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I have never posted gaming pics before, so tonight I snapped some pictures of our session.  We were missing two players tonight, but that’s okay, you’re getting the most photogenic of the bunch, myself at the top of the list.  The newbiedm shirt you see one guy wearing was made by my wife for all of us, as a gift for us to take to Gencon.  She made them as a birthday gift for me.  I’m the nerd in the Skywalker Ranch cap, behind that screen thing that DM’s use for that thing they do with those funny dice…  Enjoy.

Here is the last part of the battlemap tutorials for NewbieDM.com, written by professional cartographer Jonathan Roberts.  Click here for part 1, and here for part 2.

At the end of the last tutorial we had a lovely map, though it’s a little bare. In this tutorial I’ll cover the little tweaks that will finish off the map and how to present the finished product.

Final touches to the terrain – lava!

Here I will cover how I went about creating the lava, and discuss some alternative approaches to the one I took.

Now I already have the lava lines drawn in, so as with my walls, I can create a selection by using the Fuzzy Select tool. I then use Select->Grow to expand it by 2 pixels so that it runs along the center of my lines rather than along the edge. Now I hit Select->Save to Channel to save the selection for future use. With this in place I can quickly lay in some colours.

I create a new transparent layer and fill it with a dark red (7f1800 in html notation for anyone that wants to re-use it). I now have a totally red map. Once again I right click the layer and add a layer mask, being careful to pick my lava selection. Now I only have red lava, but it’s still a little extreme. As before I soften this by duplicating the layer, setting one layer to soft light .

Now that looks good, though it looks a little more like rivers of blood than lava. From looking at some useful reference photos of lava from Google it’s clear that the defining feature of lava is the sharp bright line – almost like ripples. So I take a new layer, grab a nice bright yellow and the ink tool and start detailing the lava. It takes a while to place all the ripples, but it’s starting to look more like lava.

Currently it’s a bit harsh – and certainly not subtle. Now lava is bright because it’s giving off heat – so we should expect these bright regions to give off light. So I duplicated the layer and used the Gaussian Blur filter: Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur… This adds a subtle glow to the lines.

I’ve also dropped the opacity of the hard highlights to 60% to avoid the harsh look that we had at the start.

Now each sharp line gives off light, but the whole pools of lava give off light too. To add to this effect I add a new layer, set it to soft light and use a very light yellow to lay in the light given off by the lava.

Now that’s quite a lot of trouble to get detail into the map, especially drawing in all the lines in for the lava. One workaround is to find a
texture that you can use to add detail. An excellent place to look is www.cgtextures.com. Here you’ll find a lot of good textures.
For this example I’ve taken the image that can be found here.

I placed this on a new layer, making sure that it covers all the lava:

Now obviously the marble doesn’t look convincing at is, but the pattern of light and shade looks like it might work well. I then set this whole layer to soft light and voila! – instant lava.

This works particularly well because the marble texture is almost greyscale. Had it been brightly coloured it would be best to desaturate it first (Colours->Desaturate).  You can use this technique to quickly add some interest to regions and delineate different types of terrain. It’s easy to overdo this, so drop the opacity low to start and then slowly build it up.

Remember that the more subtle layers you pile on top of each the better the final result will look.  We’ll cover more of this when dealing with regional and city maps.

Adding set dressing

Okay, so now we have a map with all our different features and terrain in place. Time to add some set dressing. There are two ways to go about this. Firstly, we can draw our items of set dressing ourselves. The alternative is to find some items drawn by someone else and steal them.  Remarkably, this second approach is perfectly legal as long as the person has made them freely available. There are loads of items that fall into this category in the User Creation Forums over on the Dunjinni website (www.dunjinni.com). I’ve also got a pack of items on my website that you are free to download and place.

For my example map I used torches, braziers and doors from the map pack, as well as some bones to give a properly ominous air to the
sacrificial pillar.  The rope bridge and the pile of dragon gold I created from scratch for this map. The process for these is the same as for other features of the map. Add a new layer and draw in the lines with the ink tool. Create a new layer for the colours. Finally add a soft light layer to add light and shade.

