RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32
|
Our group has always just used a normal blank vinyl battlemat and drawn map details in wet-erase before the start of game (sometimes using more than one mat if necessary). Assuming this is not an option for you, the only other thing I can say is that Paizo releases "Map Folios" at the end of every adventure path which contain all of the maps used in the entire path on paper. These maps are not laminated and thus should not be drawn on (unless you don't want to use them again) but they serve the function of "being a map" pretty well.
Unfortunately, as I said, these are released at the END of an Adventure Path, so if you want to go that route, you may want to consider Carrion Crown (which just finished) instead of Jade Regent.
Hello there friends. I am relatively new to Pathfinder and D20 RPGs. I have been playing once a week, on average, since April. In the excitement of my experiences, I told my cousins and some of their friends about it and they immediately asked if I would host a game for them as well. As of last weekend, I managed to navigate them through the Crypt of the Everflame module. Now, after hearing them talk about the excitement of Gunslingers, Ninjas and Samurai, I thought I would jump on the Adventure Path that Paizo just released, Jade Regent.
Here's where I am a looking for a little training. In the first phase of volume 1, we deal with the large swamp that the PCs have to navigate to deal with finding the "Warden" and handling the goblin menace. When I was dealing with the Everflame module I had the crypt flipmat for the PCs to play on and it made movement easy...however, there are no premade maps that I can use for this one. The swamp map in the pdf also says that the grid is 100 ft squares. How do GM's usually handle maps and navigating a party through these types of modules?
Again, I apologize for such a noob question, but in my weekly group, we've always had the option of playing on pre-made flipmats. I've not had an opportunity to experience gameplay from an Adventure Path perspective yet and any advice would be greatly appreciated from the veteran players/GMs.
What I've been doing (prior to the map folios arriving) is extract the image and reprint it without the label layer.
For maps like the swamp I just lay it on the table with a marker like a bead or coin to indicate the current party positioning.
Battle scale maps on the other hand I normally draw myself as I can't afford $1000 in printer ink per AP (Jade Regent Vol 1 battle maps when printed to 1in scale clocks in at around 60-70 pages)
One other suggestion I have for you that has worked out well in my game is to find the encounters that have stat blocks in the bestiary only and copy those stat blocks onto index cards/cheat sheets so your not flipping pages trying to find monsters like I did the first time I ran one.
Hope that helps.
|
For combat
battlemat linky
pens linky
For travel
I sometimes give players a hand-drawn map that I have made (unless the AP has a suitable handout). Other times I just ask them where they want to go and give a few options: "Do you want to take the quick route through the swamp, or the longer path that skirts the lake and is safer, or pay more to go quickly on a boat over the lake?"
How do GM's usually handle maps and navigating a party through these types of modules?
I usually just describe the locations and have pre-drawn encounter locations mapped out. If the party is going to explore an entire swamp but there's only really one defined encounter, I'll draw a simple map for that encounter and fill it with some swamp terrain. (I really should get pictures up of one of my maps so I can illustrate this for you, but, I don't think I have even a single one.)
I do this by taking a vinyl mat or a big pad of paper and drawing the map either in my Crayola markers or in my vis a vis wet erase markers (I prefer vis a vis to lumocolor because the lines are thinner and in general it uses less ink which means less clean up and a longer lifespan on the markers). I take the map and draw it out as it is in the PDF, square to square, smashing together what I can so that nothing runs off the edge of the mat. Usually, I have to pre-draft using a normal human-sized graph paper pad. This whole process takes about two hours a night every D&D night, or even more if there are a lot of encounter locations. This is because I pretty everything up. I draw individual bricks in piles around shattered walls, for instance. If you bare-bones drew it out, you could probably get by with 30 minutes of map prep.
