I’ve been playing with Photoshop again (and stealing names from all over the place, though this time largely from Pathfinder). More on the details of the campaign, etc. later.
I churned this map out for a sandbox campaign I’m planning on running next fall with the kids at the school gaming club. Of course, not wanting to waste a lot of time dreaming up new names, I did what any good GM should learn to do: I borrowed names from existing products. In this case, my old 1st edition Forgotten Realms box set, Krynn, the 4E DMG, and even some real life locations (e.g., Mirror Lake is in upstate NY). The Scar by the way is where I’m locating some of the locations of the current Dungeon Magazine Chaos Scar adventures, although in my case there’s a very different history behind the creation of the region.
Now that the character creation session is over and the players have helped establish some more of the locations on the map, I’ve been slowing filling in the names. Getting the proper scale for the text has been difficult since if they’re too small they’re very difficult to read, but if they’re too large you can no longer tell what feature they are referring to. Eventually I’m going to turn these into specific layers within a pdf so that you can turn them off and on but for now they’re just names on the map.
I’ve also started experimenting with a new color for the ocean because while the dark blue looks great on screen, it looks very muddy and unimpressive printed out. This is getting closer to what I want but the reefs have a tad too much “glow” to them now so I will need to tweak that next.
For the past couple evenings I’ve been working on developing a map for an upcoming D&D campaign I’m co-DMing: The two of us have been hashing out the details and because I’m a visual learner (especially when it comes to creative processes), I decided to put together a map of our setting. I’ll describe the actual setting in a future post, but I wanted to show off my handiwork, which required only Photoshop, a few hours of work, and a tutorial I found online (more on that later too).
Here’s the work in progress
Continue reading about Cartography with Photoshop – A work in progress »
Inkwell Ideas has a pretty nice, free program on their site that lets you generate and customize old-style hex maps for use with RPGs or miniatures games. It’s pretty nifty, especially if you want to generate a map quickly and effortlessly.
Ok, this is hardly a scientific comparison but here is an old battle map I had made in Dundjinni and one I just made in the E-Adventures mapper. The mapper version took less than 10 minutes to make, including the export to pdf and the transfer to Adobe PS for cropping and conversion to a jpg. The Dundjinni one took a lot longer though I can’t tell you exactly how long off the top of my head. These are the same size images but not necessarily the same scale (I don’t have the time to try and match the scale sizes at the moment).
Continue reading about A comparison of E-Adventures mapper and Dundjinni outputs »
This program is the best battle map (and perhaps generic dungeon map in general) creation program available, especially if you play online via a virtual tabletop like Fantasy Grounds 2 or Battlegrounds.
What is it? In a nutshell, it gives you access to all of Skeleton Key Games tile sets (at last count more than 2500 individual tiles) that you can mix and match via a very simple drag and drop interface to create a unique map. It then lets you export your finished product to a .pdf in one of three different sizes. The results are incredibly good looking and take no more than a couple of minutes.* Since they’re based on SK’s map tiles, they make it easy to pre-plan your encounters although you still need SK’s tile sets if you want to use them with miniatures because the program’s output is too low of a resolution to produce full-sized battle maps.
Obviously these are best suited for D20 and 4E where grid movement is used but they can be used with almost any RPG. For example, they’d work well for Savage Worlds and I may even use them for my Burning Wheel game to provide a more visual representation of the battle even though the game doesn’t need any map at all.
You aren’t just limited to fantasy tiles either: While the selection is still pretty small, there are a number of sci-fi (mainly spaceship) tiles as well as a few others. What I’d love to see are some modern settings, especially city streets.
If you’re playing via a VTT, the program is awesome because you can assemble your map, export it to a pdf and then copy & paste it directly into an image editor. Once you’ve done that all that’s left is cropping and resizing it to meet your needs and then saving it as a .jpg or .png file. Done. I’ve done this with to use with my 4E campaign I run on Fantasy Grounds 2 and the results are awesome.
Why do I love this program?
- It’s simple to use: Just select the tile, select it’s orientation, and drag it to where you want it. That’s it.
- It’s extensive: You’ve got more than 2500 tiles to choose from. The possibilities are practically infinite when you start mixing and matching sets.
- The maps look good: No they’re not photo-realistic, but neither are the tokens I use in FG2, nor the minis I use for my tabletop game.
- It’s very fast: This is related to my first point; I can put together a map for my FG2 game in under 15 minutes, from start to finish. That’s a huge improvement over the 60+ minutes I was using to work with Dundjinni (which runs incredibly slow once your map gets even modestly large) and the results look better.
What’s the cost? $30 via RPGNow which is really cheap for a VTT gamer, considering you’re essentially getting access to all of the Skeleton Key’s map tiles which are worth hundreds of dollars.
Part of this month’s Blog Carnival.
*A clarification: After doing some more research, the maps produced don’t reproduce well for miniature battle maps; they print out great if you want to produce a dungeon map but they are too low of a resolution to print out full-sized tiles at the 1″ per square size. I’ve amended the above review to reflect this.
Continue reading about Blog Carnival: Presenting the E-Adventures Tile Mapper »
