Battle in Kelmarane

Friday, September 17, 2010

I had the pleasure of meeting and running a game for Kyle and Nani Pratt at PaizoCon a few years back, and since then Facebook has brought me occasional awesome updates from their campaign. But when THIS showed up, it was too awesome not to repost here. Check it out, with the whole story by the mad geniuses behind what looks like an incredible campaign!

(Forewarning to Legacy of Fire players, minor spoilers might follow.)

F. Wesley Schneider
Managing Editor

Nani and I actually took the inspiration from the battle market that someone else made a year ago from here. Originally we thought we were going to just make something exactly the same, but then when we noticed how good the map was, we thought we could blow it up properly to give a good "full immersion" for the market. So my wife Nani took the image into Photoshop, sharpened the image, and then increased the scale to 1 inch. When it was all said and done, we printed it out on ~30 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper and cemented it onto foam board. We had envisioned making the columns look better... but we sadly ran out of time before the game so we had to hurry with a makeshift styrofoam solution!

We really wanted to make our Legacy of Fire game have immersion and put us all into the feel of the game. It's what makes the Paizo products so great, so we're trying to go the extra mile with this one. All of our players were so surprised we had this game aid and thought it was wonderful. It really made everyone understand exactly what the market was like (and just how huge it is compared to the characters themselves. We actually already had the Ruined Crypt of Kelmarane made for after this, and decided we wanted to go the extra mile. I think our players are going to be really surprised at this one too. Hopefully World Works finishes up the Garden from the next AP in time!

The fight itself was completely memorable. Our entire party snuck in through the north entrance using Undrella's key. Our rogue, a goblin, scouted ahead in the guise as a member of the battle market, and ended up talking with both the gnolls in the guardroom and Hurvank. With some very good bluff checks he convinced the poor ogre that the gnolls had set him up to lose in his last bout with Haleen. Hurvank then went over to the gnolls in the guardroom imagining that each one was Haleen and started to strangle them all to death. The goblin quickly went over and pitoned the second door to the guard room, trapping the remaining guards inside, scaring and confusing the gnolls on the first floor. Meanwhile the rest of the party (who didn't know what was going on) heard an ogre running across the market yelling about how he was going to kill Haleen (all three of them). The character with the "Finding Haleen" trait went rushing in to attack the ogre... which caused the bugbears to join the fight against the PCs fighting the ogre. Meanwhile, the gnolls all were trying to kill the ogre and had no clue what was going on. After about 10 more rounds of confusion, the remaining gnolls/defenders on the upper terraces finally figured out what was going on and rushed to protect the remainder of the battle market. By this time, though, the damage was done and a large number of the forces were dead by ogre/bugbear/gnoll/PC hands.

Having the market made prior to this made the combat incredibly easy to run. Instead of just describing how far up the terraces were we just placed the gnolls and described how they were shooting down from above. It was a GREAT aid!

Kyle Pratt
GM & Mad Architect

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Tags: Community Legacy of Fire Maps Pathfinder Adventure Path
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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

Wow!! That is damn impressive. I find the sudden equities of my hand drawn on the fly maps...


remoh wrote:
Wow!! That is damn impressive. I find the sudden equities of my hand drawn on the fly maps...

I wish i had that level of Photoshop-fu and craft-do. Though i might give the maps from rise of the runelords a go, if I can figure out how to rescale them.


Bravo.

I'm another of one of those mad cartographes that will take the extra step and print off a scale map for certain encounters (essentially anything that will fit on the gaming table @ 1" scale).

They are always a hit, but your 3D model would be extra icing. How do you STORE that?

Sovereign Court

Beyond jealous. I must up the ante for my current Kingmaker game. Kudos to 10th power

Liberty's Edge

Excellent work! Very impressed! I'll bet the players loved it!

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

What are the pillars made from? They look carved like plastic or maybe soap? lol

Further, what material did you use to strengthen the actual map so that it would stand on the pillars?

Shadow Lodge

ThornDJL7 wrote:

What are the pillars made from? They look carved like plastic or maybe soap? lol

Further, what material did you use to strengthen the actual map so that it would stand on the pillars?

