Princes of the Apocalypse Maps? High Quality?

[cyphus5]

So, I bought Curse of Strahd and was very much impressed with the maps and their quality (especially when used as battle maps). However, I found the maps with Storm King's Thunder to be poor resolution and quality in comparison.

Question then, what about the maps in Princes of the Apocalypse? Can anyone speak for the quality of these maps as battle maps?

[LordEntrails]

I didn't have a concern with the PotA maps. Though I admit I don't have much in the way of expectations for maps I do not create myself. I would expect the maps in PotA to be at the standard/preferred FG resolution of 50 pixels per square. I don't know if that's what you are looking for or not (I don't have STK or CoS).

If someone doesn't swing by with an answer as to what resolution the maps are at I can fire up FG and check or we can do a session and I can share some of the maps with you so you can judge for yourself (but not sure when this weekend, will be pretty busy).

[Zacchaeus]

This question comes up every so often.

You don't say whether your concern is the quality of the original artwork or whether your problem is with the maps as presented in FG. In FG images are kept to less that 2048x2048 and less than 1Mb in size wherever possible. This is so that there are less issues memory wise client side and downloading takes less time. The maps in CoS were generally quite small resolution wise so it was possible to include them at a slightly higher quality. On the other hand SKT maps are massive so the quality had to be reduced in order to keep the maps at a reasonable size. PotA also has large maps and in most cases they actually exceed the normal limits as noted above. In fact I had to cut up some of those maps not all that long ago because they were too big and causing some users issues.

Having said that all of the maps across all of the modules are perfectly good for VTT play in my view. So the bottom line is that your question is subjective and my view of whether the PotA maps are good or bad isn't really going to help you decide.

[cyphus5]

You don't say whether your concern is the quality of the original artwork or whether your problem is with the maps as presented in FG.

No, the maps in the physical book look great, it's just that the FG battle map look like they've just been essentially blown up from a small print. Maybe I'm wrong, but they seem inferior to the CoS ones.

In FG images are kept to less that 2048x2048 and less than 1Mb in size wherever possible. This is so that there are less issues memory wise client side and downloading takes less time.

Fair enough, if that's your goal. I've got maps from Heroic Maps and other makers, shrunk them down to small size and still they look great for battle maps in FG.

Having said that all of the maps across all of the modules are perfectly good for VTT play in my view. So the bottom line is that your question is subjective and my view of whether the PotA maps are good or bad isn't really going to help you decide.

Alright. Thanks for your input.

[cyphus5]

I didn't have a concern with the PotA maps. Though I admit I don't have much in the way of expectations for maps I do not create myself. I would expect the maps in PotA to be at the standard/preferred FG resolution of 50 pixels per square. I don't know if that's what you are looking for or not (I don't have STK or CoS).

I very much doubt they are 50 pixels per square in SKT, or if they are the image has been bloated to meet that. They're an eye sore. Thank you for your input. I think I'm better off getting the size and quality I want by buying the maps directly from Mike Schley, seeing as I mostly just want the maps.

[Myrdin Potter]

The issue you will run into is memory limits for the FG client. If they have too many big maps open/being shared to them, yiu risk crashing their client.

My players thought the PoTA maps were gorgeous.

[Zacchaeus]

I very much doubt they are 50 pixels per square in SKT, or if they are the image has been bloated to meet that. They're an eye sore. Thank you for your input. I think I'm better off getting the size and quality I want by buying the maps directly from Mike Schley, seeing as I mostly just want the maps.

Many of the maps in SKT were scaled to 10 feet per square given that there were a lot of Giants about. Most of the outdoor maps were 50' feet per square. So exporting those to allow for the 50px grid did entail a loss of quality. Otherwise the maps would have been too big.

More discussion here.

[lostsanityreturned]

PotA has badly compressed maps yes.

They are all low quality for their resolution and size, sadly. I don't remeber if they were as bad as the SKT maps or not though.

[Myrdin Potter]

As I said, my group just finished the adventure and we thought the maps were very nice and a lot better than what you see in the books.

The hi-red files available directly from the cartographer are better, and you can exceed the normal limits if you are good about closing other shared images and stopping the sharing. If your DM has a decent internet connection (I do from home), you also do not need as much compression.

My group generally said “wow” to the maps, so it is all a matter of taste. If you are playing on a 4K screen I am sure they look different than on my HD screen as well.

[Trenloe]

PotA has badly compressed maps yes.

They are all low quality for their resolution and size, sadly. I don't remeber if they were as bad as the SKT maps or not though.

I think saying "all" here isn't accurate. I have just looked through a bunch of maps for PotA and a lot of them look really good.

As has been discussed - some of the original maps have 10 or 20 foot square grids on them. When being converted to 50 pixels per 5 foot square the quality is often impacted because the original digital map file as provided by WotC simply doesn't have the details for zooming in to that level, or if the original detail was there the map needs to be modified to fit within the current FG 32-bit architecture size recommendations.

@cyphus5 - from your posts it appears you're more interested in the maps than the whole product. In that case, going to the artist direct is probably your best bet. Just be aware of the 2048x2048 image resolution recommendation for Fantasy Grounds (if you are using the maps in Fantasy Grounds) - you can get away with one or two maps a little bit bigger, but the player side can easily experience memory issues with just a couple of big maps, as players will usually have a number of library modules open that already will be taking up a fair chunk of memory.