Battle Map

 

I have a large (A1) laminated offset-square 1" grid that I use as a battle map for D&D.

It works great, being very quick and convenient to set up with a whiteboard marker, and it's very clear and visible to all the players (and me).

However, it turns out that it's not ideal for exploration sessions, as even on an A1 sheet, a one-inch grid doesn't go all that far. And if the party go off in an unexpected direction, you can run out of space pretty quickly. Moving the map that has already been laid down isn't very quick or easy at all.

So, I've gone and got some A3 sheets of 7mm quad paper to do the exploration mapping on. That grid is still large enough for everyone at the table to be able to see, but if the party wanders off the edge we can just carry on on another sheet. 

I'll keep the dry-erase grid for situations where we actually need a large-scale layout for the miniatures. 

 

Dungeon Sticks

 

I've just started printing some tabletop mapping components, designed by a chap called Ecaroth on Thingiverse, and named by him Dungeon Sticks.

They're basically interlinking half-height wall segments. Each piece has a male or female connector, or both: the particular ones shown here use an octagonal star socket and peg, so once assembled they are more or less locked in place (though there is still a little play). There are other versions that just use round pegs and holes, but they're more easily disturbed.

I like them better than full-blown decorative tile systems for three main reasons:

1. First, because the half-height walls makes it easier for people seated around the table to see what's going on, and
2. Second, because they're quicker and easier to put together in the heat of the moment, and they require minimal preparation.
3. Third, because they're more generic than diorama tiles, they interfere less with the "theatre of the mind" that I think is so important a feature of tabletop roleplaying. The more detail that is presented on a tabletop scene, the more that it colours the imaginations of the participants, and the more precisely accurate it has to be, not to mislead.

No doubt I'll eventually get around to painting these, but I'm in no particular hurry. They are, after all, just a glorified substitute for dry-erase marker lines on my battle-map, and being blue doesn't really affect their functionality at all.

Ecaroth has created them in several styles as well as these stone walls — there are a couple of natural cavern styles, as well as a space opera-ish set of 'Space Station' walls. Also, he's provided a bare template set that one could create one's own custom designs with, which will come in handy if I should find a desperate need for something I can't jury-rig with the existing components.

They are taking a while to print though. A set of ten medium-length wall segments will be on the printer for about fifteen hours, so they're not the sorts of things I can dash out in a panic just before the game session starts.

I experimented with shrinking some of the "Space Station" components down for use with my old 15mm RAFM Traveller figures, but with only limited success.

These were printed at 60% scaling, and they'd really need to go down to 50% to be in scale with the figures. However, even at 60% the tolerances get too close; now that these pieces have been locked together, they're definitely not coming apart, and some of the walls in the door pieces are so thin that they're barely printing at all.

I think they'd probably be more useful for 15mm if I edited them to accommodate little magnets in their base, and just use them free-standing on a metal whiteboard.

Later on...

The Dungeonsticks are fine, as far as they go, but they do have their limitations. Having to accommodate the post and socket at each end means that they're not really truly modular; two "2" pieces aren't the same length as a "4" piece.

So, I've decided to just go with free-standing pieces that I've cut down from Fat Dragon's Dragonlock tiles. I cut away the tile base in Windows 3d Builder, deleted any free-floating remainders, and added sockets for 3x3mm magnets.

Larger magnets would provide a stronger attraction to the whiteboard (or whatever), but I have a whole lot of the 3mm magnets, and they stick well enough that the pieces won't fall over if the table is inadvertently bumped.

These sorts of scenery bits will be a lot more flexible than any sort of interlocking system, and I can create them from any tile system without having to worry about conforming to any particular connector type.

Where the hell are we?

Labyrinths and mazes are a staple trope of the tabletop (and computer) FRPG (or shooter).

I have a reasonably good sense of direction, but in an environment where I have no environmental input from outside the maze (e.g. the sun) and no clear grid to work with, I get lost pretty easily. I'm pretty good at retracing my steps, and in that sense I don't easily get "lost", but if I'm not walking through a grid-based maze (or building) then it won't be long before I couldn't tell you if I'm facing north, south, east or west.