Here’s the progress of the rope bridge through this process. In the last step I added some extra shadows beneath the bridge to emphasise the height from the floor of the cavern.

Now to add some torches to light the caverns (lifted from my map pack):

A side view to help the GM:

and a signature! Don’t forget to leave your mark on your map. It’s good to see it there, and it also means that if you put it up on the web for others to use that people know it’s yours.

Oh, one final edit. I duplicate the grid layer and blurred one of them slightly. This is helpful because if you are looking at a map at different scales (say in a virtual tabletop where you can zoom in or out) then the program that does the scaling can easily lose a 1 pixel wide line. It just averages the pixels out and gets rid of the line. This doesn’t happen to the gently blurred line – so you have a smooth transition as you zoom out rather than getting a jagged effect with bits of grid disappearing in chunks as you zoom out.

With that final tip we are finished:’

Make sure that you keep all these features on their own layer, I’ll explain why when we get to showing off your map using a virtual tabletop.

Showing off your map

Now all of this is a little overkill if all you want to do is keep the map to yourself and draw the combat encounters out on a dry erase battlemat.

So how do you go about getting this map in front of your players? Well there are two ways to do it.

1. Printing it out.

It’s perfectly possible to print out your map and use it at the table. If you’re feeling flush you can take it to your local print shop and have them run it off on a large format printer. There are even dedicated online printers that specialise in RPG battlemaps (http://www.gamerprintshop.com/). However if you want to print it at home you certainly can.
First of all, make sure that your map is scaled to the correct size. Here I’ve got a 100px grid, so I need to set the resolution to 100dpi to make sure it prints out 1 inch squares. This can be set through Image->Scale Image…

Now make sure that you turn off any images that you don’t want your players to see. Hide the secret doors, remove the traps. In this case I’m going to turn off all the elevation text. Now save the map as a jpg. To do this go to File->Save As… and save it out as something like MapFinal.jpg. It will ask you to set a quality. 85% should be fine so just click okay.

Now you need to download a wonderful little program called Posterazor.  It’s free and cross platform and you can get it here.  Load it up. This program slices up an image – without rescaling it – into a multi-page pdf. Once it has done this, you can print out your map page by page. Not only does this allow you to print the map yourself, it also
means that you can keep most of the map a secret from your players before they explore it.

When you start the program you’ll be asked to load an input image.  Load up your MapFinal.jpg and make sure it’s got the right dpi setting.  As long as you scaled your image right this should be fine. On the second page make sure you have the correct type of paper selected.  Letter for the US, A4 for the UK, just check that your printer has the paper that you pick. Next comes the overlap. This sets the amount of overlap between images on each page. You can have as little or as much as you like. It’s worth having a little as it helps line things up at the table. In step 4 you’ll see an image of your map with red lines over it.  This shows you where the program is going to cut your map. You can edit the values on this page to move the cuts around, but it’s usually pretty good. Finally on step 5 you can save out your pdf. You’re done!

Open your pdf, print it out and take it to the gaming table. You’re all set to use your glorious creation for your game.  For those who would like to save ink, you can also do this at the end of stage 1 – when you have black and white map with a simple grid. This gives you all the same play value, without costing you a fortune in colour cartridges.

2. Using a virtual tabletop

The alternative, and one that uses no ink at all, is to use one of the growing number of virtual tabletop programs out there. I personally have used maptool (www.rptools.net) ever since I moved country and wanted to keep my old game going. I now use it both with my friends from the UK, and also for a face to face game in the States.  Preparing the image for use in a virtual tabletop is much the same as
preparing it for use in Posterazor. Remove all GM only information – remember you’re showing the players the map. Now save it out as a jpg.  Before you saved it at a high quality. Now when the Save As JPEG dialogue comes up, click the Show Preview In Image Window checkbox.  This will give you an estimate of the filesize. As you move the quality slider you’ll see how this size changes.

