This week I’m looking at how to take published maps, rescale them for miniature or virtual tabletop use and then slice them up for printing at home. Continue reading “Tips and Tricks: Rescaling Maps and Slicing Them Up”
Tag: Map
How to draw hills on a top down map
Today – how to draw simple hills with photoshop or Gimp. This works best for large scale maps, like world maps or regional maps, where you have a lot of terrain to cover.
- Lay in the shadows with a large fuzzy brush. In photoshop or the Gimp I’d suggest doing this on a layer with the blend mode set to overlay.
- Lay in the highlights with a slightly smaller fuzzy brush. Avoid sharp edges. You want hills to be rolling, and in contrast to the sharp peaks of a mountain range. Again, here I’ve done this on an overlay layer.
- Add colour (here I’m a layer with the blend mode set to colour) and leave the hills slightly browner than the flat plains. That helps to differentiate them – and means that even with subtle light and shade they’ll be easy to read at a glance.
A couple of other things to keep in mind:
- Lay in the rivers first. As rivers drain the water out of hills, they will determine where the hills should go.
- Less is more when it comes to shadows and highlights here. Your mountains should have the darkest shadows. Make sure that your hill shadows are quite a bit more subtle.
I hope that’s useful, chip in if there’s a particular topic you’d like to see covered!
The Arboretum
Forstor Nagar is an icy city, carved out of a glacier in the frozen north. However not all things can be created from ice, and the city needs wood for building, and fruits and berries for nutrition. But how do you grow things in these sub-zero temperatures? Well, first of all you create greenhouses, and then you heat them with drugged remorhaz! What could possibly go wrong?
In this week’s map pack we find an arboretum in the heart of the frozen city. The remorhaz (or other burrowing creature of your choice) has escaped, and run riot through the quarter leaving destruction in its wake.
With each square representing 5 feet this is another large battle area, with both indoor and outdoor areas (notice the smokehouse to the west of the map). The trees provide places for PCs to hide and nervous adventurers can retreat to the icy roofs of the houses to the south to use ranged attacks. Continue reading “The Arboretum”
Bundles of maps
A couple of years ago I teamed up with Steve Russell to turn a couple of the maps that I created for the Rituals of Choice adventure path into map packs. The plan was to see whether people were interested in the maps themselves as a product separate to the adventures. The packs initially just included a multi-page pdf that allowed people to print them out at home and assemble them on the table, but quickly expanded to include high res jpgs, an A4 bundle alongside the US letter format packs, gridded and gridless versions of the maps and finally maptool campaign files for those of us who prefer to use virtual tabletops.
So did it work? With over 2200 map packs sold at the time of posting this I think I can say yes! Continue reading “Bundles of maps”
Knights of France Map
I was asked to create a map of a (slightly) alternate France map for Interaction Point Games – for their product Kingdoms of Legend: Knights of France. It’s great fun to take a shot at real world locations. I previously did a map of the west coast of Scotland, but this time it was over the channel to Brittany and Orleans:
Castles, Kobolds and 3D terrain
It’s been quiet around here for a few weeks – but that’s going to change. There will be updates on all sorts of fun developments through the week – so keep an eye out for new things. To start the week – two new products that spun off from the same idea. I pitched some map ideas for the back cover of Kobold Quarterly 18. Out of the collection the one that got picked up was a Keep guarding a Watchfire on the outskirts of the city of Friula in the world of Midgard. There’s a bit of Midgard lore in there, but the core of the adventure is that the adventurers have to storm the castle and light the watchfire. It’s a capture the flag adventure with lots of ways in to the keep.
Just before I go on to talk a little more about the map, let me just spare a few words for Kobold Quarterly 18. That cover is just astonishing. That stands up to the best Dragon covers I can think of. The Kobold is growing some very sharp claws indeed. The content stands up to the cover’s promise. It’s a fantastic balance of fluff and crunch, and continues to walk the line between the different games it supports (now Dragon Age, Pathfinder and 4E) with deft aplomb. Above all, every article can be easily repurposed for use with your own game. A great game idea is a great idea no matter what you play.
For this Kobold I created the Watchfire Keep map for my adventure “Who Watches the Watchfires” that lies within the pages. Continue reading “Castles, Kobolds and 3D terrain”
Free Dungeon Tiles
Roll up! Roll up! Get your free dragon skeleton here! Profantasy are celebrating 50 annual styles by giving one away for free – and they picked my dungeon style! You can grab it from their website here.
New Fantasy Maps from The Elusive Foe by Interaction Point Games
This map was created for the Pathfinder adventure The Elusive Foe by Interaction Point Games which has just come out. The action takes place in Scotland and the route takes in rolling forested hills and ruined towers. The real fun here was in the icons, and the inset map. I’m from Scotland so it was great to have the chance to illustrate a part of the world I know really well. Continue reading “New Fantasy Maps from The Elusive Foe by Interaction Point Games”
The Old Stross Bathhouse
Streets of Zobeck has been unleashed upon the world by Open Design this week. It’s an adventure anthology of 7 Pathfinder adventures for levels 1-10 set in the city of Zobeck in the Midgard world. But that’s not all, it details drop in locations and stand alone NPCs as well as feats, traits, spells and gear for your gritty inner city gutter rat. The majority of the maps are by Gill Pearce, but I got to work on one of the lairs of villainy – the Old Stross Bathhouse:
Pre-orders are up for The Breaking of Forstor Nagar!
Savage battlecries and screams of pain echo through the streets and off the raw sheer walls that make up the carved stronghold of Forstor Nagar. The cannibalistic troops of The Hungering Legion have breached the gates, and the defenders have been routed. Continue reading “Pre-orders are up for The Breaking of Forstor Nagar!”