Even what seems like a perfectly rational grid-based layout could be built to deceive the sense of direction though. I refer you to the path highlighted in pink in this illustration: if each of those corners is just enough out of square so as not to be obvious, someone walking down the meander could easily be turned in a wholly unexpected direction. A RPG party who isn't using precision surveying instruments could be sent off north when they think they're heading east.

In a computer game, this would be easy to achieve. A tabletop game, however, relies on verbal description from the GM, assuming they're not just showing the group the map, which would be particularly lame. We shall not consider such poltroonery.

Back in the Olden Days, our GM(s) tended to describe our path through subterranean caverns and dungeons and things in terms of compass directions — "You walk east for fifty feet, and come to a Y-junction with passages heading off north-east and south east. Which one do you want to take?"

That sort of thing.

That makes description and mapping relatively straightforward, but it has this disadvantage: as soon as he started saying "left" or "right" instead of "north" or "south", we knew that he was up to something tricky, and everything slowed to a crawl as we took all the surveying precautions we could think of.

For that reason, I never describe a dungeonesque environment in terms of the cardinal directions, but only ever relative to the perceptions of the party inside that environment. It's sometimes a bit tricky to keep oriented, but it's worth it to cut out just one avenue of meta-knowledge that might mitigate against proper game immersion.

The Joy of Two (Dimensions)

Here's tonight's initial game setup — the tiles are cobbled together from FDG's "Ravensfell Sewers" papercraft dungeon tiles set in Photoshop and printed on my laser printer, and the froghemoth in the pool is the one I 3d printed the other day.

I'm always impressed by beautifully built and painted 3d dungeons, but I can't be bothered with them for my own games. Most of the time I just draw on that laminated grid layout (the textured thing underneath the sewerage pool) with dry-erase markers and call it good enough, but from time to time I'll go berserk and make something a bit fancier — like this sewage collection pool.

10-hex Hex Mapping Sheet

This sheet is A4 landscape, 10 hexes from side to side. The hexes are numbered by column and row, so hex 5.7 would be the fifth column, seventh row. It has lined areas on each side for note-taking convenience. There's a cartouche at top for titling your map if you so desire.

I like it better than the older 10-hex hexes I designed because it has complete hexes in the corners, and the numbering makes it easier to key.

As with any hex grid of this sort, you can zoom in on individual hexes just by drawing on another sheet to a larger scale. If your top-level map is 10,000 kilometres from side to side (1,000 kilometres per hex), the next level down would have 100 kilometre hexes, then 10, then 1, then 100 metres per hex, and so on if you want to get really detailed.

Below are links to a couple more, one of 4 hexes side to side, the other of 7. Trying to keep complete hexes in all the corners means you can't really manage an elegant sequence of sizes; four is useable maybe, but I'm not so sure about seven.

4 hexes, side to side

7 hexes, side to side

Making My World A Bit Flatter

My FRPG campaign world has been around for several decades now, and it's gone back and forth between being flat and being a globe.

I like the idea of a disc-world, but I've never been able to come up with a satisfactory way of explaining how a day and night cycle would work.

I found this gif somewhere on the internet that does the job. Though it would have been better if I'd had the concept in mind before I started drawing the maps, because now I'll have to rearrange everything to cater to having the icy frigid regions in the centre and edge rather than top and bottom. It's not a huge deal, fortunately; it just means that north and south become in and out.

So, why bother? Well, why not?

Later...

So, this is the redesign of all of my world that I've mapped so far, as a flat disc. I'm using the 10-hex hex grid I designed a few days ago, with 1000 mile hexes on this map.

I've had to move and rotate the archipelago to get its arctic areas to align with the centre and edge frigid zones, but apart from that it doesn't really affect anything that's happened in any of the campaign to date.

