Till Death Do Us Part

Tell us how you are using our gaming tools and how your sessions are going.

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EvilSqueegee
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Till Death Do Us Part

Post by EvilSqueegee »

I've been a D&D player for a few years now, my first experience being 3.0 and then moving into 3.5. I've got a knack for on-the-fly DMing, and since I usually don't have too much money to toss into the hobby, homebrew settings and creations are probably the most common thing I DM with, so I don't have to spend cash to grab the Ebberon books, or forgotten realms books.

To this end, I found myself using Auto-Realm a lot when coming up with information for a session, or when going on a worldbuilding spree out of boredom. It was okay, since it was the only tool I had, but given that my family moves around a lot, keeping a face-to-face game going for more than 6 months was a miracle way back when. Given that no matter where you go, internet folk are always accessible, the only solid group of gamers I met was online. But we play more combat-oriented games, back in the day everyone used to bring their minis and whatnot to the house to play. We resorted to forgoing the tactics, playing games over skype or vent or AIM, for a while.

Then I stumbled across Maptool.

So far the game has been *very* successful, if not even smoother-running than a face-to-face game. Given that there are plenty of online resources to draw on, like the System Reference Document Page I found a while ago, and with the measurement tools and whatnot, the group can finally play again the way we used to, with less time looking up rules or rolling mass amounts of dice (Macros are one of the eight wonders of the world, I tell you!).

I was goofing off with MapTool in preperation for a game session when I discovered Objects, and with that I immediately begun searching for a world map generator. Finding A fractal world map generator was the best I could do, since almost all the world maps I could find were all marked up with names and places.

After some thought and preliminary world building, I was able to mark up the world map with the political boarders and titles that I would need to start writing up what was going *into* those boundaries and kingdoms, using an object as an icon on the map and putting the information about the location represented by the icon in the object's notes field. From there, the party started rolling up character sheets and before you know it, I was hunting down city maps, dungeon maps, name generators, you name it, to support the places the players were going to and the things they were doing.

Screen shots available so far:

The party is currently midway through a dungeon. Currently, the map was too large to use as one map, so I cut it into smaller pieces (and judging by everyone's loading times, I probably should have cut the maps into smaller pieces than I did.) They've managed to fumble through the first half of this map, and I just now finished preparing this section for them to (hopefully) survive through. It started with a map I grabbed off of the Map-A-Week archives at wizards.com, which I edited out the floor grid for (not having figured out how to edit the image to match up to a grid size in Map Tool at the time.) I loaded up the image, put the grid down on it, and started putting in topology/stamps wherever I could. Using the token macros I even managed to place all the monsters with introductions, attacks, stats, everything all laid out already for when the game starts, further cutting down on time spent in combat due to mid-fight research.

Of special note, at least I think, is the lighting I used in this area (the lower-righthand corner of the screenshot of the overall area). I used a bunch of stamps this time around, most of them I grabbed off of rpgshare and some of the other resource links I found on the forums here. I thought the use of the Light option for graphic effect was nicely done, if I do say so myself. Each of those flames has a light effect with the selections:

Image

All in all, I've found MapTool 1.2 so far to do everything I've ever needed a virtual tabletop to do, and all the bells and whistles (not to mention the freeness of it all) are making this possibly the most powerful tool I've ever used in a game, period. Fantastic work, and more thanks than I could ever type out in one post!
"Always Make New Mistakes."

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EvilSqueegee
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Post by EvilSqueegee »

Updates:


Well, due to several technical issues, I've lost most of the maps we were using. Thankfully, though, the game has still gone on without too much trouble.

The next area of the dungeon the party went through, they encountered a section of the caves filled with fairies. Each section of the map was devoted to a different season (winter, spring, summer, autumn.) The party arrived in the winter section and had to deal with the deadly cold, making fortitude saves every minute vs. subdual damage.

Out of the four sections of the map, I'd say the winter section probably shows off the drawing tools best:

Image

I used the freehand tool (set to white, obviously) to add the snow drifting about. I used a combination of the freehand drawing tool and the straight-line drawing tool with eraser turned on and thickness variants to do as best as I could of getting the slopes against the straight edged walls to look more like snow piles. It took a little bit of work, but I think it looks good.

The icy floor of the southernmost room was actually made by selecting the "Draw Straight Lines" tool and adding a watery fill, tracing the room's dimensions... then doing the same thing again, but instead of having a watery texture for the fill, I set the fill to pure white color, and set the transparency to somewhere between 50-60%. While a lot of this is Dependant on having the right textures available, I thought it was a nice enough example of what can be done with a bit of thinking and use of the tools within MapTool itself.
"Always Make New Mistakes."

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Post by Phergus »

Very cool. Sounds like a good time.

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

I missed the original posts, oops.

How much of the winter screeny is hand drawn and how much is a background image ?

Just wait till you upgrade to 1.3 !
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

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EvilSqueegee
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Post by EvilSqueegee »

trevor wrote:I missed the original posts, oops.

How much of the winter screeny is hand drawn and how much is a background image ?

