Everytime I see some of the fantastic maps in Dungeon, I become sad. Why? Because I realize I'm the only one who will see them. I wish I could use them as handouts or enlarge them for use with miniatures, but they have all of those annoying numbers and secret door thingies on them.
Would it be possible for you, while you're preparing your maps for download on the website, to include another copy without such notations for the players use? I imagine there's a stage the maps go thru when they're created after they're all colored in but before the numbers are applied that could be used.
Would that be doable?
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Oh man, Fletch, you're reading my mind.
THAT would be beyond all my dreams as a DM!!!
Hey, ERIK - can you make dreams come true ;) ???
This was addressed by Paizo with a post on Enworld a few days ago. To paraphrase, currently the time taken to do what you request is more than tney have to devote to web material.
Not a philosophical opposition by Paizo - just an issue of staffing & time.
It's extreemly time prohibative to remove all that stuff, but if they commision the artist to supply them both the "dm map" and a "player's map" it would be simple. The artist is most likely working with layers, so its a matter of a few moments to create the player's map.
This might not be the case, but worth checking. Then again, the artist may want a larger paycheck which Paizo wouldn't like.
I'd do this for Paizo for free, if they provided me with the original map (which, as Dadga mentioned, is most likely in layers).
It's extreemly time prohibative to remove all that stuff, but if they commision the artist to supply them both the "dm map" and a "player's map" it would be simple. The artist is most likely working with layers, so its a matter of a few moments to create the player's map.
This might not be the case, but worth checking. Then again, the artist may want a larger paycheck which Paizo wouldn't like.
Many of our maps are drawn by hand, and the secret doors, hidden areas, etc. are part of the hand drawn artwork, and thus can't be removed by turning off a layer. Some of the maps done by Chris West have elements that can be removed, but oft-times doors and such are part of the base layer of artwork. Additionally, even the layered maps would have to be marked up for a player version and DM version, and then both versions would have to be checked for correct tags and make sure no extraneous elements make it from one map to the other (wouldn't be good to have a secret door show up on the player map, or a door be missing from the DM map, right?) Lots of time needed to do that.
However, if we find a financially feasible way to make player versions of the maps then we'll definitely do it. I know that you guys want them (and we'd love to have them here in the office for games that we play).
Sean Glenn
Art Director Dragon and Dungeon magazines
Take advantage of your player community! There's a lot of willing and talented folks available to help in editing player maps.
Make high resolution, un-layered maps available for download as they were printed.
Provide a mechanism for people to submit edited player maps. Make them available as-is.
TIFF format would preserve image quality.
This may not be the ideal solution, but it's LOTS better than scanning maps from the magazine and editing them for my players, which is what I'm doing now.
Does anyone know if there is a website where you can create your own D&D map online?
try this site:www.irony.com/webtools.html. It's full of useful mapping tools. admitedly, it's rather old, but at least it's online and free.
A neat trick I use is capturing an image of whichever map in the download supplements and using that as a tracing layer in Dunjinni (www.dundjinni.com) to recreate player maps that I can also print as Battle Maps. The color and detail provided in my recreations adds a lot of atmosphere for the players.
There are threads in Dundjinni.com's forums about bringing in the image as a semi-transparent PNG Object and creating your map over it.