Now this is a fine balance. Too low a quality and you’re map will look rough and have obvious compression defects. Too high a quality and you’ll be trying to upload a 10MB file to all your friends at once. Now your internet connection may have a great download speed, but I’ll bet it will take a while to upload 50MB. So strike a balance. If you’re using it for a face to face game then you don’t need to worry about internet speeds and you can go with a high quality that looks good.

Finally, depending on the virtual tabletop program, you may want to use a version of the map without the set dressing and add those items, such as the torches and braziers, in the program itself. Now you see why I said you might want to keep those on their own layer! Equally, maptool has an inbuilt grid, so I use a version of the map without a grid, and let maptool keep track of the distances.

With a little set-up for the light and shade, and with a top down token from the wonderful tokens of Devin Night of the Four Ugly Monsters the dungeon is ready for use face to face (with a second monitor, a player laptop or a projector) or across the world.

Here I set up the light sources to conform to the light rules and told maptool where the walls were. I also made sure that the elevations were only visible to the GM – so they can quickly see all the relevant information, but it doesn’t break the suspension of disbelief for the
players.

Now doesn’t that look better than a dry erase battlemat with markers?  And all for the price of two free pieces of software and a small investment of time.

If you want to have a look at the full blown maptool campaign file it’s included in the RPGNow download. In fact there are two campaign files in there – one for Pathfinder/OGL lighting rules and another for 4th edition rules.
If you’d like to see this process in real time, then sign up to The Breaking of Forstor Nagar – a patronage project with Rite Publishing. As
a patron you’ll be directly involved in the development of the adventure with input at every stage. This includes map design, storylines, NPCs and encounters. If you’d like to find out more, visit The Breaking of Forstor Nagar and get involved.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first mapping tutorial. I’ll be interested to see what people create! I’ll be back in due course with similar tutorials for some larger scale maps, dealing with towns, regions and perhaps even whole worlds. Until next time, happy mapping!

Well, there it is guys.  One of my goals for the site has come true.  A kick ass mapping tutorial by a professional.  I can’t thank Jonathan enough for this series.  Based on the number of messages I’ve received about it, I know it’s destined to become a popular feature here (if it isn’t already).  We have other tutorials coming down the pipe, but let’s give Jonathan’s photoshop some cool-down time!  Make sure you visit his website at Fantastic Maps, for more mapping goodness, and if you have made some maps following the tutorials, share them with the rest of us!

The winner of the book is Matt, with this artistic rendition of Drizzt:

Congrats, Matt!  And a signed copy of The Ghost King is on the way!

Here is the 2nd Part of Jonathan Roberts’ battlemap series for NewbieDM.com readers.  Part 1 can be found here.  In the following weeks, he’ll be providing us with mapping tutorials for regional maps and world maps as well.  You can visit Jonathan’s site, Fantastic Maps, to find other great examples of his work.

Last time we created the line art for our battlemap, and created a very functional map in black and white with a grid. Now if you want to stop at that and print then you certainly can.Equally, if you’re using this as your own reference and drawing out the map on a dry erase mat for your players, you don’t need to go much further. However if you have a little more time to invest then there are some nice tricks that can relatively quickly make your functional line map into a lush full colour map that will really stand out.

That’s what we’ll cover today. In the third part of the tutorial I’ll go through how to print out your maps or use them in a virtual tabletop.

The most important thing when you add colour is subtlety. It’s really easy to slap down bold colours in the different areas that make your map look like it’s been drawn in neon marker. Equally, it’s easy to let the colours and textures obscure the important features of a map.  Remember that maps have to be functional more than they have to pretty. The map you have already has all the function you need, make sure you don’t lose that when you add the colour.I find that it’s best to start off with one unifying texture as a background and build up colours, highlights and shadows on top of that texture, without ever truly obscuring it. This allows the background texture to tie the whole map together giving it a unified look and feel. The texture I use most often is a parchment texture, but If I’m doing a snow and ice map I’ll use something in blues and greys.

