9/02/2013

Free GM Resource: Roleplaying City Map Generator 5.40

This week's Free GM Resource is an odd one because this digital download doesn't really exist from the original producer.

Roleplaying City Map Generator 5.40 is a cool little program that you'll have to Google for a download source, but if you click on one of these links it'll take you to one possible download site.

In short, this program spits out a random city that you can then use as a simple map or as a source for some more work in another program. There are a lot of options for you to play around with and there are hints of some pretty cool options that I just could get to work.


Some of the menu options either don't do much or are just to big of a pain to deal with. Tweaking the map options are fairly easy, but printing the map out or expecting to get some labels on them aren't great. To demonstrate I'll use one map to show a couple of examples:

This map of a simple Small Town With City Wall (default options, but I think I tweaked my colors) was printed to a single PDF:
1 Page PDF printout of a simple village with a wall

This is the same map, but it was created simply from the large "export selection as image(s)" button on the bottom of the map:
1 page BMP printout of a small village with a wall

These maps have been edited such they were reduced to 72 DPI and 8 inches across. The scale and compass rose are interesting enough, but you have to print from the "City Map" menu option after playing with the settings. If you want a larger map, you would have to extend the printing across a number of pages, which is an option, but when it prints, you have to name each page individually and it takes a while (relatively speaking).

If you use the export button, you can quickly change the size of the file to 400 square pixels to 3200 square pixels, and you can elect to have the print spread out across a number of pages, from one page to 15x15 pages.

If you really wanted to drill down in your map you could export it to 3200 px and 15x15, which will take some time, but the files will be auto-named and you work with them much more easily.

I highly recommend this free program to just about anyone. Make a few initial tweaks to get the colors you like and you will be able to use this generator to spit out any number of villages on the fly. Of course if you need a large city it will take some time to generate, but only a minute or two.



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