Department of Special Acquisitions - The Scholars Compound

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Rumble
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Department of Special Acquisitions - The Scholars Compound

Post by Rumble »

Just finished up a session and remembered to grab a couple screenshots during play. The characters work for Morgrave University as "acquisitions specialists," and are off on a quest for a particular artifact. However, their contact is missing, they've been attacked by three different factions, and today they stumbled upon a tomb spider and its broodlings, left behind to discourage anyone looking to hard into the disappearance of aforementioned contact.

Used 1.3.b56 for this, and my framework for D&D 4th, as well as Devin Night's tokens and Torstan's awesome map tiles. I modified a couple tokens just slightly to make them match up better with the characters, and created a spider swarm token, and basically, we had a blast. The swarm was a fearsome enemy, but they made short work of the Tomb Spider - teamwork was rockin', and they hammered it into paste in about 4 rounds.

Here's a shot of the compound:
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the-compound.png
the-compound.png (921.69 KiB) Viewed 1620 times
Here's a close up during the fight with the (single, incredibly annoying) swarm:
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fighting-swarm.png
fighting-swarm.png (702.91 KiB) Viewed 1620 times
In case anyone is interested, here's the image for the swarm (arachnophobes, don't click that spoiler button. Seriously.):
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tombspiderswarm.png
tombspiderswarm.png (249.6 KiB) Viewed 1618 times
As always, MapTool was superb, and we had a great time.

tomlib
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Re: Department of Special Acquisitions - The Scholars Compound

Post by tomlib »

Extremely cool.

I like the transparent tokens although I wonder does it make it more difficult for the players to see and move them? Are they .png files with transparent backgrounds or is there some other trick to making them?

I'm just getting a handle on how to use tiles properly and looking back and some of my early maps I'm a tad embarrassed when I see your excellent efforts.

I like the way you've arranged your Powers. Can I ask if the Encounters and Dailys automatically disable? I just use default background color which turns to red when one is used but the buttons can still be clicked.

Awesome work,

I love Maptool,

Tom

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Re: Department of Special Acquisitions - The Scholars Compound

Post by Rumble »

tomlib wrote:Extremely cool.
Thanks - one of my best efforts, actually, so I'm happy.
I like the transparent tokens although I wonder does it make it more difficult for the players to see and move them? Are they .png files with transparent backgrounds or is there some other trick to making them?
They're just PNG with transparent backgrounds, and yes, it can sometimes be hard to see - I find that while I really prefer the look of top-down "virtual minis," I have to play zoomed in pretty close. I'm thinking that it might be best to combine them with some sort of base image - like, say, a "luminous" ring (green for PCs, red for NPCs - could even be a state image) - so they're still transparent, but you can find them easier. I still love 'em, though. My players did too - this is the first time we used them.
I'm just getting a handle on how to use tiles properly and looking back and some of my early maps I'm a tad embarrassed when I see your excellent efforts.
No worries - like I said, this was one of the better maps I pulled off. I've done some (if I do say so myself) nice stuff with GIMP, but this was all tiles.
I like the way you've arranged your Powers. Can I ask if the Encounters and Dailys automatically disable? I just use default background color which turns to red when one is used but the buttons can still be clicked.
The power arrangement is actually part of the framework I wrote and use. The buttons gray out, but the do not automatically disable - I did that, but I find it better to just have the visual reminder and allow them to be hit (in case of an error, or whatever - better to have the fallback than to have to manually edit a property somewhere).
Awesome work,

I love Maptool,

Tom
Likewise!
Last edited by Rumble on Mon Nov 30, 2009 3:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Department of Special Acquisitions - The Scholars Compound

Post by Rumble »

One option is to put nice highlights on them, like this:
highlighted-token.png
highlighted-token.png (68.58 KiB) Viewed 1577 times
It's a bit more labor intensive, though - have to do it for any token you use! Optionally, I could make the green circle a state, but then it appears over the token image, and potentially hides parts of it.

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