The important thing for the rest of this process is that the background around the middle of the scale in tone – neither too dark or too light. If you want to borrow the texture, here it is:

This is a bit dark for snow, so with this layer selected I used Colours->Brightness/Contrast to lighten it up (moving both sliders to the right) and set the layer to soft light once again, with a duplicate of the layer set to normal and reduced to 50% opacity. Voila! Snow and ice!

Part 3 of the tutorial is now available here.

With this website, I’ve tried to give new DM’s out there tools, resources, and tips to run a better D&D game with.  One of the things that I’ve never been able to offer before today, simply because I have no skills at it, is a robust mapping tutorial or series.  So I reached out to the community at Cartographer’s Guild, probably the best mapping resource on the internet, and immediately I had a volunteer willing to help out newbiedm.com readers with their rpg mapping.

Jonathan Roberts, a published cartographer who has done work for Mongoose Publishing, Kobold Quarterly, Open Design, and other publishers, has graciously accepted to provide us with a series on mapping.  Jonathan has a website called Fantastic Maps, where you can see his work.  He is also the project lead on the first Pathfinder adventure to be purposefully created for use with virtual tabletops: “The Breaking of Forstor Nagar”. You can find information on that patronage project here, and find screenshots of the project here.

Over the course of the next few weeks, he’s going to give us tutorials on creating battlemaps, regional maps, and world maps.   And these are not just tutorials on how to draw the maps, but also the thinking behind why things go where they do.  I’m excited to present this series, and I hope these tutorials help you out in what’s probably one of the funnest part of DM’ing, great map-making!  And now, Jonathan Roberts…

Designing and drawing a battlemap – part 1

“Through the archway you see a circular room, roughly 20 feet across, with doors leading off to the east, west and south. The ceiling looks to be vaulted, but it’s hard to tell due to the thick mass of cobwebs that hang like ghostly shrouds. A pile of bones lies heaped in the corner.”

It used to be the case that a DM could describe a dungeon to their
players and everyone would know what was going on. If necessary
players would draw out a map on squared paper as they went along and if a fight broke out the terrain would be built out of pencils and erasers with dice standing in for the combatants. Now this is fine as long as all rooms are built in clean 10 foot squares, but time has moved on and the game has evolved. Adventures take place in the intestines of petrified wyrms, or on the deck of a storm tossed ship. Combat rules have become more involved, requiring careful tracking of distance and terrain. Thankfully the tools we use to play the game have evolved too, whether it’s in the form of dungeon tiles, virtual tabletop software or just a dry erase mat with a grid drawn on it. The adventures that are published have also moved on. Where in the past it was fine to have black and white maps (or blue and white if we’re going really far back) with distance measured in 10 foot squares, now published adventures have glorious full colour maps.

So what do you do when you need a map for your home brew
adventures? There are two things to consider when answering this.
Firstly how do you go about designing the map, and secondly how will you present it? All too often the second question influences the first. If you have a selection of dungeon tiles that you use to display your maps then you can easily fall into the habit of creating maps by taking out your tiles and figuring out the layout of the dungeon. If you use virtual tabletop software you might feel even more limited – only running adventures using maps that you can find or buy through the internet.

Now these are both great ways to create dungeons, particularly when pressed for time, but I’m going to show you how to go about making maps from scratch that look great.  Not only that but I’ll also cover a couple of different methods that will allow you to use these in front of your players, so that you’re not the only one that gets to see the fruits of your labour.

Here’s the map that I’ll be creating in this tutorial:

The full sized version, along with two maptool campaign files, a sliced up pdf for printing at home and a number of pieces of set dressing can be picked on RPGNow.  Now as a special treat for all you NewbieDM readers, there’s a discount code so it’ll only cost you a dollar.

First of all, let’s discuss tools. For this tutorial I’ll be using Gimp – a free, cross platform and open source graphics program. Now if you have a graphics tablet that’s a huge bonus, but the majority of what I cover in this tutorial will be possible with a mouse. All of the steps that I cover here can be directly translated into photoshop.

