Contributor
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Agree. There are circuitous ways to get them to the right size (I use www.sejda.com/pdf-to-jpg to save the page as a .jpg, then photoshop to enlarge it, then save it back down to a .pdf and then print it posterized over 9 pages), but it would be nice if buying a scenario included an attachment for the custom map at the correct size... since the custom map is the one we're most likely to need to print.
Venture-Captain, Isles—Online
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That method is helpful, but I think people would really prefer that we didn't have to go through a 16 step process to print usable battlemaps.
Essentially, we'd like it if Paizo did that process for us and included it with the scenario.
Its been asked before, John Compton told me (in person) that the maps are included at their submission resolution, there are no 'high res' versions available. So the only option is to scale them up - then you still have to account for all the types of printers used (plan, US letter, A3, A4 etc) and if you want to use a commercial printers, there is the added issue of different file format requirements.
Organized Play Lead Developer
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Its been asked before, John Compton told me (in person) that the maps are included at their submission resolution, there are no 'high res' versions available. So the only option is to scale them up - then you still have to account for all the types of printers used (plan, US letter, A3, A4 etc) and if you want to use a commercial printers, there is the added issue of different file format requirements.That method is helpful, but I think people would really prefer that we didn't have to go through a 16 step process to print usable battlemaps.
Essentially, we'd like it if Paizo did that process for us and included it with the scenario.
I can confirm. The maps that we include in the scenarios are at the same (or negligibly dissimilar) resolution as we commission and receive them. Printed map products (e.g. Flip-Mats) are ordered at a much higher resolution and cost considerably more to produce. I would also speculate that they take the cartographer considerably more time to create than a smaller scenario map. Those are costs and stages that make more sense for a general purpose map (e.g. Forest, Bigger Keep, or Warehouse) that's marketed to a wide audience, easily reused, and produced about 6–8 times a year. The same treatment makes less sense for scenarios, which now involves about 25 Flip-Mats worth of maps per year (between the Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society campaigns).
That said, we began including untagged custom maps in the back of scenarios to make it a little easier for GMs to print out for their personal use. If there are steps we can take to make these easier to use, we're open to exploring them.
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I can confirm. The maps that we include in the scenarios are at the same (or negligibly dissimilar) resolution as we commission and receive them. Printed map products (e.g. Flip-Mats) are ordered at a much higher resolution and cost considerably more to produce. I would also speculate that they take the cartographer considerably more time to create than a smaller scenario map. Those are costs and stages that make more sense for a general purpose map (e.g. Forest, Bigger Keep, or Warehouse) that's marketed to a wide audience, easily reused, and produced about 6–8 times a year. The same treatment makes less sense for scenarios, which now involves about 25 Flip-Mats worth of maps per year (between the Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society campaigns).
That said, we began including untagged custom maps in the back of scenarios to make it a little easier for GMs to print out for their personal use. If there are steps we can take to make these easier to use, we're open to exploring them.
We're a long way from the dark days of Season 5 and early Season 6 with mapping, but echoes of that dark past still sometimes haunt us. In 10-03, I had to [redacted redacted redacted] to be able to retrieve the one custom map from the scenario. An additional layer (Shading? I don't know my PDF image formatting well enough to say what the purpose of it is) was sitting on top of the custom map, preventing the image's selection via my standard "right click and copy" method.
The biggest challenge for me has always been the production of the artifacts itself, where things get flattened into the image or something gets placed over the image so I can't select it. I was very surprised when the issue popped back up in Season 10 and I had to take unmentionable steps to retrieve the image.