I reviewedversion 2.01a just over two years ago. Since that time, they have fixed some bugs and added new features, addressing some of the complaints of other early reviews. NBOS's web site has several examples of maps and screen shots that show the program in action.

The Fractal Mapper comes with a comprehensive set of mapping tools for creating continents, rivers, roads, towns, dungeons, etc. quickly and easily. The program supports layers, so you can separate terrain, political, and other elements of the map and view them individually or in different combinations. The new terrain and map icons are very nice and more professional in appearance than previous versions and they have added a random-fill function that makes filling out a forest much easier than before. Selecting and moving specific objects can still be tricky, though. You can overlay square or hex grids for your map as well has measure distances based on the scale of your map.

You can create links between maps so that you can click on the city of a continent map and it loads the detailed city map. You can also create and view notes for each object with the click of a mouse. Unfortunately, if you use the HTML export feature, these links do not appear in your HTML document. If all you want to do is draw and print a map for your players, you do not need these nifty linking features.

The FWE is a really nifty toy. You can create continents manually from scratch or have the program generate whole worlds randomly. It is tricky to get a natural, random look when using the manual tools, so I tend to stick with random generation. The elevation is color coded on a scale you can customize. The program also tracks temperature and precipitation, but you only notice these when the values are very low (ice caps or desert). The erosion function will hit your computer resources pretty hard and does not produce very worth-while results. The river-generation feature does not produce very pleasing results, so you are probably better off drawing your own. The "view in globe" feature is keen, though the pinching of the map at the poles can be distracting. The FWE is fun, but the advanced features will probably go unused.

Both the Mapper and FWE have a "view in globe" feature which takes the flat map and wraps it around a sphere that you can then rotate and view from all angles. The results are nice except near the poles where pinching of the map can be distracting. This tool is probably more fun than practical.

My biggest disappointment is that the Mapper and FWE behave as independent programs that do not recognize each other's file format. So, if you create a stunning terrain with FWE and want to add in your manually-drawn rivers, political boundaries, etc., you have to save the map as a bitmap and import it into the Mapper. It works, but not as smoothly as I would like. Another inconvenience is that neither the Mapper and FWE can have more than one map open at a time.

The system requirements are "Intel Pentium class PC, with 16 meg ram, 25 meg hard disk space, running Microsoft Windows 95(with IE4) or 98. 32 meg ram and 16-bit (64k) color graphics highly recommended for 3d terrain." The FWE takes up a lot of resources and I would not recommend it to anyone with less than 233 MHz. The Mapper is not such a system-hog, but since each icon is tracked as a separate bitmap, large maps can become unwieldy without similar computing power.

Registered users of previous versions can upgrade for $10 and I recommend they do. I also recommend the program for those of us who prefer not to draw maps by hand, assuming you have a hearty PC to run it.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)