Maps for The Temple of the Frog

[greyharp]

I turned this adventure into a booklet-sized module today, but as we all know, the maps are crap and my scans are worse. Has anyone seen them reproduced? I tried searching this sub-forum and hitting Google, but no luck. Surely some map making aficionado must've had a go at some stage?

[havard]

WotC did a Return to the Temple of the Frog with "modern" style maps. That might be of use?

You can find a link to it here:
blackmoor.mystara.us/downloads.html#bm

BTW, it would be interesting to see your booklet...

Havard

[Falconer]

Er, the original IS booklet-sized.

The d20 version maps are 3-D/CG (too pretty to be functional) and missing the actual dungeons. The DA2 maps are good-looking and easy to read, but very greatly changed from Arneson’s originals published in Sup. II.

The original maps difficult to decipher as long as they are printed out on very large paper. :-) It would be nice if someone redid them so they could fit neatly and prettily in your booklet, but I would go ahead and blow them up as big as you need them to be to be playable. Or redraw them by hand.

[greyharp]

Jul 22, 2010 12:03:22 GMT -6 Falconer said:

Er, the original IS booklet-sized.

Yes I know the original is booklet-sized Falconer. I wanted the module as a separate item so that I'm not using my original at the gaming table, spilling coffee on it, bending back the cover, etc. And because the module is booklet-sized, the maps are small and the details poor and fuzzy. In fact I'm going to have to write the map numbers in by hand in the copy I've printed out.

I considered redoing the maps by hand, but I'm not the most artistic sort. I'm not a whiz on graphics software either, but perhaps I'll have to have a go. Anyway, thank you both for your suggestions.

Here's a link to the booklet (2 meg pdf) Havard. I changed the formatting slightly to make it easier to read. I also corrected one spelling error and changed what appeared to be a typo.

[havard]

Thanks for sharing this Greyharp. I wish I could recommend some program for you to replicate the maps, but I dont know of any good ones for this purpose.

Hand drawn maps might work just as well actually...

Havard

[Falconer]

As I see it, there are two problems with the original maps:

1. To begin with, that the scan (at least the free scan available on Arneson’s site) isn’t the best quality. Any chance someone who owns a physical copy of Blackmoor could scan all the maps at 300 dpi or better?

2. Arneson's maps were not drawn for 5.5" x 8.5" in the first place. That is probably obvious just from how close together the grid lines are, not to mention the general readability difficulty. What also tipped me off was the fact that there is a large amount of space left blank at the bottom of the page. So I trimmed the main maps down to the gridded areas:



The ratio between width and height is the same as, or close to, 8.5" x 11". (The second map seems a mite skinnier, but it looks like it is cut off on the left side.)

So printing them out in digest size was never an ideal solution to begin with. Far better would have been the Judges Guild model of a small booklet and a large map sold together in a zip-lock bag. (Though obviously less economical!)

Those hash marks on the fourth map don’t help at all! If you can imagine that map without the hash marks, it looks very similar to the Castle Blackmoor Dungeon maps given in FFC.

Since the maps given in the book extend beyond the gridded area, my suggestion is (if we can get better scans) to print the maps out on a sheet of paper even bigger than 8.5" x 11" in order to recreate the Arneson map. But if you still wanted them to fit inside a digest-sized book, I would at the very least print each map across two pages so that if you hold it sideways you get a complete 8.5" x 11" map. That should render them perfectly usable. Regards.