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

Review: Story Maps: Ruins of the First Age

From: Savage Mojo
Price: $6.95
Artist: Mike Burns

Ruins of the First Age includes two maps of 12 tiles each meant for printing and use in face-to-face games. The map depicts ruins and surrounding area with 8x8 inch tiles. If you plan to use it for a Virtual Table Top there's some work ahead of you. The maps are 8x8 inches bounded by white borders that overlap a bit. You'll need to crop the border before using.

If you plan to use this product in a VTT, you'll need to crop the border first with an image manipulation program. I use GIMP. While GIMP can have quite a learning curve, it is highly functional and quick if you know a few tricks. For more information check out Beginning GIMP by Akkana Peck.

You can crop the images quickly by importing all the pages at once into GIMP assuming all the images are identically layed out like Savage Mojo's. This creates one layer per page. Crop the image to the corners and it crops them all at once.

Quick Mapping with MapTool, TokenTool, Google, and Gimp

Recently I faced the dilemma of a time shortage and the need to produce several new maps for an upcoming game in my Space Nazis campaign. I was able to produce everything in about an hour but only because I follow a tried and true method of map and token making. This post details the source, resources, and methods used to generate these maps quickly with a minimum of effort.