Does anyone put out battlemaps or terrain markers for 3e?

[Felon]

Lord knows that D20 v3< is heavily geared towards the use of grids and terrain elements. Personally, I love tactical combat so I'm all for it. But oddly enough, WotC doesn't sem to have much in the way of plans to actually take advantage of the market potential of selling grid maps for different battle environments (e.g. city ruins, mausoleum, sewers, cave system, etc) or any tokens for terrain features (e.g. underbrush, loose debris, crowds, quicksand, etc). I've seen their small tiles for their miniatures line, but they don't lend themselves to large-scale battles.

So does anyone else put out products focused on capturing this market?

 

[trentonjoe]

I found all sorts of miniatures trees and bushes at the dollar store. I think they are for like x-mas displays. They work great.

Oh yeah, and they were a buck.

 

[Painfully]

Dungeon tiles are available which are essentially cardstock pieces with a dungeon floor/wall look to them. Skeleton Key Games is the company that makes them IIRC.

 

[Felon]

I found all sorts of miniatures trees and bushes at the dollar store. I think they are for like x-mas displays. They work great. Oh yeah, and they were a buck.

Well, we've actually tried using pieces of plastic terrain like that, but it's a real pain to lay out an entire forest one tree at a time, and when you're done it's tough as heck to see.

Tile pieces that can thrown down is what I'm looking for. I'll have to check out the Skeleton Key stuff. Do they only do dungeon tiles?

 

[KenM]

We use a megamat from Chessex(SP?), with wet erase markers. Works really good. http://www.chessex.com/mats/Mat Maintenance.htm
You don't have to come up with new mats every game.

 

[DaveStebbins]

RPGNow has an entire section devoted to buildings, terrain and tilesets which can be purchased as electronic products and printed and used in whatever quantity is needed.


http://www.rpgnow.com/default.php?cPath=2_284&

Is that what you were looking for or am I way off base?

-Dave

 

[Felon]

Re: megamat--We use one of those now, but again drawing every little area of debris in a ruined city, or every section of crowd in a fair, or every bit of underbrush in a forest is too time-consuming. I should mention that I don't actually own the mat. We game at another guy's house, so there's not as much time for prep work as I need to draw everything out.

Re: tiles--Yes, that sounds more like what I'm looking for. Basically, I need something I can lay down in squares or strips, quickly covering the megamat with some diverse, interesting terrain. Getting PDF's printed on to card stock is tricky though, and likely pretty expensive to get Kinko's to do.

 

[KenM]

Re: megamat--We use one of those now, but again drawing every little area of debris in a ruined city, or every section of crowd in a fair, or every bit of underbrush in a forest is too time-consuming. I should mention that I don't actually own the mat. We game at another guy's house, so there's not as much time for prep work as I need to draw everything out.

You don't have to draw out every little detail, just so you have a general layout is good.

 

[Felon]

Essentially, I'd like to have a battlefield that's sufficiently elaborate to provide some interesting tactical options. And if they come in sets that I can basically pull out at random, then I can just plop things down without consciously deciding "hmm, a demolished wall goes here...and it has a gap here...and there's some movement-hampering debris right on the other side..."

See what I'm saying?

 

[Trainz]

Look at the back of your 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide: there's a lot of terrain features cut-outs.