Phystus

My, how the time flies! But I’m back, and I’m going to cover one final aspect of mapping - making maps in smaller scales than the typical 5' per square of a D&D battle map.

By “smaller scale” I mean a map of a larger area. Map scale is expressed as a ratio. For instance, a 1"=5' D&D battlemap would be a 1:60 scale (1 inch on the map equals 60 inches on the ground). A map at the scale of 1" equals 1 mile (63360 inches) would be 1:63360. Since 1/60 is a larger ...

I know last time I promised to talk about how mapping has changed through the years, but I changed my mind. I had nearly completed the article about old-school mapping, but after I re-read it I realized that it wasn’t going to be terribly helpful to most people. Sure, it’s fun to talk about the old days, but if you weren’t a gamer back in the 1970's it just sounds like the blathering of an Old One. So rather than forcing my younger readers to make a Sanity check, I decided to talk about something ...

This is a continuation of the previous post about map size. It turns out blog size is important too, and the full post exceeded the allowable size, so I had to split it. You can see part one here...

Map Area

The other factor that influences the size of a map file is the size of the area your map covers. You’ve probably already figured out that, if all other factors are equal, a map that’s 50 squares on a side is four times as large as one that’s 25 ...

Today’s entry isn’t specifically about my group’s journey from a physical tabletop, to long hiatus, to a virtual tabletop with Fantasy Grounds. But my last post about tokens raised some points about scaling that I wanted to explore further. This will be a long post, so get something to drink, settle into a comfy chair and let’s get started.

If you frequent the Fantasy Grounds forum, you’ll see people discuss map size from time to time. Usually the discussion centers around the ...

In my previous post I wrote about the difficulties I had with scanning my old campaign area maps from paper into a digital form so I could use them in FG. As you’ll recall, it didn’t go very well. But of course, campaign maps aren’t the only maps we have to deal with as a GM. We have to make dungeon maps as well. And while I was scanning maps, I scanned some dungeon maps along with the campaign maps to see how that would go.

I’m sorry to report it went even more poorly than had ...