So shall we start drawing?

Well, not quite. As I said before, there are two questions about maps-first how we should design them, and secondly how they should be presented. So let’s start off with design questions before we put pen to paper.  In this tutorial we’ll be doing battlemaps.

These are fundamentally tied to combat and should be designed with this in mind.  You need to think what kind of encounters you want to throw at your players.  Do you want to give the ranged PCs an encounter where they can fire across large open spaces?  Would you prefer a tight corridor where the fighter can hold off the hordes?  Will the combat change halfway through when enemy reinforcements surprise the PCs from behind?  If so then you’re going to want to make sure that there’s a passageway they can appear from.  The art of designing a good encounter has become more sophisticated as the game has evolved, and the current manuals have excellent advice on how to build a good combat.  Now remember, it’s easier to change the encounter than the map, so best nail down the encounters first.  Then you can build the map you need to run them.

In this tutorial I want to create a lair for a young adult red dragon.  Dragons love caves, and they also love treasure.  However I don’t want this to be a straight forward single monster encounter – it would be fun to have some smaller enemies to fight as well as the dragon itself.  So let’s say that the dragon has acquired a tribe of humanoids that provide it with sacrifices and treasure.  Not only do they add an excellent lesser
threat for the players, it plays to the themes of vanity and greed that define dragons as well as giving me a couple of hooks to get the players involved.

This mix of foes means we should get a good mix of mass combat encounters and fights with a single monster.  I want the dragon to have opportunities to outmaneuver the PCs. The easiest way to do this is to have the dragon flying.  Now that’s not much of a benefit if the whole dungeon is flat, so let’s have some rooms with high ceilings and different levels inside.  Whilst the players are slogging across the difficult terrain the dragon can be swooping back and forth.  Perhaps we’ll throw in some lava as well to give the encounters some added danger.  Nothing says epic battle like the chance of falling into lava.

I want the fight with the dragon to have a number of beats.  First the players will encounter the dragon when he is about to devour a sacrifice.  They will battle through the dragon’s acolytes to get to the sacrifice and fend off the dragon whilst they whisk the prisoner out of harm’s way.   Then they will go after the dragon – first fighting the dragon in the outer  caves.  They wound the dragon badly enough for it to retreat.  They can leave it at that and go home, or they can follow the dragon to it’s hoard.

There it will fight to the death in a climactic battle – probably with more lava. So I want to have three primary locations. Firstly the outer area where the sacrifice is made. Second the tunnels to the dragons lair where they fight a running skirmish and encounter the dragon’s traps.  Finally the dragon’s hoard where they fight to the death.  Now we have the required locations, and we know the type of fight we’ll be running in each place it’s time to pick up a pen and draw a sketch!

Drawing a sketch

First off let’s lay down a sketch of what we want the location to look like.  Open up a new document in Gimp and set the dimensions to 2000px to a side.  Here’s my layout whilst I’m working – it’s easy enough to set up:

If you don’t have the layers dialogue open, you can find it under Windows->Dockable dialogues, along with the other dialogues.  First of all let’s lay down a grid for us to work with. First create a new
layer (ctrl-shift-n) and make sure it’s transparent. Then go to Filters->Render->Pattern->Grid.  Set the offset to 0 and the size to 50px.

This will create a map that’s got a resolution of 50px per square.  This is good enough for use in a virtual tabletop but if you’re going to be printing then you probably want to go for 100px here.  Now you can go larger.  Print images are normally printed at 300px per inch, but you’ll find that Gimp will start eating up your system’s memory. Anyway, how finely detailed do you need a battlemap to be? I find that 100px per grid square (remember that when printed 1 grid square = 1 inch) is a good compromise.

Rename that layer to Grid – we’ll be using quite a few layers and its always worth naming them to keep track of what’s what.  We’ll be leaving our Grid layer alone for now.  Now let’s sketch out our map.  First create a new transparent layer (ctrlshift-n) and rename it Sketch lines.

