In my last post, I wrote about converting my old campaign area maps from paper to digital. I needed digital maps so I could use them on a virtual tabletop. As you’ll recall, scanning them didn’t go very well.

But of course, campaign maps aren’t the only maps we have to deal with as a Game Master. We have to make dungeon maps as well. And so I scanned some dungeon maps along with the campaign maps to see how that would go.

Scanning

I’m sorry to report it went even more poorly than had the campaign maps. While the dungeon maps were a lot more readable than the campaign maps, there was a fundamental problem. The squares on the graph paper weren’t actually square once they were scanned. I’m not sure if that was due to issues with the paper or the scanner, but the result looked terrible. The VTT created its own grid so it could regulate movement. But I could only get that grid to align with the squares on the paper for a small area, perhaps the size of a single room. The grid wouldn’t align across the entire map.

Worse yet, no matter how hard I tried the graph paper was never exactly square in the scanner. I always had to rotate the picture a tiny bit with a graphics program to get it square. The angles would be small, less than one degree, but if it wasn’t square it looked terrible. Each scan was at a slightly different angle, so I had to tweak it by trial and error each time. It was a pain in the ass, frankly.

Back to the, er, drawing board…

I realized that by the time I did all of that I might as well just draw the dungeons on the computer to begin with. So I that’s what I did! The results were still quite Spartan, but at least the picture was square, and the grid would align properly.

[IMG: Basemap.png]

Your basic dungeon!

That’s a very basic map. In fact, this is the DM map for the first adventure I ran with Fantasy Grounds. Yeah, that’s right, I had a different map to show the players! Several maps, in fact. There was one for each area of the dungeon, so there was one for the corridor at the north end, one for the square room, one for the next corridor, and so forth.

A later effort. Still kickin’ it old school, though.

I soon learned how to use a mask effectively, and subsequent maps showed an entire dungeon level at once. The mask feature, overlays a blank view of the map for the players. Then you can selectively reveal portions of the map as the party explores. Eventually I learned about other mapping tools, and the results became a bit more artistic as well. But that’s a post for another time.

Thanks for reading!