Net Find - Planetary Map Generator

The Savage Duck found this the other day. He's aware of my star sector generator project and thought this might be of use. Indeed it might be!

It may also be of use to your gamers, especially with the upcoming Savage Worlds SciFi companion coming soon.

The web site is run by Torben Ægidius Mogensen, an associate professor in Copenhagen. For twenty years he's worked off and on with map projections. I did the same in a previous life though not as thoroughly as  Professor Mogensen.

To use the web based generator, simply open the generation console and change the values to your heart's content.

Once satisfied, generate your map. If you ever need to get back to it, simply remember your seed number and other values. It will generate the same map every time. You can see various areas of the map in more detail by adjusting the zoom, center latitude, and center longitude. You can also adjust the grid.

The generator produces BMP format images. You can easily convert them using a product like GIMP, for use in your favorite VTT, like MapTool.

You can also download the code and run it from the command line. See the project page for mote detail.  

Review - The Lightning Train

Fantasy Maps: Lightning Train Map Pack
Publisher: D20 Cartographer
Price: $2.99
Artist: Joshua Bennett


All Aboard! The Lightning Train is about to leave the station. Tracks? Who needs tracks with a train that levitates above the ground on electro-magnetic forces and/or magic? Just don't step in front of the train. Those cow-catchers have a habit of flash frying anything in their way. You might want to steer clear of the engine as well. Lightning bolts fly from the front of the engine arcing backwards in brilliant displays of light.

This is an amazing map set suitable for a Fantasy or SteamPunk settings. It includes maps of the Engine, three different First Class cars, three standard passenger cars, two freight cars, a service car, and caboose. The pack also include four empty cars and object images so you can make cars according to your own personal design. You can mix and match the images anyway you wish to create the train of your choice.

The product includes PDFs for printing, JPGs for importing into your favorite Virtual Tabletop, and PNGs representing objects inside the train. The most interesting file, however, is the MapTool campaign file. It's thing of beauty containing 11 maps representing the outside of the train and the inside of each individual car.

For those who don't know, MapTool is a free VTT you can use in your face-to-face games with a projector, or connect with your friends across the Internet to play online. It is a full-featured program that runs equally well on Mac, Linux, or Windows.

Joshua leveraged several cool features of MapTool to make his map do wonders. It makes full use of lighting and topology meaning your MapTool players will only see what their characters see. The Lightning train also uses Wolph42's teleport pad. With this, players step between cars disappearing from one map and appearing on another.

This product does an equally good job of showing off the artist's talent and MapTool's capabilities. I highly recommend it.

Classic Dungeon Tiles

Product: Classic Dungeon Tiles: Lesser Temples of Greygax and Arnemoor
From: SkeletonKey Games
Price: $5.99
Artist: Arthur Braune


It was the late 70's. DnD was new and maps were meant to be blue. Back in those days photo copiers wouldn't read blue lines and so, to protect their maps, TSR made them blue. This tile set is a blast from the past and I highly recommend them to anyone who played our favorite past time during the Carter years.

The product contains 62 separate tiles on a 1 inch grid that can be easily manipulated into your favorite VTT. They'y all on the same position on the page so it's easy to crop once for every layer. What's more, because of the simplicity, auto-cropping works great! The set contains a legend you can edit and apply on the GM's layer of MapTool so a concealed door is concealed until you (the GM) says it isn't.

Review: White Plum Mountain Tile Set

Product: White Plume Mountain Tile Set
From Red Pub Games
Price: $0.50
Author: Steve Wachs
Artist: Steve Wachs

I love this concept. Red Pub Games took an old TSR AD&D module and made a tile set out of time. The doors attached to the rooms can be bent up to give the map a nice 3D effect. The 32 pages of maps, however, will keep you busy cutting for a while.