Blog Post wrote:
When it was all said and done, we printed it out on ~30 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper and cemented it onto foam board. We had envisioned making the columns look better... but we sadly ran out of time before the game so we had to hurry with a makeshift styrofoam solution!


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Did you print the maps straight from the PDF, or did you work on them yourself? If you did them yourself, do you have the files available?


This is amazing looking! You can actually see and measure the elevation and setup the multi-tier encounter in the battle-market in all its perplexity! Awesome job, haven't seen anything this cool looking since all the models for 'The Wreck' in Savage Tide. This raises the bar on tabletop role-playing, and definitely inspires me to deal with more 3-D terrain.
(Which right now is a 3-D model of 'The Well of Debased Eros' from Savage Tide)

Contributor

I especially love the bodies left in the PCs' wake. Carnage!

Shadow Lodge

Tarondor wrote:
Did you print the maps straight from the PDF, or did you work on them yourself? If you did them yourself, do you have the files available?

let's try this again, since my first post got eaten a few days ago

I did pretty much the same thing, save mine was 15 11x17 sheets and glued mine to cardboard. For pillars I used pvc pipe about 6-8" long. (was pretty tall, but wanted pc's to not have trouble seeing the map. (if anyone wants them message me)

Unfortunately, the were able to sneak in, and basically took the shortest route to the third floor only getting in one fight (the stair guards) thanks to the information and the key they got from undrella...

They loved the battle market, but since I didn't have much to work with it lasted just long enough for them to get through it. The pillars I used were starting to corkscrew by the time they made it to the third floor.

Of course it wasn't until after I had it set up that three/four of my players mentioned they could have gotten me better supplies from the factory they work at. Like corrugated plastic large enough for the whole table.

RPG Superstar 2012

Incredible!

Liberty's Edge

That is so cool.

The Exchange

Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

Thanks everyone! Let me make one correction before my wife kills me... she's the DM of the game! We've been planning the Legacy of Fire campaign for a while though, so I'm kinda like an assistant before the games who just so happens to play as well :P

Anyways as to some question answering:

@Tarandor, we used the original file from the PDF but extracted and smoothed the picture using photoshop. The pictures don't show it but if you got really close you'd definitely see a grainy picture. However, for the purpose of standing at least 2 feet away while playing it looked pretty good.

@Jason, The best way to store it is to actually knock off the styrofoam inbetween the tiers, then they can simply be laid flat on top of each other. When we want to use it again it's just a simple matter of gluing the columns back on.

@Wes sadly that wasn't even all the carnage... as we had to reuse gnolls from the bottom floors for the upper tiers! The carnage was awesome though. Gotta love that Hurvank, he was a wonderful "ally."


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Alizor wrote:
Tarandor, we used the original file from the PDF but extracted and smoothed the picture using photoshop.

Okay, let me ask you a beginner question. When I try to grab the image from the PDF, I can't grab it as I can with some PDFs. There's nothing to click on. Did you use some program to do this? Or am I just PDF-impaired?

Shadow Lodge

Tarondor wrote:
Alizor wrote:
Tarandor, we used the original file from the PDF but extracted and smoothed the picture using photoshop.
Okay, let me ask you a beginner question. When I try to grab the image from the PDF, I can't grab it as I can with some PDFs. There's nothing to click on. Did you use some program to do this? Or am I just PDF-impaired?

It depends, what program are you using? I use Foxit Reader. In Foxit what I did is zoom in to about 200% then use the camera tool to select the whole page and copy it. Opened up Paint Shop Pro and paste. Then started dividing up the maps.

I know there's a camera tool in acrobat too, but as I don't have it on this computer I'm not positive if it can copy the whole page or just what's visable on screen.


Acrobat 9 won't let you select the image. You need to use Acrobat 8.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Thanks, Eric and DMFTodd!

So...

Once in Paint Shop Pro, what steps did you take to divide up the maps (should be the last question. I think I can take it from there!)


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Never mind! I printed them out (that's a big stack of cardstock!) I'll post pictures when I finish it.


Would you care sharing your photoshoped map ?

when I have asked my family digital artist, she reply that the whole thing must be vectorized and that she Don't have a Week to do this for a game.


Kelmarane has Fallen !

and the 3D flipmat of the arena that this thread inspired me was more than useful.

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