Grid Paper

[Jaxilon]

Hang on a second I seem to recall something... let me find that link again....I think it's right up your alley -

Hehe, yep, here it is.. gamingpaper <-- I should get a commission for that I think.

I used to always do my dungeons on grid paper, then I used stencils for a while....just lines for hallways and whatnot, not very great to look at but easy to follow and perfectly functional. Now I'm getting into the digital thing but I still prefer the hand drawn look of things so I'm working on trying to merge the two styles and have it look right.

[Kharon Alpua]

Funny thing about this: Gaming Paper is (a) local to me, (b) cheaper than any other option, and (c) already my preference for tactical mapping (I set up a table for nothing but tactical maps by just taping down two strips of gaming paper). Last fall, I heard about it when looking for a mapping solution for my Shadowrun group, and so I swung by GrandLAN (home of Gaming Paper) to pick a roll up. So, my thoughts?

On the 1" scale, I'd say it can't be beat in everything from usefulness to durability -- we've spilled Mountain Dew on it and at one point a map we'd set on the floor got soaked by a bit of flooding from a severe storm -- the map is still in one piece and the ink didn't bleed at all. It comes in square (which I bought a roll of last year and finished up about a month back by setting up the aforementioned table) and hex (which I might buy next time just to see how it works out) grids. This year they have added singles to the options, 8-1/2x11" sheets that can be used standalone or put into a printer, but I cannot presently comment on the non-square grids, and I'm sure that the singles are of the same quality as the rolls.

If you need grids for tactical purposes, or like working on a large grid (I never recognized how big one inch really is until I got this paper), check out the site and order some, or see if you have a local retailer who carries it and support your local businesses if so.

Unfortunately, while Gaming Paper is, presently, wonderful for tactical mapping, I have a terribly difficult time working on a large area, like a city, on the 1" scale. The roll is easy to trasport, and I could slip singles into a folder, but the space I'd be using to map out a town would get ridiculous, not to mention a city, dungeon, or castle. I currently am using a sheet of clear vinyl to make my table reusable, but I also plan to make cutouts of tactical scale bits from future investments in gaming paper, and once the SR group got into mapping things out, they started to love the gaming paper too, so it's definitely part of my gaming repertoire from now until the cows come home, but when I'm planning a city or other structured area, whether I'm doing so as GM or just as a diversion when work is slow, I can't really work at a 1" scale, and I get frustrated by how spatially limiting an 8-12x11" sheet of 1/4" grid can be for a huge city, even though I could easily go onto multiple pages.