Review: e-Adventure Tiles: Encounters No. 1 and 2

Product: e-Adventure Tiles: Encounters No. 1 and No. 2
From: SkeletonKey Games
Price: $3.49 Each
Artist: Ed Bourelle

Encounters 1 contains 6 tiles for the Necromancer’s Throne Room, 3 tiles for the Swamp Temple Ruin, and a single tile for a Warded Supply Cache.

Encounters 2 has 3 tiles for a Swamp Ruin (which is very similar to the Swamp Temple Ruin), a 4 tile town residence, and a 3 tile ice prison.

The graphics are detailed with lots of eye candy for the players.   For a face-to-face game, the tiles can be quickly separated by following the convenient scissor guides.

For Virtual Table Top players, however, the product isn't as easy to use.  The irregular placement of the tiles on the page makes it difficult to group them for a mass trimming via an image editor like GIMP.  Likewise, with the scissor guides you’ll need to do a little extra work before importing them into a VTT like Maptool. (see below):

 Encounters No. 1

Necromancer's Throne Room

Swamp Temple Ruin

Warded Supply Cache

Encounters No. 2

Town Residence

Swamp Ruin

Arcane Ice Prison

To use these maps in a VTT, follow the instructions as you would with the Savage Mojo maps (details); the primary difference is, because the images are all different sizes, you can’t crop all the images at once.

For this set, I used GIMP and imported the images onto different layers.

I copied a region with the rectangular Select tool, placed the images in the copy buffer with Edit->Copy Visible, then created each image as a separate PNG file with File->Create->From Clipboard (I decided on PNG rather than JPG as I want some transparency on the images).   I used the scissor guides from the PNG file as a guide before deleting the white spaces and dotted lines.

Use Image->Autocrop Image to make sure the canvas size is at the image edge; otherwise, you might miss something during cropping.

Edited by J A Day