ENnie Awards Voting

You can now drop by and cast your ballot in the ENnies. Please remember our friend, Jonathan Roberts. His work's been nominated in the category of Best Cartography for The Shadowlands Conversion Guide. Other votes we encourage is for the Savage Worlds Deluxe Edition from Pinnacle Entertainment Group for Best Game and Agents of Oblivion by Reality Blurs for Best Supplement. Of course we also encourage voting for Pinnacle, Triple Ace Games, GRAmel, Reality Blurs, and Arc Dream Publishing in the Fan's Favorite Publisher category.

A word about voting: you're able to vote for first, second, third, etc. Don't vote for a product if you don't like or know it. No vote is better than a low vote, if you catch my meaning. Remember, vote early and vote often. Well, strike the last one but do encourage your friends to vote.


Regarding the vote in November, consider this write-in candidate

Review - Fantastic Maps - At The Gate

Fantastic Maps: At The Gates
Publisher: Rite Publishing
Price: $2.99
Artist: Jonathan Roberts

Jonathan Roberts is a cartographer for Kobold Quarterly, Sunken Empires, and Adventures in the Hyborian Age. He also contributes regularly to the Maptool forumsunder the name Torstan.


For December, he's produced another fine battlemap showing a wintry fortress with a barricade. It was originally used in the Pathfinder adventure The Breaking of Forstor Nagar. The battle scene depicts an encampment outside a city fortress with a tent, bonfire, damaged buildings, and a sturdy barricade to prevent a counter attack.  The fortress is protected with a wall, moat, and bridge.

The product includes .pdf files for printing, jpg for importing into VTTs, and .rpmap files for importing directly into MapTool.  It also contains a set of .png files for the objects that appear on the maps for use in other scenarios.

Related links:

Announcement on RPTools forum

Fantastic Maps Blog

Fantastic Maps on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+!

Review: The Giant's Meadhall Map

Product: The Giant's Meadhall
From: Rite Publishing
Price: $2.99
Artist: Jonathan Roberts

This is another great map from artist and cartographer Jonathan Roberts. His latest offering is of a giant's mead hall created from Mammoth tusks and skins. The art is up to Jonathan's usual level of expertise and the product has been professionally packaged so it prints on both European and US letter-sized paper. All the maps (both color and printer-friendly black and white) are in the same pdf which helps eliminate drive clutter.

If you're a virtual gamer, you won't wast time importing the pdf into an image editor, exporting to image files, and then assembling them in favorite VTT. The pacakge includes a JPG image of the map (with and without grid) as well as a Maptool campaign file.

This map originally appeared in Kobold's Quarterly #16 in the adventure "Beer Run".

Interview: Jonathan Roberts aka Torstan

We continue Maptool Month with an interview with Jonathan Roberts, also known as Torstan on multiple gaming forums. Jonathan is another artist who gives back to the virtual gaming community with the release of free tiles and maps to be used online. Publishers noticed his maps and he soon found a second career as a cartographer and artist in the gaming and comic book industry. In his spare time Jonathan contemplates the creation and composition of the universe as a doctor of theoretical physicist with New York University.

We caught up with Torstan between drawing fantasy maps for our imagination and analyzing data detailing the structure of our physical reality.

Torstan's Maps

Jonathan Roberts is a map maker who, through pure altruism, improved the quality of my fantasy maps greatly. He's also a cartographer for Kobold Quarterly, Sunken Empires, and Adventures in the Hyborian Age. 


Under the name of Torstan, he contributed tile sets and maps to Maptool which either ship with the product or can be downloaded into it. His work greatly speeds the development of new fantasy scenarios through the use of drag and drop map making. I created the Ogre Bandit Lair adventure with his tiles.


Jonathan released the latest map set in a series titled Low River Map Pack. The set contains battle mat pdfs for printing and jpeg files to import into your favorite Virtual Table Top. It also contains a Maptool campaign file with the maps preloaded. You can find the entire bundle of Fantastic Maps on DriveThruRPG.

Sample Map from the Low River Collection