Review: Map of Berem Town (Free)

Product: Map of Berem Town

Rule System: Generic Fantasy
From: 1191 AD Publishing
Price: Free
Author: Domagoj Rapcak
Artist: Domagoj Rapcak

This free, hand-drawn map for a generic medieval fantasy setting has one feature I wish all map makers would learn: PDF layering. In this case the PDF allows the descriptive text to be turned off for printing a player view. I wish the location numbers were on separate layers as well but that is a minor quibble.

The map of Berem includes sixteen points of interest including:

1. Town Entrance
2. Riverside Inn
3. Town Hall
4. Playground
5. Smithy
6. Marketplace
7. Windmill
8. Temple
9. Alchemist
10. Barracks
11. Lord’s Manor
12. Tavern
13. Harbor
14. Lake
15. Monastery
16. Tower

I like this map a great deal. It's pleasing to the eye and lets the GM make the map his own. Kudos to Domagoj Rapcak and 1191 AD Publishing for making it available for free.

This map is free from DriveThurRPG.com.

Review: Nevermore Manor

Product: Battlemaps: Nevermore Manor
From: Emerald Press
Price: $1.00

This is a nice map for your fantasy campaign to use as the home of a well-to-do wizard on the outskirts of town. The manor house has three levels complete with libraries, wizardly laboratories, and secret chambers. It's missing some detail that would be in an actual manor but that's easy to overlook since this is, after all, fantasy.

It's well worth the $1.00 asking price.

Planned Changes for MapTool 1.4 - Part 2

This is the second half of the MapTool 1.4 interview with Frank, Craig, and Bill the project leaders for MapTool.

In part one, we discussed the user interface changes planned for 1.4. In this portion, we focus on Macros, underlying architecture changes, JavaScript, third part tool integration, and MapTool plug-ins.

Planned Changes for MapTool 1.4 - Part 1

MapTool is a free, open source Virtual Table Top (VTT) used to connect gamers of all stripes. MapTool includes powerful map creation, token management, light and sight, and initiative tracking functionality in an easy-to-use package that a user can pack with customizations to speed game play.

It is The Savage Troll's go to technology for time-crunched gaming since it removes much of the setup and travel time required for our favorite hobby. You simply drop a map onto the screen, create a few tokens to represent PC and NPCs, start your MapTool server, and play.

The 1.3 version of MapTool is in Release Candidate mode which means the developers are tidying up a few final bits and pieces before all work on 1.3 stops. At that point the developers rip the code apart and do major modifications and upgrades to the existing code base while adding a slew of new functionality. This leads to the inevitable question regarding what's changing, what's staying, and what's leaving in terms of MapTool form and functionality.

The current project leads for MapTool ( Frank, Craig, and Bill ) took the time to answer a few questions regarding MapTool 1.4. Luckily for us they had a lot to say so we broke the interview into two sections. The first, Planned UI Changes for MapTool 1.4, is presented below. The follow-on interview regarding macros and other functionality should follow in one week's time.

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: 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".

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.

Review: Arsenale Shipworks Maps

Sometimes we fail to see the elegance in something simple. We don't always see the possibilities in the functional and gravitate toward visually stunning. I have to admit when I first viewed the Arsenale Shipworks maps I almost passed them over for this reason.

These fantasy maps are black and white, one to a pdf, and lack eye catching graphics. As it turns out, this is by design. The maps won't eat your print cartridge, have a 1" grid suitable for 25mm miniatures, and print on 8.5x11" paper.

At last count, Arsenale Shipworks has 12 maps available for about $0.75 per printed page. Each purchase includes the map with and without descriptive text. Most maps are a single printed page but two of the maps reviewed required two pages to print.

For you Virtual Tabletop users, the graphics are easily imported into an image editor like GIMP and saved as jpgs or pngs. The resolutions is 100 ppi and the line up nicely inside Maptool. The added benefit to the black and white color scheme is a small memory footprint inside a VTT.

I had two issues with the maps. The map's description exists only on the retailer's product page and each map is duplicated (one with text and one without) in a separate file which leads to disk clutter. I recommend placing a description on a title page and putting both versions in one file, possibly with a text layer than can be turned off for printing.

Overall the maps are a nice offering and well worth the price.

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.