In fact, the whole flat-world thing has very little mechanical impact on anything. It's pretty much just for flavour.

Tabletop Dungeon Mapping Modules

 I've been experimenting with using flat printed images on blocks of MDF for 3d (or 2½d) dungeon mapping pieces. Proper painted 3d resin pieces are very nice, but they also cost an arm and a leg.

These ones are my first "secret door" image, printed on self-adhesive label paper, and stuck to 12mm MDF. I might possibly go to 18mm for added stability, but I'll see how these go in play first.

The black edges are problematic. They'd be better covered with the stone pattern, but the edges of MDF aren't an ideal surface for sticking the label paper to unless it's sealed and sanded pretty smooth, which means more trouble than I really want to go to. Maybe as a partial fix I'll paint the sides of the blocks, where they're more likely to be exposed, in a roughly stone-like colour — it would still be a bit of a dislocation, but they wouldn't stand out quite as much when they're butted up against each other like this.

What I want to end up with is something like the Fat Dragon card dungeon bits, but with more weight and stability.

This is the image I've used for this particular module — I've got a bunch of other doors in the works at the moment, if these turn out OK.

I've saved it at 300dpi, but I don't know if Blogger's image uploader will preserve image resolution information. The physical dimensions of the image are 50 x 50 mm, so if it prints bigger than that, then you'll have to find some way to adjust it (such as embedding it in a word processor document, resized to the right dimensions.... though that sort of kludge makes me sad).

Later...

I later realised that I had a roll of 12mm double-sided tape, and since the MDF is fortuitously also 12mm, I could make my own block-pattern edge banding tape with relatively little travail.

Which I have now done.

As I suspected, it is a great improvement.

---

Later...

I tried out a single wrap-around image for a standard dungeon door, but I found that it made the location of the door sides centrally on the block on both sides difficult — impossible, in fact, without getting a lot more pernicketty about my measurements.

So instead I went back to separate individual images for each side, but this time with sufficient overhang to wrap around and cover about 60% of the width of the block. There is therefore a line up the sides where the two images don't tile seamlessly, but it's not at all noticeable unless you look for it, so I call that a win.

Here are JPG files for a couple of styles of door, to go on to 50 x 50 x 12 mm blocks:

The Known World Expands

I've been working on some more of my campaign world's maps.

Specifically, I've been expanding the north of the main continent out to the north-west and incorporating Færún's Sword Coast (from the D&D Forgotten Realms campaign setting) so that I can make use of Neverwinter and Waterdeep.

I started our 5e campaign with the Starter Set and its Lost Mines of Phandelver module (which, incidentally, we're nowhere near completing), and all the action in that adventure takes place on the Sword Coast. So, it seemed like a good idea to shoehorn it into my own world.

Progress thus far. Clickupon to enlargenate.

The geographical features are more or less all present, but I still have to add all the place names and roads and what-not in the eastern half of this map — the overlapping area with the existing map of the North. Also, I have to come up with names and terrain for the islands out to the west. I haven't really thought much about what they're like.

Adding roads is way easier since Photoshop finally started supporting dashed and dotted strokes on paths — I think they started that at long last in CS6.

SquareHex Game Mat

I really must get around to painting Annette's figure properly.

This is my 25mm square-hex game mat. Thanks to Living In The Future, getting this printed and laminated at A1 size cost me about thirty bucks, whereas not that long ago it would have been hundreds, and thus unattainable. When I first started gaming back in '81, this sort of thing would just have been a dream.

I like this offset-square layout for gaming on; it provides all the benefits of a hex map (which I've also got several of) while being much, much easier to draw accurate room layouts on without getting lost in counting hexes. We don't go all-out tabletop-miniatures-wargaming style, but it does reduce the chance of mutual misunderstanding when it comes to determining just who is eligible to be brutally dismembered at any given time.

I draw the layouts in dry-erase whiteboard marker. Some colours (red, for example) are a lot harder to erase without solvents than others, but I mostly just use black, so that hasn't been a big issue.