I plan on running Menace Under Otari from the Beginner Box as an intro into PF2. As I purchased the digital version of the Beginner Box, I had to re-create the maps which would ordinarily be a flip mat. Not an issue- I love crafts and making physical maps.
When I began to do the same thing for the adventure itself, however....
Well, I don't know if I can fit a map that's literally 4.75 feet by 3.6 feet on my gaming table at all! It's SOOOOO HUGE!!!!
I love large play areas, and I know that not everything needs to be tiny... but the actual physical size of a 1 square = 1 inch translation of these maps requires an enormous amount of space that I simply don't have.
My game crew meets at various locations around town, so the option of "just go digital" doesn't work for us. I'm still burnt out on digital gaming from the pandemic, and despite hearing nothing but praise for Foundry, I just don't want to do that. I'm excited to meet up and play in person with my friends again, and to do that I need physical maps!
Has anyone put in the brain sweat to shrink down some of these enormous areas a bit? I know it won't be necessarily 100% accurate to the original module, but if it means not having to have 17 square feet of space just to put down the map, I'll do the work to make adaptations work!
I have some 26 x 32 conferencing grid paper (stuff for stand up easels) that I made my maps on, using other 8x11 paper tossed on to simulate the fog of war. Mostly, each of the level maps can be split into a North and South section. I draw each starting at the north and south and work my way to the middle. The middle section then duplicates on each map giving me encounter space I can play in until I need to switch from north to south section. This way my double map is never all on the table, just the large half section the party is in.
If you count things out, 32x26 x2 with middles overlapping works for s decent number of levels. Once things got to big I then taped 2 sheets together to make 40x32 x2 maps with duplicated middles. This even helped me increase the space of the map dimensions to account for the 7 person party I'm running.
Needless, I now have a large roll of maps.
Hunting grounds is next, and I will probably just make that into sections, use some generic maps, theatre of the mind and what ever else to get through that huge level
Nightfox
Something you could try is to use a "mini-map" of the whole area, sized down to a single sheet that you place a single party token on. As players move from room to room, you can move the party token, or split off members into different rooms. You can place blanks sheets of paper over unexplored areas.
As soon as an encounter happens, switch to a full-sized map of just that room. If a multi-room encounter happens, you can put two or three rooms together. You're probably never going to need the entire map all at once.