Non-RPG Use of FM8

Some of you may not have thought about this, but Fractal Mapper 8 also is an excellent tool for making things that are far removed from your RPG gaming table.

In the last couple of years, I've used it to make maps for history books, hiking guides and the like. Our village has an annual hiking day each year on October 3. This year, we're hiking through the forest to the remnants of old ponds that once were used for cows to drink. The use of these ponds came to feuds between villages, and as a result, the ponds are known even today as Streitweiher or Quarrel Ponds in the English translation. One of those quarrels were settled on the level of high nobility and ended up creating a strange but small border shift between the Castell princedom and the March of Bayreuth. That border change continues on today as the border between two Bavarian counties.

In my days as a newspaper editor we always were eager to use those press releases that came with good graphics. For our press release on the hiking day, I used FM8 to make a map of the area in question showing the strange and fascinating border shift that still exists today. (See the scanned clipping above.) We got one-third of a page in yesterday's newspaper. Without the FM8 map, we probably would have gotten a squib three or four inches long.

Keep FM8 in mind if you do publicity for something where a map can be useful!