At this point I have a layers dialogue that looks like this:

Make sure that when you are working on your map that you have the correct layer selected.  There’s nothing more irritating than finding you’ve been working on the wrong layer and having to do it all over again.

You can fit the whole map to your screen using ctrl-shift-e so that you can see what you’re doing.  Now take any of the tools and start sketching in lines.  I like using a colour and the ink tool. This delivers nice clean lines.  Now start at the beginning, by drawing the entrance to your dungeon.  Lay out corridors and rooms, remembering your notes about what each encounter area needs to achieve.

An aside about adventure flow

Remember that your map defines the flow of an adventure.  A map that has a series of rooms with one entrance and one exit will lead to a linear adventure as players fight through room after room.  This lends itself to dull adventures where players can feel railroaded.  On the other hand, a maze where every turn offers three or four possible directions can leave players feeling lost and unsure that they’re going the right way.  Think of each room as a decision in the adventure. Players need to choose which exit to go through to get to their goal.  Just as you should offer players more than one way to solve a puzzle, it can be useful to offer players more than one path that they can take through a dungeon.

Back to the sketch

So, following my plan to have a big encounter in a cavern with a tribe and a sacrifice, I’ve laid out a room with a series of terraces at the front that overlooks a cave with the sacrifice platform on top of a pillar. A rope bridge will connect the two areas over the floor below. This area is around 100′ by 80′ in size, offering plenty of space for combat. The terraced seating lends a ghoulish feel to the sacrificial process. The rope bridge, pillars and long drop to the floor ensure that the dragon will have a solid advantage… and if he decides to destroy the rope bridge while the adventurers are on the pillar rescuing the sacrifice then that’s
just icing on the cake.

A couple of passages lead deeper into the mountain. The players can choose either one – they’ll both lead to the same place eventually. The twisting caves offer lots of opportunities for the dragon to circle around
and attack from unexpected directions, and the tight quarters are perfect for placing rock fall traps and pits.

Finally I place the dragon’s lair – a good sized cave enough room to maneuver, but without the large amount of space of the first fight. I want the final fight to be a toe to toe melee combat with the dragon where it can use all of its attacks in contrast to the skirmishes and strafing runs of the earlier encounters. Even though they fight the dragon three times, they should have three very different encounters.

The dragon has his own entrance that I’ll place much higher up the mountain side. Observant adventurers might spot it, and athletic ones might be able to climb the icy cliffs to get in this way. However if they
infiltrate the dungeon through this entrance, they’ll not be able to save the sacrifice in time.

So that’s the logic behind my decisions. Make sure you follow your own logic as you place your own sketch. If you get the layout right now it will make life much easier further down the road. I’m sure you can all see an obvious error my layout so far. I didn’t spot it until the next step…

Laying in the lines

Once you have your dungeon drawn in rough it’s time to start a final version. At this point I create a new (transparent) layer (ctrl-shift-n). This will hold the walls that define areas the PCs can’t enter and other key
structural features like stairs, edges of elevated areas, that sort of thing.  When working on this layer I zoom in to 100% and set the sketch layer to 50% opacity (using the opacity slider in the layers dialogue). Now you can see where I made a few edits to my original layout. I’ve also resized the image up so that my squares are 100px each as I want to allow people to print this out, as well as use it online.

Now it’s important that your walls don’t have holes in them. You’ll see why in the next step.  Be careful as you lay them down, and if your dungeon is rough stone, let your hand jitter around as you draw, this will
create nice rough edges. If your walls are straight then click once at the beginning of the line, then hold shift and click at the end of the line.  Voila! A straight wall.

Equally, it’s easy to create curved lines. Just take the elliptical selection tool (e) and drag out a selection corresponding to your pillar or post (holding down ctrl, shift or alt all help to constrain your ellipse in different ways – have a play and see what works). Once you have the selection you want, go to Edit->Stroke Selection and pick a nice thin line like 2px. Hit okay and you now have a lovely round pillar.

If you’re not sure something will work, try it on a new layer. Then once you have the lines you want, right click the layer in the layers dialogue and select Merge Down to combine it with the rest of your lines.

