Good, Simple, Free Hex Mapping

In my last post I talked about the Cthulhutech campaign I’m starting. One of the things I wanted to do for it was an overland hex map. I wanted players to have some small but abstract version of the setting they could keep in their pocket, and mapping has always been my weak point, so the more cartoony it looks the better it would be for my purposes. Besides, Hex mapping is sort of a tradition, and I find it rather amusing just from reading about it, so I wanted to try my hand at it. But I quickly realized that the choices for hex mapping apps that I had were either a) arcane as hell, b) not Mac compatible or c) much more expensive than I’d pay for a hex mapper. I didn’t want to produce an accurate geographical satellite survey – just a grid of funny shapes with basic colors and some symbols.

Then I discovered Hexographer, which is an incredible little web app. It runs in your browser quite aptly and produces colorful, cute, simple hex maps with a nice palette of 1-hex brushes for practically any terrain you could want. It has quite a few useful symbols and a small notation feature. Best of all it saves a file for off-line archival that it can later read, so you can edit your hex map whenever you have access to the internet and that file AND it can also export to PNG, which is a god-send for sharing online. This is definitely the one I plan on using. It’s fast, simple and it does everything I want and thankfully nothing more than that. Now if only there was something like this for tactical grid maps instead of overland. Just simple shapes, symbols, notes and colors on a square grid and that’s it. Though I’m rather happy with Maptools for tactical maps.