Gorgeous maps, all of them! Thanks for sharing!
Not to sound greedy (they are so nice!), but will you make them for the other two books as well?
really awesome work, thank you so much for sharing! would love to see this for the other two books
Thank you so much for sharing these! Looking forward to the other two books if/when you have the time to do them :)
Hey Narchy I just want to add that we switched from the original maps to yours last session and my players are blown away from your maps! This is insanely good stuff. And I, as the GM, want to really thank you with all my heart that you made a foundry module, so easy to use! I am so looking forward to the next book and am especially excited for book three and the infamous 1 square = 10 feet map
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This is simply fantastic work...
...
The map quality in the pdfs is a real sticking point for me, and your maps have made me bite the bullet..
I agree that Narchy's work here is pretty great. Personally, I appreciate the additional artistic details the most, like in room B14 which on Paizo's map is a featureless room and in Narchy's is a highly notable landmark matching the written description.
And making a graveyard map at all is just a huge win. There's no reason anyone shouldn't use Narchy's.
That said - they're also a little darker/grittier and ominous (which is probably good) and suffers from 2000s-era video game texture design where everything is dark brown/gray and on level 1 the contrast between colors on like the floor and walls makes it hard to just distinguish at a glance. But - it's a VTT, and your players will have their vision limited by the walls. Plus the other levels use a different floor tile which addresses that. Anyway, agree that they're great. Different priorities, but great.
What I really wanted to respond to your comment to address, though, is that the quality of the images in the PDFs is typically plenty high, especially the interactive PDFs for the maps in particular. There were some issues with the Age of Ashes PDFs where the images were truly low quality, but Paizo re-uploaded them to fix that after they were informed.
So if, for some reason, someone didn't want to use Narchy's maps (I plan to use them), there is a module specifically for importing the PDFs (which you might want to do for the journal entries even if you plan to use Narchy's maps). For AV in particular, it includes the ability to import the maps from the interactive maps as well (which you might want to do just to have the pretty Otari map), although it didn't do level 4 for some reason. Because the image size is different between the interactive maps and the regular ones, that's a huge bummer because it's a fair bit of a hassle to fix.
Anyway, the PDFs generally have good images, and a lot of the time the trick is knowing how to get at them. I wrote a post about this last March.
Even with all the maps squared away by hardworking folks like Narchy, I still use those techniques to make all of my tokens.
Schweeet, thanks a million Narchy! Just the right amount of additional detail (some redone maps - by others - can be too cluttered för my taste) and just beautiful. Well, gritty and dark and gnarly but beautifully so :)
I've added a slightly less grimdark version of the level 1 map to the Google drive. :)
That said - they're also a little darker/grittier and ominous (which is probably good) and suffers from 2000s-era video game texture design where everything is dark brown/gray and on level 1 the contrast between colors on like the floor and walls makes it hard to just distinguish at a glance.
Oh, wow, thanks! I did go ahead and make the switch. And I agree, it makes sense that level 1 is grimier than level 2 and below. I think you did a good job of balancing that extra griminess in the alternate version.
For players, the wall/floor color differences aren't super relevant (because walls in the app block sight in obvious ways). It's just about the only reason I'd expect someone might not want to use your maps. With Foundry VTT, the challenge of the grime can be compounded if you're trying to tell the difference between "dim" light and "bright" light (which aren't as customizable as I'd prefer).
That said, I've also added fog effects to the 1st level, so I'm part of the readability problem there too.
As for the aesthetic merits of grimdark, I think of the era of early 3d videogames with low-res textures coupled with "brown" as a color palette as a low point in game design - I recall playing a map on an old shooter that was a desert town and all the buildings looked the same so I couldn't find my way around. It's not hugely comparable here, just what came to mind.
You may have accidentally been downloading one of their packs by mistake - I just went and checked, and downloading a specific asset just gives me a single .png download of the image. That's all I can think of.
You could probably ask in their Discord, where you're more likely to get a proper answer than these forums.
A big thanks for the time saving! I like what you did with the teleportation circle.
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Interested to know what people think![/URL]
Looks really good! I'm thinking of some rooms on the other maps that would really benefit from some webs or roots hanging down... But as you say in the video, the fog in the swamp is a bit overkill.
What would be really cool would be the roofs of the outlier buildings showing from outside (and maybe a bit of the keep's roof as well). But I understand that would be a lot of work. My players had some trouble getting a grip on what their characters were actually seeing when they first arrived, with Foundry just showing a giant black blob in front of them. (I did explain it, but when using a map or a VTT people tend to focus more on what they see than what they are told they see...)