game by TSR.

A more graphic and futuristic map. The Zorbos asteroid planets by Thomas P. Walton.

 The possibilities are endless. All that is needed is some imagination, a little bit of study of the application, and the rest is entirely trial-by-error. You'll have fun, I'm sure. Invest in the app that lets your reach extend beyond imagination!