What are /r/FantasyWorldbuilding's favorite Products & Services?

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I use GIMP for my digital mapping. I end up using it as a feature-rich MSPaint rather than doing anything interesting with filters or custom brushes, but the layers make creating decent maps relatively painless and makes creating variations on the same map (political, climate, etc) or regional submaps way easier. I'm sure with a few YouTube tutorials you could put out something pretty impressive.

I'm a piddling artist in any medium, but I was able to knock this out for my players in just a few minutes when they requested a full-sized scale-accurate map of the Omman Empire. I just collated the regional maps I had given them before and added a layer behind for the large-scale geographical features. I find it pretty useful for hacking together digital maps quickly; a more competent artist could weigh in on how useful their suite of tools is.

If you have the money/license I'm sure Photoshop would be a great tool as well.

In my world, the fastest way of sending long range messages is to send them via Bluron birds. This strange blood drinking bird with its red eyes is used as a messenger bird in the Empire of Lumiaron. The birds will find any person whose blood they have consumed last. They are capable of flying from one end of the Empire of Lumiaron to the other in three to four days, depending on flight conditions. Messages are most often encoded incase the birds are intercepted. The blood of the person that the message is addressed to must be ingested by the bird just before flight and again on arrival. The bird is capable of carrying small packages or messages, however they can carry at most one quarter of their own weight, with proper training. The sender requires a crystal-cake or a vial of the receiver's blood. If the bird drinks another human's blood before delivery, the homing signal will be lost.

Also, I finally DID IT! haha. My first book, is on presale now at Amazon and releases on 10 September :) The Hidden Blade by Marie M Mullany Can't believe I've finally reached this point.

Amy: Thanks! My favorite book as a little girl was Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and my baby brother and I loved playing the nation-building game Civilization III together. I would play as China or Japan when I wanted to win the game with military victory, he would play as Greece or Babylon when he wanted to win the game with cultural victory, and when we wanted to work together, he always picked because I could work military with his cultural choices more easily than he could work culture with my militaristic choices.

When I first met Charlie, we didn't have a lot in common personally except for the fact that I worked for her, but then we realized that my love of battle and her love of chemistry found common ground in the science and history of chemical warfare.

Like how mustard gas was popular in WWI because it was so comparatively non-lethal, or how the Nazis wanted to use Substance-N as a flamethrower fuel before they decided that it was "too dangerous" for their soldiers to carry on the battlefield. You ever heard of Substance-N?

When I'm doing my own maps I approach it from the perspective of creating a Photoshop map. (I hand draw my maps, but sometimes do pictures in Photoshop).

I would draw out the outline of the map with no details and examine it for a while, tweaking it. (In PS this would be layer 1). Then I add rivers, mountains (PS layer 2). Then other areas like bogs, forests, and such. (Layer 3)Then cities and other habitations (PS layer 4).

All these layers are eventually merged.

In short, build up the map in stages. This enables a better idea of where everything goes and helps avoid clutter. It's so easy to get carried away making maps.

A great book I'd recommend is: https://www.amazon.com/How-Draw-Fantasy-Art-Maps/dp/1440340242

I hope you get the ideas. And apologies if you're not familiar with Photoshop.

Personally I use Dendron, a VS Code extension that turns markdown notes in to a second brain / knowledgebase / note-taking app.

Please see literally the last comment I made for an in-depth breakdown of how I organize my notes.

https://www.amazon.com/Magic-System-Blueprint-Fiction-Building-ebook/dp/B09G76NF2T/ref=nodl_ This might help? I’m not affiliated and only halfway through, but it could help you answer some of your own questions.

Asrai are a strange race of mute aquatic fairies found in the ponds, lakes and caves of Great Albion. They are very shy and will flee from anyone who even slightly scares them, though a small number have managed to form friendships with gentle and trustworthy humans.

A peculiar trait found in them is an almost vampire-like vulnerability to direct sunlight, any exposure will cause their skin to burn and blister. If they don't manage to cover themselves or dive below water within a few seconds, the affected area will melt into water. While the injury will heal after a month, too much more exposure can kill them.

Another is Asrai Frost Burn, an incurable condition affecting all other species caused by having skin-to-skin contact with an Asrai. Upon making contact, the colour will begin draining from the touched skin until it matches the off-white of the Asrai, the area becomes significantly colder than the surrounding skin. While harmless by itself, the skin effect by the frost burn becomes very susceptible to sunburn. The effect also has a pain-numbing aspect to it as well as reducing blood flow, Asrai will often seek out injured swimmers and will attempt to help them.

 

Asrai are based upon a British Folkloric creature of the same name. Writing this took a few too many late nights reading poetry and cryptid blogs at 02:30 in the morning, but I'm fairly happy with the result.

Any feedback on the writing or questions about the Asrai and Great Albion are warmly welcomed.

For any more of my stuff, here are my social links.

• Twitter: www.twitter.com/RaptorBricksArt
• Deviant Art: https://www.deviantart.com/raptorbricks
• World Anvil: www.worldanvil.com/author/raptorbricks
• Patreon: www.patreon.com/raptorbricks

A couple people are recommending Inkarnate, but I've found Wonderdraft a lot easier to use personally. Lots of nice little quality of life stuff to help generate a map if you're starting from scratch, and from there it's just drag and drop. There's a fairly active community behind it generating custom asset packs if you have a particular style of icons you're looking for. Generating an entire world map took me less than an hour. If you're interested in TTRPG battle maps, same developer has another product called Dungeondraft that is by far the best battle map design software I've seen.

Inkarnate has a free version or demo or something.

I like /r/FantasyMapGenerator, aka Azgaar's map generator, which works well if you don't have a strong idea already, but you can edit anything it makes or erase it all and start fresh.

I have started with an idea, not very fleshed out yet though. I have also found that as I have been doing some of the worldbuilding (especially when thinking about the magic side of things), it has prompted more ideas I want to include in the story.

As for the map - The website that I've been using (https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/) is really amazing. It generates a random world map (you can specify certain things) from countries to towns (with generated names), rivers and lakes. Then you can tweak pretty much anything you want. Although, I think I did take a little too long on it before doing anything else..

Thanks for your thoughts!

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