I really recommend this big mat for most AP usage. Adventure Path maps once upon a time actually fit the 22 square by 25 square battle mats, and now they very rarely fit even these 32 square by 47 square mats. If you play on a kitchen table instead of like a coffee table or patio table, this mat is pretty cool, fits well, can be rolled halfway to reveal locations as the PCs explore-- you know, whatever. Sometimes you'll have to smash maps together or smush them to save space, which is fine. One is enough for most groups, but if your group is smash-and-grab and likes to clear encounter locations like a SWAT team, I would honestly suggest buying two so you can have everything drawn out in advance. Another good idea is using the graph paper I listed above to draw out fringe encounters-- like, if, for instance, your next upcoming session was a long investigation, a battle in a church and then the catacombs, you might want to draw the catacombs on graph paper. That way, if your group solves the investigation really fast and speeds through the church, your catacombs are already drawn and you can move right along. If they don't, you have them for next week. If they don't speed along but still get by quick, you can have them half-explore the catacombs and then start them up again the next week on the same map without having to re-draw it.
(On the topic of re-drawing, by the way, vinyl mats are NOTORIOUS for letting colors seep in if they're not erased within a few nights of being drawn on. I've seen faint afterimages of statues, couches and things stick on mats week by week, and I've heard stories of people rolling mats out of storage to find that their pal who put it away drew a giant elf on it and it's stuck in there permanently. It can be removed, with persistence, but it's better to wash them and put them away after every game night than "pause" the game, leave it sitting, and risk getting to see an outline of a corpse or a lava floe on the map for the next six sessions.)
Also if you are insane you can buy one of the biggest mats ever. My FLGS supplied this mat for free for years and I dearly miss it. It is way too huge and way too costly but if you really never want to "squash" your maps together or run out of map space, this mat is amazing. This mat is also $%!@#ing huge and will not fit on any tables-- my FLGS had massive tables and even then I had to play with a good 3ft of map hanging off of the table on my side.
"Map Folios"
I heavily suggest against map folios for a DM who wants to actually draw a map for miniatures to move around on.
Most of these maps aren't made for gameplay-- they're made for admiring, pinning on walls, mapping out large areas, or in the case of early APs, being 8 by 11 inch reproductions of maps that are in the book.
As far as mapping out a giant swamp goes... there's no need to draw the entire thing. What I would do is replicate the drawing of the swamp on a large piece of paper (enough for everyone at the table to see from around the table) and use a game token to represent the PCs moving around on the map. As they near locations that are fleshed out in the module or enter random encounters, move it from macro to micro and have them set up their characters on a pre-drawn vinyl mat or paper mat you prepared in advance.
I may have just rambled a lot without giving a single piece of usable advice, so let me know how I did and I'll clarify.
So, with regards to travel, when not in combat, as a GM, how am I reflecting the "3/4 movment through terrain"? I've never experienced the mechanics for tracking time in the game before, so I'm unfamiliar with those types of mechanics. What impact is that supposed to be making on our adventurers?
Check out Chapter 7 - pg170-174 for some more info on moving around in a non-combat manner. Heck, that entire chapter is good for information.
Basically, your PCs travel for about 8 hours a day. The other hours are sleeping, making camp, packing up and getting ready for the day.
Every 8 hours, they can move so many miles. If they're on foot, it's 3 (walking, exploring) to 6 (moving with purpose) miles per hour, or 24 miles in 8 hours walking.
Generally assuming that the PCs aren't trying to exhaust themselves by moving with purpose all day, they would walk about 24 miles through the swamp. Swamp terrain makes that 24 miles divide by 3/4ths to 18 miles. In a day of travel, the party can cover 18 miles of swamp.
But really, the rules are kind of ambiguous. Do some calculations for yourself, make assumptions on how long encounters (social and combat) take with the post-combat healing, looting, prodding, talking, buying items, that kind of thing. It's a subsystem that doesn't really need to be there if you have a decent grasp on how far you'd like your PCs to explore every day, when you want night to begin to fall.
So, with regards to travel, when not in combat, as a GM, how am I reflecting the "3/4 movment through terrain"? I've never experienced the mechanics for tracking time in the game before, so I'm unfamiliar with those types of mechanics. What impact is that supposed to be making on our adventurers?
The only time I track movement per every five foot square is during combat, pre-combat ambush prep, stealth attempts through hostile/restricted territory, and so on.
In the core rulebook, table 7-6 deals with distance and travel. If all the PCs have a speed of 30, then it will take the party a minute to move through a 300ft square; one round is equal to six seconds.
