BigRedRod
8th of June, 2008, 20:50
Maps are fairly important to many of our PBPs, and with D&D 4th Edition being even more reliant on accurate depiction of combat scenes I think it's time we all talked about the best way of creating maps for our games.
Types of Maps
There are two general types of map which we use. The first being a tactical or combat map. These are used for round by round tracking of combat with elements moving about. The second is the overland or world map, these tend to be static as the layout of a city rarely changes on a short timescale and two cities tend to stay a fixed distance apart.
99 Problems
In face to face games tactical maps are quite often just marker pen scribbles on some kind of white board or battlemap. You draw the outlines and then set out your miniatures (whatever they might be). Bam. Job done. If you use modules it is even easier as they often come with maps that you can just lie on a table and use.
In this scary digital world though we don't have white boards, pens or miniatures and what should be a fairly trivial problem becomes a bit of a pain. All too often we, as DMs, promise maps to our players but just find ourselves unable to deliver. So I thought I'd throw out my experiences of map making and hopefully attract some of the more skilled members to chip in.
Resources
There are two specialist programs for making game maps which I've come across:
Campaign Cartographer (http://www.profantasy.com/) and Dundjinni (http://www.dundjinni.com/)
I've limited experience with both of those despite having bought a copy of CC3 and played with the Dundjinni trial. Possibly due to a lack of patience on my part neither program seemed very useful. Good maps can be made but they rely on either having an archive of art to draw upon or the ability to create this art. Without these, maps tend to look quite crude.
There's also a java map design applet which allows you to sketch very basic maps and save them as a code which you can update round by round. I can't find a link to a mirror (as the site it came from now seems broken) which is rather annoying. This is a perfectly serviceable solution and for a good few years it was what I used. The problem is that it's very limited and quite often players seemed too lazy to bother loading maps.
Edit: itches found a working mirror (http://pages.infinit.net/pdclarke/mmee/index.html).
And this (http://www.stonesword.com/dungeonmaker.php), which is good but very limited in the tiles and icons, which is a shame.
I'm lucky in that I've got a Photoshop license from my place of work and although I'm no artist I've found that it is much easier to simply use such a program to create maps than to mess around with programs specifically created for the purpose (Which is counter intuitive).
In having a search around for how others solve this tricky problem I stumbled upon another resource which I quite like but I feel it would cause some of the site's members to scream out in impotent rage. Using a 32x32 pixel grid you can essentially use snes RPG tiles to craft custom maps, the sprites are also very (http://www.videogamesprites.net/Links/) readily (http://charas-project.net/resources.php) available.
Make Maps The BigRedRod Way
I won't lie to you, I essentially cheat at map making.
Step 1: Find a source map. Good general maps with grids and the like can be found here (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/mw). It's not an unlimited selection and some are only available in frustratingly low resolution, but it is the best I've found. The key problem is that one of my games so far hasn't included a single wilderness or dungeon encounter, instead it's all been fights within a city. Decent maps of a densely packed fantasy city are rather rare.
From the "Castle Ravenloft and Complete Mage" maps though we find the map named "The Village of Barovia" comes the closest to a city map of sufficient quality that it can be blown up and used with a 5ft square grid upon it (as required for combat in D&D). Here's the original map:
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d49/PASG/Village40ft.jpg
Step 2: Make the source map a bit more suitable. What this means for our chosen map is cropping an area of it to make it look more like a city than a village, resizing the cropped section and adding a 5ft grid. After resizing it ended up looking rather ugly (as resizing does with complicated images) so I committed the cardinal sin of using a photoshop filter in an effort to make it look more like a painting. A better, but more skill reliant and time consuming, solution would be to trace the cropped source image in Artrage, I could have also added a few houses in the process here to up the population density.
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d49/PASG/BallacheJunctioncopy.jpg
There is much more that can be done here. More recent maps have seen me carefully cutting out elements to recolour or clone.
Step 3: Add the counters. So now we've got a map of a useful size with a grid. We're nearly done. Now it's just a case of adding some counters to represent the players and the monsters. There are lots of token packs available so it's possible to use these for a more graphical approach, I just settled for white circles trimmed with coloured edges (blue for players, red for badguys, green for allies and grey for unknown). This is fairly trivial in photoshop, you just draw two circles, one white and one slightly larger coloured one. Line them up. Add a label (I use single letters for the most part) and then merge the layers to yield a single counter. Keeping each counter on its own layer is essential as it lets you move them about.
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d49/PASG/BallacheJunctionR1.jpg
Step 4: Every time you post in combat you update the map. This usually just involves shifting counters about. Now as I was still learning at this point I was a bit inconsistent with how I represented things. There were a few complications in this combat:
1) My players took shelter inside the houses
2) The badguys were standing atop the houses
3) One of my players threw a feather token and spawned an oak tree
My end solutions were as follows:
1&2) Originally I made the tokens smaller, but I then settled for using black dots (one for the ground floor, two for the first and zero for actually being stood on the roof)
3) This was unexpected and quite good fun. I ended up digging through the map archive again to find a tree stump and cutting it out (thanks to the magic wand tool in photoshop). I then found image showing trees with foliage and cut that out. The tree trunk was resized and placed on the map with the foliage on top and made slightly transparent. It worked quite well.
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d49/PASG/BallacheJunctionR3-2.jpg
And that is how I make my maps despite a lack of artistic skill.
