How Useful Is This?

[Matt Drake]

I have this crazy idea.

I just launched Spectre Press, my little e-publishing empire, and I was thinking of a really cool thing I could do with it.

So far all we're selling are little mini-magazine thingies, but I want to make some full-size products. Since they're PDFs, there's a lot of flexibility. So what do you think of a product that was a collection of maps?

More specifically, there is a two-page map of the general area. Then there's a series of smaller maps, one or two to a page, detailing smaller areas. There is some accompanying text, so that the map is not entirely empty, but you can use the map and create your own campaign setting.

Not only that, but since it's a PDF I can put the names of the cities and stuff in forms, and then the downloader can change the names or stick with the ones that are there. So if you want to make a whole world with your own names and just want some maps, with detail maps of particular regions, your map-making work is over. And the accompanying text is sparse, but it does provide enough info to use the setting right out of the box.

Assuming the quality was great and the price was right, does anyone besides me think this is a cool idea?

Matt Drake
www.spectrepress.com

[kabael]

I think it's an awesome idea, dependent upon price of course. Then again, I have a great love for maps.

Personally, I'd find a collection of urban maps very, very, very useful, whether generic or not. City maps always bug me, because while I never really go smaller than that (i.e. bothering with building layouts) and I can handle larger sizes easily, I don't like city maps without some sign of where streets are, and that's hard to do unless you want to sit down with it for quite a while.

But collecting a variety of themed maps (the City Pack, the Fantasy Pack, the National Pack, etc) for cheap prices, even with or without the naming option, would definitely be a pretty useful device, I think.

[Judas]

Yes, but I also would primarily want city maps. It's easy to draw a big areas and put some dots where cities are, some woods, etc. Citites are a bitch, and adventurers have a bad habit of travelling to dozens of them. ;)

Well laid out fantasy and sci-fi city maps would definately be worth it. Where's town hall? The redlight distict? The black market high-tech traders?

[kabael]

I probably should have mentioned this before, but I'd also love to have nicely detailed city maps for real cities, since RPGs always seem to skimp on that.

What's that? I can look it up myself? Bah! I don't want to have to do that! I want things handed to me! :p

[leviathan]

This thread gave me an idea. (; I'm going to try to make hex/isometric maps in photoshop for my upcomming fudge campaign. I started on hex maps last night, and I came up with something quite neet for only a few hours work. (; Hopefully, if the attachments work, you'll see it.

Anyways, I think this idea is great, because from last nights work... I see that maps are a pain in the backside to make. I haven't even started on the city maps either. :P Something like this would be great to have on a PDA of some sort. You know, high tech gaming. (; It would really be efficient to have all of your maps in a tiny space like that. So if you could make the graphics used for the PDFs efficient enough, it would be very possible to do so within a 2mb space. (;

[Ebenezer]

...pdf, so what I'm suggesting may be do-able in that format....

Personally, I'd rather see maps done in HTML so that I can click the old mouse pointer on a portion of a bigger map and have it open/move to the more detailed map of that area.

Or click on a city dot on a bigger map and have it bring up the city.

Or just hold the mouse pointer over a portion of the map (like a building on the city map) and have it bring up a small text box giving some basic data about that area/structure.

Or a distance calculating function that allows me to click on 2 points on the map and have it tell me what the straight line distance is....

Now THAT would be the thing I could sink some bucks into.

Eb (I just want everything) N. Ezer

[Joshua BishopRoby]

Originally posted by Ebenezer
Personally, I'd rather see maps done in HTML so that I can click the old mouse pointer on a portion of a bigger map and have it open/move to the more detailed map of that area....

Or click on a city dot on a bigger map and have it bring up the city....

Or just hold the mouse pointer over a portion of the map and have it bring up a small text box.

Or a distance calculating function...

Eb (I just want everything) N. Ezer

With the exception of the distance calculator, all that is possible in pdf. Good suggestions.

[Joshua BishopRoby]

Originally posted by kabael
I probably should have mentioned this before, but I'd also love to have nicely detailed city maps for real cities, since RPGs always seem to skimp on that.

What's that? I can look it up myself? Bah! I don't want to have to do that! I want things handed to me! :p

It's called Mapquest.com.

I do all my Tribe 8 mapping through Mapquest -- the satellite image option is -perfect- for a post-apocalyptic world, untouched by all those nasty cities and freeways and such.

[Tim Gray]

Campaign Cartographer might fir somebody's bill here. Stuff at www.profantasy.com last time I looked.

[Mock]

First off, this is a great idea--I echo everyone's comments that city maps would be especially welcome.

As an alternative solution to address some of Ebenezer's questions, one could use a combination of an image file from Matt's collection and a spreadsheet program.

If Matt distributed the maps in both PDF and image format, you could do the following:

1. Create an Excel spreadsheet where the cell size is adjusted to be a square grid instead of rectangular.
2. Select the image file and place it in the background of the spreadsheet. The grid is now superimposed over the map image. (bear in mind this is not a printable background, so this is a useful suggestion for folks who either PBEM or use a computer at the game table)
3. Place letters, symbols, whatever in the cells that represent the characters, objects, whatever. These can subsequently be moved by dragging the cell contents to their new location. (for PBEM players, this is especially useful since the spreadsheet has a built-in coordinate system, allowing for very specific movement).
4. Add notes to certain cells that will identify special features of the map if necessary.
5. Distance calculation could be made (rough estimate, at least) by comparing the size of the cells to the scale of the map, then by simply counting cells.