For a 30ft speed (based on the slowest member) party, without rounding off:
1/4 speed (0.25x30) == 7.5ft
1/2 speed (0.5x30) == 15ft
3/4 speed (0.75x30) == 22.5ft
As you can see, if you want your party to feel bogged down (pun intended), it's far easier to use the half-speed reduction. Personally, I'd only apply the movement penalty in combat.
Atheral, would you mind sharing what you might use to take the extracted map image and expand it more to the playable scale? Not quite the full size for the 300 ft/square, but for some of the smaller maps.
Well to tell the truth my method is kinda slipshod but here is what I do.
I open the PDF in either Adobe Acrobat or in Adobe Reader (it seems that as long as its not version 9 it has the functionality to do this) Then do a copy/paste into something like Excel or Word that has a ruler feature (you can do this straight from Acrobat I think but I'm not proficient in its use) then I just scale the map till the grid on the image has been adjusted to ruler/page size and I like the size/scale of the image. This may affect some image quality loss due to size distortion though.
Another option I've played with is using Paint (or Gimp if your a fan of that) and after setting the image size I'll adjust the print scale typically between 200 and 300% but that can end up being a very large map.
Now that I re read this it doesn't seem very helpful. I got the idea from another tread on here but I can't remember which one. There are programs out there designed to extract and resize images out of pdfs maybe one of those would work better than my method but hey I'm lazy when it comes to stuff like that.
Overland Maps:
I've had to do a fair bit of managing overland movement (and speeds decreased by terrain) in my Serpent's Skull PbP. For these purposes, I adapted Laurefindel's Cross-Country Overland Round houserules (which govern all-day movement) down to an hourly Exploratory Overland Round movement scale.
Even if I was running this for a Face-to-Face game instead of a PbP, I suspect I'd still track overland movement/progress using MapTools, Photoshop, and a hex template that I created to go with the hourly movement scale. I'd then simply output the overland map to my computer monitor from the laptop so that others could see it. Since there don't need to be actual minis on such a map, there's no real need to lay it out on a table like with the battlemaps.
To actually get the images out of the PDF, I use Some PDF Image Extract. It will go thru the PDF file and output all the graphics to a folder of your choosing. You can then find the image of the map and import it into Photoshop/Gimp/MapTools/whatever.
Battle Maps:
When a battle comes up in the midst of a huge area like that, simply think of it like an old school top-down RPG. You aren't so much zooming-in on the big overland map so much as generating (i.e. drawing) an impromptu battlefield and marking it sufficiently so that players can tell what sort of terrain is what, (i.e. blue markers for water, maybe brown for a downed tree, green for difficult terrain, red for fire, and black for walls or other features).
You can then simply indicate that your players should place their minis in a given region of the map, or arrange them according to their pre-established 'marching order'. While I don't do this myself, you could probably pick up some decor intended for hobby railroad train set and place tiny trees or spongy moss on the mat to make the terrain features easier to understand. If you don't want to go erasing such maps, a simple solution is to get one of those big easel pads with 1" graph paper grids like this.
Using the interactive maps that came with the AP, you could just click player view and print those out as player handouts. While the AP does say no one really has mapped the swamp accurately, there's nothing stopping you to ignore that and hand the map off to the players at they begin exploring if that makes running the AP easier for you and your group. I might do that for my group as well.
I've been running Rise of the Runelords and it's my first AP to run as well. I've got a really limited budget and only limited color printer access, so I've been experimenting quite a bit with different ways of handling this. The solution I like best (and my players prefer too!) is to let one of the PCs assume the role of cartographer and just give them fairly detailed descriptions of each area they enter. I'll kind of watch over his shoulder as he maps just to make sure there isn't a huge disconnect between what's published and what he draws, but accuracy doesn't have to be 100% and the players like that they get to use their imagination a little more this way when imagining the settings.
When combat breaks out, depending on the situation I often use just a 8x10 grid I printed out on regular old 8.5x11 printer paper. For bigger brawls I get the battlemap out, but most dungeon skirmishes don't get much bigger than this and it's a lot less cumbersome and easier to prepare.
My two cents :) Glad you're getting some good ideas.