Introduction

AutoREALM is a free role-playing game mapping program originally made by Andrew Gryc. This program is an excellent mapping program that can design castles, caves, cities, dungeons and more. It is free to download from http://autorealm.sourceforge.net/.

Finished tutorials

  • How to make a lake
    • An easy lesson on how to make a quite nice lake in AutoREALM.
  • Drawing rivers
    • Why not add a river to the lake?
  • Drawing an island
    • Drawing an island isn't that different from drawing a lake, but this tutorial also includes some other tricks.
  • Creating and editing symbols
    • A small tutorial on creating and editing symbols.
  • Colour translation
    • Colour translation is a powerful tool that can be used for many purposes. For instance to change the look of a symbol or an entire map.
  • How to draw walls and castles
    • An introduction to various ways to draw walls. Also serves as a base to later tutorials on drawing dungeons, towns and ships.
  • Drawing and decorating dungeons
    • Drawing of the various room, hall and cave outlines. Creating openings/breaks in the walls to accommodate side corridors, branches, etc. Placement of door and other basic dungeon symbols.
  • Mountains and rivers
    • Covers the use of symbols and how to place them for a good effect.

Yet to be done

  • Scaling
    • How to zoom in and out in various ways as well as panning.
  • First map
    • A walk through the process of making a map. Describes how to draw an overland map with some basic features (mountains, forests, rivers, roads and some towns or villages).
  • Basic drawing
    • Covers the drawing of fractal lines (coasts), smooth irregular shapes (forest boundaries?), placement (scaling, rotating, shearing) of symbols. Changing of line weights and fill colors.
  • Drawing a town
    • Cover laying out streets, city walls and farmland. Contains a section on linking this map to the overland map.
  • Ship
    • Whether it is a space ship, a steam ship or a wooden vessel, these focus around deckplans. Most ships display a symmetrical outline and how to best/most easily achieve this should be covered.
  • Layers
    • Layers is a powerfull tool that can be used to hid and display things, for instance if you want a GM and player map. They can also be used to help drawing a map.