Mike Schley's Strahd Cartography

Now that Curse of Strahd has been officially released, cartographer Mike Schely has - as always - made his maps for the adventure available from his store. He's done a lot of work for this adventure - over two dozen full-colour maps - and come in digital DM and Player versions. you can buy the whole lot in one bundle for $30. It's a great way to support the artist, and it's great that WotC allows artists to sell the maps directly. Find the full selection here.

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[holoKitten]

The player's version has included the grid on most of Schley's previous maps; are the maps for CoS different?

Yeah, some of the maps have gridless versions. For example, the upper floor/cellar map of the Abbey has 3 versions: a gridded DM version with room numbers, a gridded player version without room numbers and a gridless version.

 

[jayoungr]

Does anyone know what to make of the fact that the player's maps are in PDF format? Is there a way to strip out the JPGs? Or can you use PDFs in Roll20?

 

[holoKitten]

Does anyone know what to make of the fact that the player's maps are in PDF format? Is there a way to strip out the JPGs? Or can you use PDFs in Roll20?

If you have Acrobat DC (or Photoshop) exporting the individual images is pretty easy. I think you can get a 1 month subscription to Acrobat DC for like $15 through Adobe Creative Cloud. There are some less elegant methods for exporting the images for free (such as screenshot, snipping tool, and the snapshot tool in Acrobat Reader).

 

[jayoungr]

If you have Acrobat DC (or Photoshop) exporting the individual images is pretty easy. I think you can get a 1 month subscription to Acrobat DC for like $15 through Adobe Creative Cloud. There are some less elegant methods for exporting the images for free (such as screenshot, snipping tool, and the snapshot tool in Acrobat Reader).

Thanks...but I have to wonder, what on earth is the point of paying for digital versions of the maps if they're not in a usable format?

When I bought the Lost Mine of Phandelver and Tyranny of Dragons maps from Schley, they were all individual .JPG files. What on earth could be the reason for the change?

 

[nomisteraki]

Does anyone know what to make of the fact that the player's maps are in PDF format? Is there a way to strip out the JPGs? Or can you use PDFs in Roll20?

you can easily extract images with PkPdfConverter
google it, it's free

 

[jayoungr]

Thanks, that's helpful! I'm still confused as to why they're in PDFs to begin with, though.

 

[dosaceos]

All the extract tools seem to lose the file names of the pics, any suggestions on how to keep the names with the jpegs?

 

[Bruce Vistani]

Easiest way is to expand the page to full screen and do a screenshot, then paste into Paint and save as a jpeg. It should be decent quality. If you still want higher quality then screen shot the map in two halves or in quarters and then merge them together in Paint. This will produce very high qualitg and large images.

If you plan to print them as posters, then most decent print shops will be able to do it from the pdf file.

GIMP is a photoshop-like freeware program and it can extract the images ic you want to go that route.

Virtually every map comes with a DM version, player version and gridless version. The only exceptions are the the 3/4 illustrations.

 

[jayoungr]

Well, I found out what's up with the PDFs. I recently got a thank-you note for shopping on the site during the spring sale, and it included this information:

The site architecture of Zenfolio requires attachments to be PDF formatted at this time but you can easily convert them to jpg’s for printing or VTT use. Simply open the PDF in a standard viewer like Acrobat, click on the map image, copy it and then paste into a new document via an image editing program of your choice. Alternatively, you can just open or import the PDF file in a program like GIMP and it will convert the individual pages for you. Keep the image resolution the same as in the original PDF and you can simply save the artwork as a jpg. There are plenty of free programs out there to edit the art formatting but I would suggest GIMP if you’d like a user friendly interface. Others, such as MSPaint or Adobe Photoshop Elements will work fine too.