Making game tiles?

[Gundark]

Is there a program for making battlemaps like skelton key games (and others) does? I was in a LGS once and saw that they were selling these homemade battlemats (made with photoshop or something) for WotC adventures (ie. you could buy a battlemat for every encounter for "speaker in the dreams"). I would like to do this sort of thing for my gaming group. suggestions?

 

[Blackrat]

Make a map using Dungeoncrafter 1.4, save it and then open it with photoshop or like. Change it to 20 DPI and print.

 

[Shadowslayer]

I print-shopped a bunch of homemade tiles once, glued em' to thin posterboard and had them laminated in hard plastic. They were nice but not worth the hassle in the end. Remember that if you print up beautiful color tiles then don't protect them, they'll be a one use item a lot of the time. Color ink's expensive and so is lamination. WOTC makes nice tiles way cheaper than I can.

One thing you can do is get a 1 inch gridded easel pad and cut the pieces out. I've done that and it works nicely. You can get a lot of dungeons out of one of those pads.

I know that doesn't really answer your actual question. I used an older copy of Corel Print House for mine. It was still time consuming, but the results were pretty good.

 

[hexgrid]

There's dundjinni: http://www.dundjinni.com/

It's got a clunky interface and the default tileset isn't very good, but it works pretty well once you get used to it.

Of course, making tiles good as SKG depends as much on your ability as it does the software you use.

 

[Rafael Ceurdepyr]

Is there a program for making battlemaps like skelton key games (and others) does? I was in a LGS once and saw that they were selling these homemade battlemats (made with photoshop or something) for WotC adventures (ie. you could buy a battlemat for every encounter for "speaker in the dreams"). I would like to do this sort of thing for my gaming group. suggestions?

I just bought two PDF products that are very cool for making tiles. Wilderness Tile Designer and Dungeon Tile Designer, both by 0one Games. They are limited, but very easy and quick to construct. The newer one, WTD, has an ink-saving feature. I highly recommend these. I got them at RPGNow, but unfortunately I can't get to the site at the moment for some reason. I printed them out on cardstock and they look pretty good.

The other option is Campaign Cartographer, which produces gorgeous maps, but has a rather steep learning curve.

 

[Gundark]

Make a map using Dungeoncrafter 1.4, save it and then open it with photoshop or like. Change it to 20 DPI and print.

Link to dungeon crafter?

 

[Treebore]

Link

Do NOT click on that spyware warning junk to the left.

 

[Blackrat]

You should probably download it straight from the official site. I suggest using the 1.4 version but if you prefer the newer version should be as easy to use.

 

[Gundark]

Thank you for the replies