I encourage other people to show off their maps and to do their best to describe any clever tricks they've stumbled across.
Types of Maps
There are two general types of map which we use. The first being a tactical or combat map. These are used for round by round tracking of combat with elements moving about. The second is the overland or world map, these tend to be static as the layout of a city rarely changes on a short timescale and two cities tend to stay a fixed distance apart.
99 Problems
In face to face games tactical maps are quite often just marker pen scribbles on some kind of white board or battlemap. You draw the outlines and then set out your miniatures (whatever they might be). Bam. Job done. If you use modules it is even easier as they often come with maps that you can just lie on a table and use.
In this scary digital world though we don't have white boards, pens or miniatures and what should be a fairly trivial problem becomes a bit of a pain. All too often we, as DMs, promise maps to our players but just find ourselves unable to deliver. So I thought I'd throw out my experiences of map making and hopefully attract some of the more skilled members to chip in.
Resources
There are two specialist programs for making game maps which I've come across:
Campaign Cartographer (http://www.profantasy.com/) and Dundjinni (http://www.dundjinni.com/)
I've limited experience with both of those despite having bought a copy of CC3 and played with the Dundjinni trial. Possibly due to a lack of patience on my part neither program seemed very useful. Good maps can be made but they rely on either having an archive of art to draw upon or the ability to create this art. Without these, maps tend to look quite crude.
There's also a java map design applet which allows you to sketch very basic maps and save them as a code which you can update round by round. I can't find a link to a mirror (as the site it came from now seems broken) which is rather annoying. This is a perfectly serviceable solution and for a good few years it was what I used. The problem is that it's very limited and quite often players seemed too lazy to bother loading maps.
Edit: itches found a working mirror (http://pages.infinit.net/pdclarke/mmee/index.html).
And this (http://www.stonesword.com/dungeonmaker.php), which is good but very limited in the tiles and icons, which is a shame.
I'm lucky in that I've got a Photoshop license from my place of work and although I'm no artist I've found that it is much easier to simply use such a program to create maps than to mess around with programs specifically created for the purpose (Which is counter intuitive).
In having a search around for how others solve this tricky problem I stumbled upon another resource which I quite like but I feel it would cause some of the site's members to scream out in impotent rage. Using a 32x32 pixel grid you can essentially use snes RPG tiles to craft custom maps, the sprites are also very (http://www.videogamesprites.net/Links/) readily (http://charas-project.net/resources.php) available.
Make Maps The BigRedRod Way
I won't lie to you, I essentially cheat at map making.
Step 1: Find a source map. Good general maps with grids and the like can be found here (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/mw). It's not an unlimited selection and some are only available in frustratingly low resolution, but it is the best I've found. The key problem is that one of my games so far hasn't included a single wilderness or dungeon encounter, instead it's all been fights within a city. Decent maps of a densely packed fantasy city are rather rare.
From the "Castle Ravenloft and Complete Mage" maps though we find the map named "The Village of Barovia" comes the closest to a city map of sufficient quality that it can be blown up and used with a 5ft square grid upon it (as required for combat in D&D). Here's the original map:
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d49/PASG/Village40ft.jpg
Step 2: Make the source map a bit more suitable. What this means for our chosen map is cropping an area of it to make it look more like a city than a village, resizing the cropped section and adding a 5ft grid. After resizing it ended up looking rather ugly (as resizing does with complicated images) so I committed the cardinal sin of using a photoshop filter in an effort to make it look more like a painting. A better, but more skill reliant and time consuming, solution would be to trace the cropped source image in Artrage, I could have also added a few houses in the process here to up the population density.
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d49/PASG/BallacheJunctioncopy.jpg
There is much more that can be done here. More recent maps have seen me carefully cutting out elements to recolour or clone.
Step 3: Add the counters. So now we've got a map of a useful size with a grid. We're nearly done. Now it's just a case of adding some counters to represent the players and the monsters. There are lots of token packs available so it's possible to use these for a more graphical approach, I just settled for white circles trimmed with coloured edges (blue for players, red for badguys, green for allies and grey for unknown). This is fairly trivial in photoshop, you just draw two circles, one white and one slightly larger coloured one. Line them up. Add a label (I use single letters for the most part) and then merge the layers to yield a single counter. Keeping each counter on its own layer is essential as it lets you move them about.
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d49/PASG/BallacheJunctionR1.jpg
Step 4: Every time you post in combat you update the map. This usually just involves shifting counters about. Now as I was still learning at this point I was a bit inconsistent with how I represented things. There were a few complications in this combat:
1) My players took shelter inside the houses
2) The badguys were standing atop the houses
3) One of my players threw a feather token and spawned an oak tree
My end solutions were as follows:
1&2) Originally I made the tokens smaller, but I then settled for using black dots (one for the ground floor, two for the first and zero for actually being stood on the roof)
3) This was unexpected and quite good fun. I ended up digging through the map archive again to find a tree stump and cutting it out (thanks to the magic wand tool in photoshop). I then found image showing trees with foliage and cut that out. The tree trunk was resized and placed on the map with the foliage on top and made slightly transparent. It worked quite well.
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d49/PASG/BallacheJunctionR3-2.jpg
And that is how I make my maps despite a lack of artistic skill.
I encourage other people to show off their maps and to do their best to describe any clever tricks they've stumbled across.