Just wait till you upgrade to 1.3 !
I've done a lot of image editing in my day, so it was pretty easy to get the snow effects entirely out of the drawing tools in maptool. My mom was an art teacher, so I grew up with an eye for visuals :P

Any and all of the snow and ice was drawn on inside of maptool. The trees, doors, throne, crystal ball, and other objects were stamps I picked up from the resource links on the other forums here. The map I used was a selected image rather than a map created entirely within maptool itself... here's a link to the map image I used as the base:

I grabbed it off of the Map-A-Week articles at wizards.com. I popped it into Jasc Paint Shop Pro and painted over the grid that was on the map to begin with so I could adjust the grid size as needed once the image was loaded into MapTool.

I really can't wait for a release version of 1.3. Watching some of the preview videos and whatnot has the group really pumped.
"Always Make New Mistakes."

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

The map embellishing looks fantastic :)
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

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EvilSqueegee
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Post by EvilSqueegee »

trevor wrote:The map embellishing looks fantastic :)
Why thank you, mr. trevor...

*dons sunglasses*

Just doing my job.
"Always Make New Mistakes."

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Post by Full Bleed »

I'm usually not a big fan of what I see most of the time when people try to put together a "freehand" map like this... but when done right, I kind of like the "old school" meets "new school" feel of the map.

Nice job... it does a good job of retaining some of the more organic feel of playing on a real table-top and having to sketch stuff out for players.

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Post by EvilSqueegee »

Full Bleed wrote:I'm usually not a big fan of what I see most of the time when people try to put together a "freehand" map like this... but when done right, I kind of like the "old school" meets "new school" feel of the map.

Nice job... it does a good job of retaining some of the more organic feel of playing on a real table-top and having to sketch stuff out for players.
Thanks. All I really did was use the drawing tools to dress up the map - starting with a more oldschool "organic"-feeling map for your background image, and then building on top of it with stamps and drawing tools, is probably the best way to avoid getting far too, uhm... un-organic, if that's the feel you're after?

I'd probably do maps that were more graphically eye-candy-like, but that's more about the base background image than what you do inside of maptool, IMO. and since I don't currently have photoshop or another equally potent graphics program that I know how to use, this is what we'll be having for a while :P
"Always Make New Mistakes."

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Post by Azhrei »

You can always pick up GIMP, but the learning curve is pretty steep due to some non-traditional UI features (what PS users might call "quirks" :)).

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Post by Full Bleed »

EvilSqueegee wrote:I'd probably do maps that were more graphically eye-candy-like, but that's more about the base background image than what you do inside of maptool, IMO. and since I don't currently have photoshop or another equally potent graphics program that I know how to use, this is what we'll be having for a while :P
Yeah, I'm more of a PS user myself, so I can get very nice eye-candy results there and then import the maps into MT, but it doesn't have that freehand look like your map does... which I kind of like from an artistic/throw-back stand-point. Yet, if I went freehand with MT drawing tools I think it would end up looking pretty laughable whereas you've got a style going there that is pleasing to look at.

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Post by RPMiller »

Azhrei wrote:You can always pick up GIMP, but the learning curve is pretty steep due to some non-traditional UI features (what PS users might call "quirks" :)).
If you do decide to go with GIMP, you may want to check out the Cartographer's Guild as we have many tutorials and links for GIMP and a few very savvy GIMP users. Not that sort of gimp. :shock: :lol:

The link to the site is in my sig. :)
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EvilSqueegee
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Post by EvilSqueegee »

RPMiller wrote:
Azhrei wrote:You can always pick up GIMP, but the learning curve is pretty steep due to some non-traditional UI features (what PS users might call "quirks" :)).
If you do decide to go with GIMP, you may want to check out the Cartographer's Guild as we have many tutorials and links for GIMP and a few very savvy GIMP users. Not that sort of gimp. :shock: :lol:

The link to the site is in my sig. :)
I'll definitely look into that. Thanks for the tip :D
"Always Make New Mistakes."

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Post by SirGunther »

RPMiller wrote:If you do decide to go with GIMP, you may want to check out the Cartographer's Guild as we have many tutorials and links for GIMP and a few very savvy GIMP users. Not that sort of gimp. :shock: :lol:

The link to the site is in my sig. :)
Yeah, thanks for posting that. I use GIMP all the time, but I suck at it, and have no training whatsoever. I went and did one of the tutorials by RobA over on the Cartographer's Guild, and redid one of my maps, and it looks pretty good. Nothing like what he does, but not bad for my first try using more advanced techniques. So thanks again.

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Post by RPMiller »

SirGunther wrote:Yeah, thanks for posting that. I use GIMP all the time, but I suck at it, and have no training whatsoever. I went and did one of the tutorials by RobA over on the Cartographer's Guild, and redid one of my maps, and it looks pretty good. Nothing like what he does, but not bad for my first try using more advanced techniques. So thanks again.
Don't thank me, thank RobA. :D We all want to know how well our forums are doing and encourage folks to post and contribute or even just ask lots of questions. That's why the Guild was created in the first place. :)
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