The Best Bit

Now we’re going to employ one of the most powerful features of Gimp.  Take the fuzzy select tool (u) and make sure that you have your Lines layer selected. Click in the area that you want to be solid wall. Then hold down shift and click in the next region that’s solid wall.  Repeat until all such areas are selected.  You should now see something like the image below.  Make sure that it has selected only the regions you want it to.  This is where all the care you took over your walls pays off.

Now currently your selection (the line of marching ants) will run alongside the lines you drew rather than down the middle of them.  To fix this go to Select->Grow… and pick 2 pixels as the value.  Now your
marching ants should run pretty much down the middle of your line.  We’ll be using this selection a lot so we’d better save it by going to Select->Save to Channel…

If you have the Channels dialogue open you’ll see a new channel appear under Red, Green, Blue and Alpha Channels.  Rename this to Walls and head back to your layers dialogue.  Now that you have this selection the majority of the work is done! From here on it’s surprisingly easy to get a good looking map. Indeed we can get a great simple map with just one more step. Go to your grid layer in the layers dialogue and right click. In that menu find the option Add Layer Mask and when prompted pick the option Initialise Layer Mask to:  Channel.  In the channel you’ll see the shape of your walls already mapped out. Now what this is going to do is hide any of the grid that’s in an area that wasn’t inside the selection that you saved.

Now obviously this is the opposite of what you want. You selected all the walls, and you want the grid to be hidden there and visible everywhere else, so click the Invert checkbox.  Hit okay and you’ll see the grid disappear in the walled off areas. Delete your sketch layer and you now have a lovely clean battlemap!

Now this is a great map to use for a battlemap. It doesn’t take too longto create, it’s all at the right scale and all the features are clearly shown.  You can print this out without killing your printer’s ink cartridge and it can be easily imported into your virtual tabletop of choice. Save it! First save it as a .xcf file (Gimp’s native file format that preserves all of the information) and then save it out as a jpg.

And just to show how cool your work looks – here it is in maptool:

However, some people prefer their maps with a bit more pizaz so in the next installment I’ll show you how to go about adding some colour…

And there’s the first part of the Battlemap tutorial.  I want to thank Jonathan for helping me with this series, and I hope readers get some nice use out of it.  Stay tuned, as in the next several days we’ll have part 2 up and ready for you guys to keep building your map with.  Also, please make sure you visit Jonathan’s online store and see what kind of maps he’s got for sale.

Edit:  Here is part 2 of the tutorial

Here’s a quick thing I’m sure all DM’s do in one form or another, whether it’s via email, wiki, pen and paper, or some other form:  the game recap.  In my particular case, we don’t get to game as often as most of us would like, so as game recap is a great way to get the players up to speed on the events that have occurred in-game up to the current moment.

This is something that I’ve only implemented recently, but I’ve found that it helps cut down the 10 minutes or so of last-session questions and answers before we start gaming for the night.  Here’s what I’ve been doing… I’m building a document as a narrative of the previous game’s session, and I add to it at the end of the night.

A sample page from my recap document

Within the documents I’m adding maps, images, NPC quotes and other stuff directly lifted from the adventure I’m running, in order to make it more attractive and engaging to the guys.  The document is simply a word one, converted to PDF.  Very simple, yet effective.  I even noticed that there were some printouts at the table last time we played.   Everyone knew what had happened previously and we got right to playing for the night.  That’s the point.

Now, what kind of recap you give your players works best depending on your group.  Some groups and DM’s may prefer to write their own version of events on a wiki, using Obsidian Portal for example.  Others may use a Google Group to keep track of what’s going on.  Those are all great tools to use to keep track of your party’s progress, but in my case I’m using what I know is the best for us.  Knowing my players, I don’t think they’d have the time to sit there and dig through a wiki looking for campaign info.

So how do you guys recap your game?  Do you have any links to your campaign websites or wikis out there?  I’d love to see them, as I’m sure other Dm’s would as well.