Alternatively, the map can be distributed in PDF only, and the image of the map can be extracted if this idea is of any use. There are some limitations, most notably that you need Excel to do it. Also, backgrounds aren't printable, so it's on-screen only. Finally, you can't get a hex grid.

Sorry to be a bit off topic, but I thought this might be a good way to capitalize further on Matt's idea. Of course, if you don't use a computer for your mapping, it's not a useful idea.

-Mock

[NPC Matt Drake]

The links Eb suggested are a great idea, and I will make a point of having several city and town maps in the package. I will most likely not distribute the raw images with the PDFs, because raw images outside of a stabilizing platform like PDF or HTML can resize and be difficult to print or read correctly, and the additional file size is, in my opinion, not worth it. As it is, if the book is only 20-30 pages it will still be along the lines of a 8-12 meg download, and that's assuming some serious compression, which I may not be able to do without over-jpegging the images, which would then look like crap.

I have a cartographer hard after it right now. He's finished the main continent map and is working on some smaller areas.

Also, I will consider the possibilities of different settings - an Old West collection would be cool, and could have smaller maps of things like Dodge City or Abilene. My wife is an historic cartographer studying the American West, and she could do this sucker justice. And maybe some 1920s, or late 20th century maps (Hong Kong? I think so!) and then some sci-fi map packs, and...

Whoa, am I getting ahead of myself.

Matt Drake
www.spectrepress.com

[NPC kabael]

Originally posted by Joshua BishopRoby
It's called Mapquest.com.

I do all my Tribe 8 mapping through Mapquest -- the satellite image option is -perfect- for a post-apocalyptic world, untouched by all those nasty cities and freeways and such.

I hadn't actually thought of using Mapquest, honestly. I usually avoid it because of it's brilliantly accurate directions :p

I'll make sure to check it out for the next vaguely real world game I run. Might come in handy with the New York game I'm pondering at the moment...

[Skojar]

Asside from maps and GM tools, I think it would be interesting to try gaming when each player had a pda program that had all the info for his/her character, and you would just click on "Save vs. Death" button and it would give you the number.

Maybe even infrared the number to the GM's laptop so he could fudge or whatever.

GM: "Okay Thor, I need a to-hit roll."
Thor: (touches his little pen-thingie to the pda) " done."
GM: (clicks the mouse twice and read the screen) " The displacer beast lets out a howl as your Bastard Sword +1 slices through its hindquarters"

With all the money we sink into books, what's a couple hundred dollars extra per player? (plus two grand for the laptop)

EDIT: I keep inadvertantly putting smileys in the middle of lines.

[Ian Absentia]

Originally posted by Mock
As an alternative solution to address some of Ebenezer's questions, one could use a combination of an image file from Matt's collection and a spreadsheet program.

Your spreadsheet idea is good, but using a program like Excel for this sort of thing is a bit like strapping a saddle onto a cow and expecting a smooth ride. If someone is willing to go to that sort of trouble, I suggest finding someone with GIS experience to generate maps and databases in a proper GIS platform like the ArcGIS series (ArcInfo, ArcView, etc.), then bundle them with the free-for-download ArcExplorer program, which is something like Acrobat Reader for ArcGIS files. Thus, you have fully searchable, query-able, point-n-clickable, zoomable maps tied in with databases that can be as extensive as you want. You can superimpose shapefiles to indicate demographics of all sorts (population, businesses, crime statistics, racial make-up, whatever you wish) that can bring up your databases with a simple point and click.

~Ian

[Mock]

Originally posted by Ian Young


Your spreadsheet idea is good, but using a program like Excel for this sort of thing is a bit like strapping a saddle onto a cow and expecting a smooth ride.

~Ian

I'm merely suggesting a possibility that might not have been considered. I acknowledge that Excel is far from the ideal "map" solution: my dream is to have a fully zoomable, 3-D rotating map able to display eye-level views of every environment the players might encounter. I actually can do this, but it just takes too much time to generate an entire city in the 3-D design software. Generally, all I'm trying to keep track of is where the bad guys are. I don't go in for large-scale maps, but tend only to provide maps for interiors or very small-scale locations. Even with its limitations, Excel works adequately for this kind of work.

My biggest challenge as a GM is time--maps are fun, but even the time it takes to annotate an existing map may not be available (especially if, like me, you end up throwing together games because hey, everyone's home for the holidays).

[NPC Matt Drake]

Originally posted by Mock

My biggest challenge as a GM is time--maps are fun, but even the time it takes to annotate an existing map may not be available (especially if, like me, you end up throwing together games because hey, everyone's home for the holidays).

Which is why the maps really have to come with some background info, so if you don't have time, or even if you do and you're not inspired, you can use the map package right out of the box.

Matt Drake
www.spectrepress.com