New Poll: WG13 Maps

Over at ENWorld, awesome artist and cartographer Jaerdaph has done me the honor of redoing one of the maps for level 2 of “The Castle of the Mad Archmage” into the old style blue and white maps, and it looks TERRIFIC. He has offered to to the same for the other maps in the module in the same style.
And yet aother talented artist has contacted me on the possibility of doing the same!
So I’ll leave it to you, loyal readers. The choices I’ve put into the poll are 8.5″ x 11″ blue maps, poster-sized blue maps (my thought being that it might be nicer to have a single large map, since the dungeon levels I’m envisioning will all span multiple pages), and sticking with the scanned hand-drawn maps. Plus, if there’s something you’d rather see, feel free to choose “other” and discuss it in the comments on this post.

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Wargamer and RPG'er since the 1970's, author of Adventures Dark and Deep, Castle of the Mad Archmage, and other things, and proprietor of the Greyhawk Grognard blog.

6 thoughts on “New Poll: WG13 Maps

  1. Well, legability is the only real vital thing, but if you’ve found people willing to make more polished looking maps for you for free, you may as well take advantage.

  2. I just checked with my local Staples, and printing out one of the 17″x22″ maps would run about $12. Not too bad for a single map, but I’m not sure I’d want to have to shell that out for a dozen different levels!

  3. I’m with Cole: why not make them all available? You have to draw them out for the cartographer to render anyway, and then combining the 8.5x11s into a single-sheet poster map is easily accomplished by the cartographer too.

    Let’s have our cake and eat it too! šŸ˜€

    Allan.

  4. Here’s another alternative to Staples for printing out the maps as large posters:

    http://www.gamer-printshop.com

    I believe the prices are more reasonable than Staples (for some reason my employer is blocking the order page so I can’t tell). The owner is a member of The Cartographer’s Guild (www.cartographersguild.com), and he gets a lot of positive testimonials as to the quality of his work. He recently hosted a mapping challenge constest at the Guild where the prize was a printing of the winning map:
    http://forum.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=4290

  5. It is a problem for me if the grid and background are the same color. So please keep your hand drawn maps!

    For myself, I take the maps and use them in maptool (from rptools.net). First I import them into GIMP. There, I edit them to their outline by removing the grid – which I do by selecting the grid color to be removed. If the grid and the background are the same color, this step pretty much would destroy the map. Once I get the map down to its outline, I add textures appropriate for the floors of the rooms, maybe play with shadows a bit, and then save them to go into maptool.

    It is pretty much the same process that your mapper will be doing, though I’m sure he’s got a lot more professionalism to his work.

    I haven’t done this to your maps yet, but I was planning on it when my campaign takes on the Castle.

    These days I apply this to either output from a random floorplan or something awesome from Tim Hartin’s work at http://paratime.ca/

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