Yes, I know this isn’t technically tabletop RPG content, sorry RPGBN, but I think this game looks too cool for me not to blog about it.  Plus, it is getting a tabletop treatment courtesy of Green Ronin, so there.

Dragon Age was developed by Bioware, and they see it as the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series, although it is not based on D&D.  I love Bioware games, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect are two games that took up most of my time when they came out, and Dragon Age looks like it’ll be no different, plus, it’s heroic fantasy, one of my favorite gaming genres.

The game releases today, November 3rd and here now are a boatload of screens full of coolness:

But what about videos?  Check these out…

Character Creation:

Dwarves!!!!

The Korcari Wilds:

The game is available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 starting today, November 3rd!

I have in my possession a brand-spanking-new, hot off the presses signed copy of R.A. Salvatore’s latest Forgotten Realms novel, “The Ghost King”, part 3 of the “Transitions” series.

You, dear NewbieDM.com reader, can win the book!  The contest is simple, send me an email with the best hand drawn sketch you can come up with of Drizzt and his black panther Guenhwyvar.  You can draw it by hand, or on Microsoft Paint.  If your drawing looks like a 3D render or something similar, I won’t even consider it.

Send me those emails, I’ll select my favorite sketch, and you’ve got the book!  Not an artist?  No problem, I’m not a writer and I have a blog.  Enter anyway!

Contest ends Friday November 6th at 11:59pm eastern time.

*By entering you agree that your drawing may be posted on my site, whether you win or lose.*

I brought up a topic on Twitter recently that spawned a number of replies and let to an interesting discussion.  I asked if DM’s mostly rolled out in the open, or behind the screen.  A good number of DM’s seem to roll their dice in front of their players, which is what I personally do.  In combat, all my attack and damage rolls are out there for all to see, as I believe it adds a sense of excitement to  combat.  I love the groans that accompany a natural 20, and the high fives that accompany a crucial monster attack that ends in a fumble.

Having said all this, the topic of the DM fudging  the dice came up.  How can you fudge if the dice are being rolled out in plain view?   Well, the truth is that I don’t fudge dice.  Dice fudging goes back to the very beginning of D&D.  It is a tried and true tradition of the game.  After all, what DM wants his party to die at the hands of a lucky Kobold rather than the big boss at the end of the dungeon?  Not me.  But I also think that the element of randomness that the dice bring to the game is crucial, and should be respected.  I was asked if I would allow a total party kill due to lucky rolling at the hands of some mediocre enemies.  So I tweeted the following:

I’d rather “guide” the story through narration than by fudging. If I smell a TPK, I’ll narrate them out of it, rather than lie about a roll.

It’s very simple.  If I see it coming, I’ll get them out of it before I let it happen.  I ask you this… what’s the point of rolling if you know that a certain outcome will cause you to fudge the roll?  If you know that your party might die due to the breath weapon on the big red dragon, and you plan to fudge this “to hit” roll, why do it at all?  Narrate them out of a possible TPK.  Reinforcements come in to help them bring down the dragon… a dragon’s old enemy swoops in to attack him while he’s busy with the party, allowing the pc’s some rounds to deal with a distracted dragon… the party has a round to heal a few key members… You can come up with something.

Although it looks tasty, it's not the fudge we're talking about.

All I’m saying is that I’m not in favor of the randomness of the game being played with.  You wouldn’t use loaded dice, and fudging is the verbal equivalent of pulling out your loaded d20.  Instead, use you narrative control of the game to steer things where you want them to go, while making it feel organic and not too obvious to the players.

I know I’m going to be in the minority with this thinking.  I know that fudging is seen by many as a handy DM tool.  I get that.  But I want to get my point across and get your thoughts on the matter.  If a result is so crucial that you are willing to lie to get it, then just skip the step  altogether and use your storytelling to get where you want or need to go.

Alright, my flame retardant suit of armor is on.  Bring it on!

Oh, and check out Mike’s D&D Blog, where he writes his views on the subject, as he was involved in the twitter debate.