Deciding What to Do
The first thing I looked for when I knew I needed a map was a free online map tool. Honestly, I don't even remember the name of the tool I first considered, but it was garbage.
I then looked into YouTube tutorials on making your own maps, and found a great one, by JP Coovert. He seems to have something of an artist background, and a real passion for D&D and in particular, D&D maps. Here is the video that really inspired me, but he has several others that would be useful if you want to hand-draw your maps.
The thing was, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how problematic drawing the map by hand would be. As you play Five Leagues from the Borderlands, you discover more places and add them to the map. You also eliminate camps, clear out delves, and so on. What is important on the map will change, and it seems nearly impossible to have something that both looks good and allows for expansion.
So, I went back to looking for digital tools. The one that every place seemed to bring up was "Inkarnate." I spent a half-hour or so playing with the free version, and I pretty much hated it. It absolutely can make beautiful maps, but it was unintuitive for me to use, and seemed to require a lot of effort to get even the simplest things done. Even worse, I'd find a tool that I'd like to use to add something to the map, and it would be locked behind the pay wall. Now, I don't mind paying for a product, but having to pay for a subscription to use even pretty basic features bothers me.
In the end, I bought "Wonderdraft" for a one-time price. You can get decent-looking maps in a tiny fraction of the time it would take me using Inkarnate, and I think that with practice you can get stuff that looks just as good. I'm not constantly being hounded to pay, and I can add and remove things easily as the campaign progresses.
Without Further Ado...
With less than an hour of playing around, I have a fun map of the area my warband will be adventuring in.
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