How do GMs convey the maps from adventures published online?

[aco175]

I remember playing with rulers for guesses of how far you can move and Coke bottles for dragons.

Today we mostly play with the tiles. I fiind they look good and save time drawing out on the wet grid. If I have a map from a module, I mostly approximate with tiles and if a line is 5' or 10' off from the book- who cares. The players do not know if the stairs were only 5' and I have them as 10' wide. I can also change things to make fights more relavent to the party with wider stairs for better fights and what not.

We have several of the 3.5 map modules for the miniatures game we use for some encounters. They have one called the King's Road that has been used several times over the last couple years. I can change it a bit with some tiles to cover the small gravesite with a guardshack or rubble and it works fine.

What I would love to do but not had the time yet is to make a map of the whole dungeon like the delve book. I could take a picture of it to paste in my encounters in a Word doc, which I thought would give it more of a module look. I could cut the map for individual rooms or just take a seperate picture of each room and I can even place tokens on it. Ultimately I would take each rooms worth of tiles and place them in a ziplock bag to save time looking for what I want in each room.

 

[BobTheNob]

How do GMs convey the maps from adventures published online?

In another thread where I was looking for a cheap 1st level adventure, I was directed to look at Dungeon and other online sources. Then it hit me what I was paying for with store-bought modules: those awesome tabletop battle maps.

I read the map hubbub over at the Bark at the Moon thread, and I am not seeing a good solution to conveying maps to players for adventures published online. [SIZE=-2]I know the thread is not about that, but the discussion gives good insight into how GMs convey online maps.[/SIZE]

It seems almost criminally selfish of me as a GM to have this awesome looking tactical map that I can see, and to then sketch some lame imitation of that on a battle mat with a couple of differently colored wet erase pens.

Do the online maps look good when blown up to real-life 1" squares and then printed out? What other solutions are there for this problem that I'm not thinking of?

Well, I have a few of those maps from the Fantastic Locations (Fane of the Drow, Dragondown Grotto) line from a few years back I could substitute.

Any other ideas?

I use software. The software we use (which I wrote) can import maps, and then has an "fog of war" overlay, so I can reveal the map as needed, and the party sees the map on a big screen tv

So if I can scan it, I can use it.

Have you thought about a software based solution. Theres plenty of tools out there.

 

[rangda]

How do GMs convey the maps from adventures published online?

I go through the aggravation of posterizing the maps, printing them out, and taping them together.

When I did this for Scales of War I was using a normal sized printer so 8.5x11 sheets. SoW loves large maps so some of these maps were 30+ pages. I'd spend 4-6 hours doing assembly and the printing cost (using name brand ink carts) was creeping up to $50+ per module.

Now for War of the Burning Sky I'm using a 13x19 printer and generic refillable ink. Paper cost has about tripled using 13x19 presentation paper (paper used to print out proofs of photos large size generally to pick 1 of N different pictures). However the ink cost is probably 1/10'th of what it was with the refillable ink. I'm now down in the $10-$15 per module area in materials and with 13x19 paper and more reasonable sized maps assembly is an hour or so. Many maps can fit on 2 13x19 sheets.

I've seen people that print maps out then assemble on foam board, but IMO this isn't worth it unless you plan on running the module multiple times (say a LFR module or somesuch).