
                          Worldmap v1.1
                       General Introduction

Welcome to Worldmap, a roleplaying game aid which can help
you design and map your own fantasy campaign world. If you like
this program, feel free to redistribute it however you wish, so
long as you don't charge anything for it.

The basic idea behind the program is that you have 24 "terrain
tiles" which you can design however you like. You can have one
for mountains, one for oceans, one for plains, one for forests,
and so forth. You then place these tiles on a two-dimensional
grid which moves around you as you explore it. You can also place
cities or other "locations" and attach text files describing
these places. Likewise, you can add roads, rivers, and borders to
your map.

When you want to show the map to your players, you either have to
draw out a version to show to them (no printer drivers have been
developed yet), or simply let your players "view" the map via
main menu selection [e] (where they can look all they want
without accidentally changing anything).

In addition to the program, a number of example "worlds" have been
developed. Four of these are linked together to form an adventure
setting which you can explore.


                       Flatland
                          |
                 ---------------------
                 |                   |
             Portown             StormCastle
                                     |
                                     |
                               The Underground


These four maps also show examples of how to map not only
worlds, but also cities, castles, and dungeons as well.

The fifth "world" is actually a starship map "Starship Vista"
without any links to any of the other maps.

Whatever map you are currently selecting, you can choose Selection
[f] (World Notes) from the main menu to examine background notes
about the map. All of the maps in this package also have their
background notes linked through the map's "Key" which you will
find at coordinates (0,0) of each map respectively.

I developed this program for two reasons. First, there's been a
lot of call on rec.games.frp.misc for world mapping software, and
while I haven't checked out the commercial packages which are
available, I heard that they were a bit tricky to use (as well as
being a bit on the expensive side). I figured it would be nice to
give people a $0 option for those of us who prefer to scrape by
with something cheap and easy. The second reason is that there's
been numerous attempts at doing a networld, however, very few
maps have been generated out of such efforts. I wanted to give
people a way to contribute to a shared-world via a program which
would allow separate maps to join seemlessly together (assuming
everyone is using the same terrain.dat file).

No doubt you will have many questions about worldmap which aren't
addressed here. Please contact me, if so.


   Hit <Q> to return to Help Menu

