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D&D Mapping tools for the Mac

It turns out that OmniGraffle is a sufficient tool for doing maps on the Mac.

You can do it the easy way, scanning or otherwise acquiring an image of the underlying map - like I did here:

where I took the map from the Cormyr article from Dragon, cut the appropriate area out, converted it to B&W and added it as a background to OmniGraffle. Make it transparent so that a grid shows and draw my additions on top.

The other way to do it is to actually draw the terrain from scratch, which is possible and probably not much harder than any other tool. Certainly good enough for the sort of topographical maps I want to do, and I'm sure you could do pretty fancy stuff if you actually had graphic talent.

Apple Mac Tools for DMs

A quick brain dump of the tools I'm currently using to manage a 4e D&D campaign I'm starting in the Forgotten Realms on my Macs:

• Bento: it's a pretty neat way to store information about NPCs, locations, maps and so on - cook up a custom format and load the information in.


• PDF versions of the books: they fit in your laptop, they're searchable and you can cut-and-paste from them into your own documents (for personal use only, obviously).


• Devonthink PRO to organise the PDFs and other documents in a useful way. I'm not sure I'd buy this just for D&D, but since I own it already for other things, it's a great way of organising them.


• Pages: to prepare player hand-outs.

Something I don't have is a suitable mapping tool. I might have to sucumb to Campaign Cartographer on the PC, I don't know.

Oh my god! They killed FR, you bastards!

Getting back into D&D with 4th Edition after an extended absence starting about the time that they moved to third edition is deeply amusing: I started way back in the days of AD&D 1e and was always slightly disconcerted by the changes made to the Forgotten Realms setting as part of the transition to 2e. I don't even know what they did to accomodate 3e in the Realms - 3e became too much like GURPs for me, with too much flexibility and overly complex rules. Now, as part of the transition to 4e, they're changing all sorts of things again and a good segment of the fan-boys are up in arms. Again. To the extent that ignoring their rantings bemoaning the changes - as yet only hinted at - on forums is hard work.

Guys, they ruined the realms with all that nonsense about the Time of Troubles, ok? That was fifteen years ago. Get over it.

Anyway, I'm going to do what I always do with settings: keep what I like and ignore the bits I don't.

Omnifocus becomes usable, iPhone becomes inevitable.

The inability to sync the otherwise wonderful Omnifocus across computers had pretty much made it impractical for me: I use a laptop and a desktop all the time, and a to-do list that's only available on one of them was useless to me. So I've been using my paper diary as a to-do list manager, which isn't ideal.

Now the latest (beta) versions can sync across any Webdav server - including your iDisk - and the iPhone that is now becoming inevitable for me. We have too many Macs and the integration offered by the 2.0 software is too tempting!