Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

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galneweinhaw
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Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by galneweinhaw »

I tried to use torstan's tiles for everything possible because 1. they are awesome, and 2. so I could provide some feedback/requests.

Here's the overall layout, except for the end which I modified to fit my campaign, the rest follows the revised-3.5 remake of the module pretty faithfully:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/oa/20051031a
TombOfHorrors.jpg
TombOfHorrors.jpg (136.18 KiB) Viewed 10307 times
Zoomed in a bit:
center2.jpg
center2.jpg (130.87 KiB) Viewed 10297 times
Full Scale: Here's one of the more busy rooms which uses torstan's items for everything but the tapestries.

The room is scattered because there are little random earthquakes.
Perturbation Room2.jpg
Perturbation Room2.jpg (170.25 KiB) Viewed 10302 times
Requests/recommendations =)

-First, this should go without syaing, I only make these recommendation because I love these tiles so much. Obviously, or I wouldn't have spent days making this rediculous dungeon!

-I actually made my own piece because I didn't like the look of offset doors down a 10 ft hallway. You can see my modded doorway at the bottom of the purturbation room. I wish I had made this at the beginning because now all the doors I did before look silly. torstan you have to make this one for you set!! =D

-this has been mentioned before I'm sure, but it would be nice to have the wall sections match the interior walls and the new exterior corner sections (smaller stones, darker earth behind them)

- The shadows on each tile type are slightly different. I find the exterior wall sections with their black shadows ar ethe most versatile, since although the brownish shadows on the others look great on your floor texture, it doesn't look so nice on other textures.

- A shadow at the bottom of all the sets of stairs would be nice. It would make it easier to put them together to form staircases, And I wouldn't have to add the shadow seperately for every staircase.

- 90 degree staircases without walls at the end would be nice. That way you could have the map continute on at the top of the stairs if that's all that was needed. See the example below. This had to be done with way to elaborate layering.. and I noticed just as I was makin this screenshot it's not even done well =P (can see the corner of the floor over top of the NE corner of the stairs... cus the floor is one the object layer to overwrite the wall at teh bottom of the stairs.)
90 stairs.jpg
90 stairs.jpg (40.26 KiB) Viewed 10292 times
-On the otherhand.. the modularity of the stairs is pretty sweet, check this one out:
spiral.jpg
spiral.jpg (51.96 KiB) Viewed 10299 times

- I still think doors should be sized so that they can snap to grid ;)

Ok.. .I have more... but my game is starting in 10 min and I have to get ready =)
galneweinhaw = galileo newton einstein hawking

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lmarkus001
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by lmarkus001 »

That is darn nice looking! It "almost" makes me want to run that insane adventure :-)

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RPTroll
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by RPTroll »

That's really, really cool. Nice job!
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Natha
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by Natha »

Awesome !
I love the way you did round walls.

How did you do the blood trail and gazeous thingy (seen in the second image) ?
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torstan
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by torstan »

Wow. Great job.

Do you want drop shadows on the set dressing items? That's on my list, but I'm not sure how big an issue it is?

I agree about the shadows. I've made a few maps where the shadows actually lightened the floor. Black shadows are definitely the way to go.

The long straight walls were the first to be made. I think I'm going to have to reconsgtruct them from scratch to match the other walls. Ah well, that'll keep me out of trouble on Saturday morning!

For the offset door, can you expand a little? You want a 10' wall section with a doorway space in the middle? I guess you also want the door to be separate and on the object layer as normal?

I think I know how to fix the wall styles now so that they work properly.

For the stairs - the question is what you do when you need to create a 10' long stair. If you have a shadow burned into it then your going to have an edge of a shadow every 5' as you go down the stairs. That's going to look weird. On the other hand it's easy to have one stairway with that burned in for quick and easy use.

For the 90 degree staircase - I think you did a great job! I hadn't anticipated staircases that turned like that. I'll make a note and knock one together.

Right. Off to note that all down. Thanks a lot for the comments. That's great constructive criticism and will really help polish up this set.

What was the thing that took the longest to do? I ask because I'm trying to think of ways to speed up the dungeon creation process. For example - would it be useful to have a 10' wide corridor premade or does that just open a can of worms?

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jfrazierjr
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by jfrazierjr »

torstan wrote:What was the thing that took the longest to do? I ask because I'm trying to think of ways to speed up the dungeon creation process. For example - would it be useful to have a 10' wide corridor premade or does that just open a can of worms?
Frankly, a few premade tiles would be great. A few corridors, a few rectangle rooms, a square rooms, a few circular rooms. At the end of the day, if you "do" include some premade rooms with doors and someone cannot find one they like, they still have the option to make their own via piecing tiles together(except for the round ones).
I save all my Campaign Files to DropBox. Not only can I access a campaign file from pretty much any OS that will run Maptool(Win,OSX, linux), but each file is versioned, so if something goes crazy wild, I can always roll back to a previous version of the same file.

Get your Dropbox 2GB via my referral link, and as a bonus, I get an extra 250 MB of space. Even if you don't don't use my link, I still enthusiastically recommend Dropbox..

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galneweinhaw
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by galneweinhaw »

torstan wrote:Wow. Great job.

Do you want drop shadows on the set dressing items? That's on my list, but I'm not sure how big an issue it is?
Yes, that would be nice =)

For the offset door, can you expand a little? You want a 10' wall section with a doorway space in the middle? I guess you also want the door to be separate and on the object layer as normal?

Exactly like the doorway at the bottom of the room. I just cut out the middle of your 10ft interior wall. The door is seperate and on the object layer like any other door.

