Raise my map fu -- drawing light sources on a battle mat.

Stormonu · Mar 9, 2012

Ah, I suppose I misunderstood. I thought this was merely tracking the PC's light source. I missed that this was mostly drawing up battlemats with affixed, environmental light sources.

Nytmare · Mar 9, 2012

I make my maps in Photoshop first, and then feed that to a monitor for my players to copy over onto the battle mat as we're playing.

http://*****.com/ddzxB.jpg

On the board, I have a handful of yellow Alea Tools that we use to mark where the light sources themselves are, and a bunch of square dowel rods cut to the appropriate lengths and marked in the middle to show where the leading edge is.

http://*****.com/PTFgT.jpg

We used to use transparent overlays, but decided that extra layer of crap was more of a hindrance than a help. Then we changed over to 4 yellow markers to mark each corner of a light source; but then you had to move 5 tokens every time you moved a character, and the board was just too cluttered and confusing.

Using the dowel rods to mark the entire pool of light means that we're all just readjusting the same 2 or 3 pieces based off of where the focus is on the battle mat.

TarionzCousin · Mar 9, 2012

Nytmare said:
I make my maps in Photoshop first, and then feed that to a monitor for my players to copy over onto the battle mat as we're playing.

That looks fantastic. Do you have templates for Photoshop, or are you importing from a mapping program (or something else)?

Nytmare · Mar 9, 2012

TarionzCousin said:
That looks fantastic. Do you have templates for Photoshop, or are you importing from a mapping program (or something else)?

The only things that aren't freehand are scrounged off the Dundjinni forums, or swiped out of pdfs. The rugs, and statues are all built off of things I found online. The chairs and beds I got out of a pdf...(Spellgard maybe?) then I recolored and resized them to get a variety. I think that the tables and weapon racks are mine.