Good conversation about rights and what is right.

Yes I agree that it would be wrong of me to simply email someone else a full PDF of the work I paid for for them to manipulate and then be able to keep. That is not what I am intending to do.

I will disagree that it is not fair use for what I want to do. Fair use allows me to use the product for my own personal use in my game as I see fit. It does not allow me to use pieces of prior art, rotate 90 degrees and then re-distribute that work. Fair use does allow me to take that work, cut the church out and move it to the right to break up the alignment of buildings to fit the arbitrary paper size that the publisher needed to work with. That allows me to use the product in my own game. If I do that myself it is perfectly fine.

I think the only real potential quibble here is hiring someone else to do it for me. In its most strict sense copyright does not allow that to happen. The rights holder of the work is the only one who can further bestow those rights. By my purchase I have been given the right to printing for personal use. Do I have the right to pay someone else to print it for me? I think that is too minor of a point to concern 99.9% of the rights holders out there.

I really do like this publisher and have shared versions of their maps in use in my VTT with them and posted on various boards to highlight how useful products like theirs are.