Does anyone know if there are Shackled City maps (in PDF or another format) that are suitable for use with miniatures? It would be great if there was as that way the players as well as the DM’s would be able to see all the great looking maps.
Olaf the Stout
I'm sure there's something at www.therpgenius.com
I downloaded all the maps from RPGenius - they're very nicely done, with all the room numbers and secret doors taken out. Just a great resource to have, and so nice for people to have taken the time to do that and then share it freely.
I debated whether or not to print out Jzadirune and the Malachite Fortress to scale, but the amount of ink it would have taken was prohibitive. And the logistics of revealing the maps room-by-room without giving hints of where secret doors or adjacent rooms are would have made it more work than I was willing to do.
What did work beautifully though was the Lucky Monkey. I took that map and blew it up in MS Paint, cutting it up into page-size pieces and printing it out. I fixed the pages to some cardboard, and it actually worked out really well. The map looked great, and it was a huge hit with the players. The ground floor covered about nine pieces of paper, which isn't bad at all.
I agree with you Olaf that it nice to be able to share the good-looking maps with the players. I think that for some of the nicer maps where there are the big set-piece battles, it's worth the time and effort, but for a bunch of gray halls covering a large area it's not worth the time or expense in ink.
I saw the maps on the RPGenius website. If I were to download them how do I print them out to miniature scale? I have access to a colour laser printer so printing them out isn't really an issue for me.
Olaf the Stout
I am sure there are specific settings someone could give you, but I don't know them off the top of my head. I will, however, share with you what I would do (and it may not work for you as I use graphics editing software like photoshop and illustrator for this type of thing).
First way you could do it is print out just a small portion of the map at 100%. Really you just need one square which you will then measure and do the math to figure out what percentage change you would need to make in the printing of the document. Then you could just change print settings to output at that percentage.
Alternatively you could place the graphic in a layout program and set guides to be one square inch. Then scale the graphic so one square meets the same dimensions and print from there (I prefer this method as I can control where the pages break and create overlapping areas so they can be fit together nicer.)
Sean Mahoney
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I've done two things to do stuff like this with SCAP
1 - I bought Dundjinni and tried to build the maps and print them out. I actually did Bhal-Hamatugn. I had one of my players help, glue the printouts to hardboard, and use toilet-paper tubes for columns to build a 3-D dungeon. Lots of fun, but a lot of work for one set of encounters.
2 - Recently I took my SCAP map to a Kinkos equivalent, and had them photo-enlarge one of the maps, print it out, and laminate it. It wasn't too expensive ($25?) and looks great!
My method was rather crude and laborious, but used only the resources I had on hand. I opened the maps in MS Paint, then cut out chunks that would be approximately page size when enlarged. I used Stretch/Skew to blow them up to the right size, actually putting a ruler up to my screen to check the dimensions. I left some overlap on each page to make it easier to line things up. I cut-up a cardboard box and taped/tacked the pages to it. The results were actually better than what I expected when I first started, and the players loved it.
I did it almost in the same way as Findas. I payed attention in having a big enough enlargment but also in clipping the whole map in a lot of tiles which allow me to built the map on the fly, taking relatively care of what is seen / not seen an so on. The files were created using Photofiltre (freeware) and Powerpoint or Word for preparing the print of a all in one file.
Result is absolutely great and *very* appreciated by the players but :
1) Takes me about 10 hours to prepare maps of a module
2) Uses a lot of sheets of paper and ink (I often assemble some tiles on another sheet of paper to have big rooms of one piece)
3) Needs the use of small pins and a large pin board
4) Needs to sort out and mark all the tiles in a proper way to be able to find out them quickly during the game play
So far I have done it for Jzadirune (but scraped the file), Malachite (5 meg ppt file), Drakthar Way (10 meg ppt file but without some caves which are not interresting to feature IMHO), Lucky Monkey (5 meg doc files).
Also I enlarge three times the standard regular size to give more room for battles. For example a single floor of the Lucky Monkey is at the end a 5'x 4'huge map.
If some of you would like to see how it looks just drop me an email at
philippe.deletombe@vmtubes.fr
I can forward you one of the files from the Lucky Monkey (0.5 meg)
In conclusion, a lot of work but a stunning effect I cannot manage in another way. You have to continue to describe before to use the tiles (especially to excite the players imagination) but it saves *a lot of time* when entering tactical situations. The game flood smoothly without any dead time. And for sure don't worry about the areas which are not useful to map (and save ink and trees too).
One thing you might want to check out is worldworksgames.com They have an excellent selection of cardstock miniatures setups. I just bought three of them and I'm very happy with them.
They have dungeon setups as well as interior setups for taverns, etc.
If you don't mind a little work printing them off and assembling them, I'd advise this as an excellent way to present settings in mini's scale. My players caught a glimpse of one of the sets I bought and their unanimous reaction was "We want to go there NOW!"
Ridolfin,
If I were to print them out I would be cutting them out room by room like you have done. It keeps the sense of mystery in my opinion. However I won't have a couple of the problems that you had though. I won't be paying for printing costs for one and I plan on laminating each individual section. This will eliminate the need for pins. A little bit of blu-tack will do the trick if they are moving about too much.
The time issue can't really be avoided. If it looks good and the players appreciate it then it is worth it though. The last issue can be minimised as long as I stay organised (yeah right! :-) ).
It looks like it is doable though.
Olaf the Stout
I've had a problem trying to use www.therpgenius.com - I clicked on one download and it downloaded with no problem, but ever since then (even the next day) it errors out when I try to do any other download, saying the site is unavailable. I tried deleting all cookies and history in IE, thinking it was only letting me download one item, but that didn't fix anything.
As a note, this has happened before - a few months ago I made one download and then it wouldn't let me do any more that time, too.
Has anyone else had similar problems? Any solutions?
Please disregard my earlier post (immediately above) - today, for the first time, the site is letting me download multiple files. Yay!
Hey Guys,
How about you post these maps that you have made to scale. I would love to check out what youve made, I have the same problem but have not yet attempted it. Maybe post on RPG genius as mentioned above. Many thanks in advance.
That would be fantastic. I'm running SCAP over Fantasy Gounds, and I'd like some nice Dundjinni quality maps for running the encounters. There are a few maps here and there on RPGenius, but they aren't quite up to the visual quality of Dundjinni. For those of you who used that, please post so that I can use them! The scale doesn't matter since I'm not printing them out.
Thanks in advance,
~magnus