For the stairs - the question is what you do when you need to create a 10' long stair. If you have a shadow burned into it then your going to have an edge of a shadow every 5' as you go down the stairs. That's going to look weird. On the other hand it's easy to have one stairway with that burned in for quick and easy use.

Good, point, if you did it it would wreck other stair configurations... I didn't think of that =) It wouldn't be so much of an issue if it wasn't so difficult manipulate the objects after they've been placed (if they fall under another in the z-order)

What was the thing that took the longest to do? I ask because I'm trying to think of ways to speed up the dungeon creation process. For example - would it be useful to have a 10' wide corridor premade or does that just open a can of worms?

It's so easy to throw together halls, the return wouldn't be worth it I think...

The thing that took me the longest by far was manipulating the tiles after they were placed.... oh man that is painful, but that's a maptool layer/z-order issue.

Here are some item I had to go outside your set to get for this amp in particular, because I didn't see a suitable enough proxy (to consider for your list I know you have =)

-Sarcophogus
-Mummy / roll of linen / scatttered linen.
-Different urn (empty or with the contents undistinguishable so it is generic.. the current one looks like it has gold in it =)
-Throne
-Spikes (that could be placed in the bottom of a pit for example)
-Some broken items (a broken chair, table, urn/vase, chest)
-a book shelf
-random lab items/decoration
-spider web
-candelabra
-mist or cloud
-vertical/hung tapestry

Can't wait for you to post moe goodies!!
galneweinhaw = galileo newton einstein hawking

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torstan
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by torstan »

Good list, thanks. Most of them were on the list already, but a few were really handy additions (spiders web, broken bits and pieces) and a few were a little too specialised (scattered linen - I'm looking at you :) ). Some of them I already have done, and will add soon.

Thanks for answering my questions. I agree that getting the z-ordering right is a pain. I find that going into the map explorer and right clicking the item ->bring to front works in most cases and avoids having to tear a section apart to get at the one section that's not right.

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Azhrei
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by Azhrei »

torstan wrote:What was the thing that took the longest to do? I ask because I'm trying to think of ways to speed up the dungeon creation process. For example - would it be useful to have a 10' wide corridor premade or does that just open a can of worms?
The angled walls are the most time-consuming for me.

I've been creating tileset maps for the RttToEE module lately (all done now, thank goodness!) and they have a lot of weird angled walls, which are a royal pain with tilesets.

If I had tiles that were at 45-deg angles and spanned one square and two squares, that would suffice for most of the weird stuff. (To be honest, I cheated sometimes and use 45-deg angles when others may have been called for on the original map. The players will never know, though.)

This will require more tiles, but a tile that spans one square horizontally and two vertically would also help. That's not quite 60-deg. I find that it's much easier to layout strange angles based on metrics such as one-up-two-over. Also, by rotating the 60-deg tile, I should be able to build "large arc" walls without too much trouble, although a one-up-two-over type of tile may be difficult to get the rotation right, possibly requiring a boatload of tiles to do correctly with snap-to-grid turned on.

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torstan
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by torstan »

It should be easy enough to rotate the existing tiles and resave them at the correct angles with a little cropping to get the distances right. I'll look into that and see how easy it will be. I think 45 degrees is probably a must, and could even merit some 45 degree corners (I know - really pushing the boat out!).

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torstan
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by torstan »

Just to check - you do know that you can use the current walls with free rotate and snap to grid to create 4 degree walls? They even snap along the 45 degree line. You only need to unsnap them to do each end of the corridor. I tend to rotate one wall by 45 degrees and then just copy and paste it until I have all the long sections done, and then go back and do the fiddly corners more carefully.

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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by Azhrei »

torstan wrote:Just to check - you do know that you can use the current walls with free rotate and snap to grid to create 4 degree walls? They even snap along the 45 degree line. You only need to unsnap them to do each end of the corridor. I tend to rotate one wall by 45 degrees and then just copy and paste it until I have all the long sections done, and then go back and do the fiddly corners more carefully.
That's usually what I do. But I then end up with a lot of pieces that extend beyond their square and if it's close to another wall, I need to turn off the s2g and move it manually. That's why I suggested a 45-deg that was exactly one square (and maybe two squares) in size; it would produce a cleaner finish and require less "fiddly corner" work. ;)

frood42
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by frood42 »

galneweinhaw wrote:Here's the overall layout, except for the end which I modified to fit my campaign, the rest follows the revised-3.5 remake of the module pretty faithfully
That is simply awesome. I've just spent a good 4-5 hours working on a map for the same module using the 'mapping_objects' images. After seeing your effort I’m starting again with Torstan's images.

This is my first map, I've worked my way through the video tutorials but am still learning from my mistakes at the moment :roll: . Could I ask a few questions about the settings you use? What values do you use for the following?

Grid Size
Units per Cell
Pen Width

I originally had 1 grid cell per 10ft, but I soon realised that it meant that in some parts of the map the PCs would be single breast in a 10ft wide corridor. I was thinking of a grid of 5ft, any suggestions?

Cheers

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torstan
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by torstan »

It's best to have a 5' grid so that the tokens take up one 5' square.

The tileset was made for a grid size of 100 pixels.

As for the pen width I would tend not to use a pen at all. I turn off the line stroke in the drawing tools and just use the fill instead. There's a set of instructions on how best to use the tiles in the tileset thread here:

http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=7418

frood42
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Re: Another torstan's tiles map - Tomb of Horrors

Post by frood42 »

Cheers for the tips. The example campaign is great, It really helps to be able to pull a map apart to see how it was put together.

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