I’m running a one-shot 4e session on Saturday, one of the Chaos Scar adventures (perhaps another post coming along about this series. Long story short: the ones I’ve read so far are really good!). And of course, I knew I’d need the maps.
I’ve got a Chessex battlemat, but it has a map drawn on it that we’re using in my long-run game and I don’t want to erase that. I have a bunch of the sets of WotC Dungeon Tiles but after looking at them apparently not enough/the right ones. I’ve got a crapload of Descent board pieces but looking at the maps I didn’t have exactly what I’d need. I dug around online for a while and found some scanned tilesets but laying them out in a Word or Paint Shop Pro document was a big pain.
But then I stumbled across the Dungeon Tile Mapper on WotC’s site. I don’t remember them promoting this much at all. It’s a program that lets you lay out digital versions of four of the older pre-4e WotC tilesets. Took me a bit to figure out how to make it work (note: under “Settings” tell it you have multiple copies of each set or you’ll be frustrated) but overall it is a good “quick and dirty” tool for putting together and then printing some nice looking maps.
I know there are others out there as well. I looked at Campaign Cartographer once but couldn’t get my brain around it. Same for Dundjinni. Also, those cost but the WotC one is free (and doesn’t even seem to be behind the D&D Insider wall). There’s another one based on the same program as on the WotC site but, well, it feels like there’s some serious intellectual property issues with the tilesets it uses so I’m loathe to write its name here but that one is also really awesome. But as a web-based tool that I can access from work get to wherever I am, it’s a good thing.
Any others people like for doing print maps?
(and Bryant – I’m finally using the foam boards I took from you when you guys moved! Have to paper over some of the Keep on the Shadowfell, but so it goes)
