Stranded Battlemaps

[ZRTaylor]

Friendly greetings everyone.

My name's Zach, and I'm currently run my first tabletop campaign ever. A Savage Worlds campaign set in the modern era and built as a zombie survival game of sorts.

Since a big part of this /is/ the maps, I figured I would join the forum and put up what I make for critique and advice so that I can reflect on my work and improve more efficiently.

The game is played week by week, and making an entire town worth of potentially unused maps would be a bit overkill. As a result, everything I make is under a pretty heavy time crunch and not as detailed as I would like.

Even so, I welcome any constructive critiques. I'm especially looking for good tutorial series or asset packs that will help me make better maps without sacrificing too much extra time.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Zach

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Thompson Gap School

The first map I'm posting is the first one I made for the campaign. It's a local school, which I used as an early test encounter, with two stories as well as an exterior map. My approach to props shifted as I worked on the map. I started out with a pixel art approach in the kitchen/cafeteria area and the locker rooms. And then, as I went along I shifted to loading 3D models in Blender, lighting them, and turning them in to properly sized props.

Savage Worlds uses a 6-feet-per-square scale, so a lot of the items are out of scale a well. Doors are too wide, chairs are too wide. I also would have liked to add more details like blood stains in the gym (where a PTA meeting erupted in to a zombification bloodbath) but time constraints tied my hands.

The exterior map is a little rough as well. Poor grass texture, and I was tracing the shadows off of a RL building without really understanding my tools properly. So the results look a little wonky.

I welcome your thoughts.

[ZRTaylor]

I have a small backlog of maps from the last three sessions, so I'll be posting one a day or so to get caught up, and then probably once a week as the game progresses.

Today's map is the Thompson Gap Sheriff's Office.

I wanted to give the players some options for places to run after their initial arrival in town and first brush with the living dead. The two most prominent options were the school and the sheriff's office, purely by virtue of size and proximity.

I roughly based the floor plan off of the sheriff's office in the game Alan Wake, although I significantly altered the layout of it and added the carpool area as an alternate entrance.

Put a few zombies in the cell block, and story-wise I used an incidental ill patient in an EMS vehicle that had arrived per the request of the a deputy on duty as the vector for the initial infestation of the station.

I used an ambulance sprite in Roll20 so that they had the option to move the ambulance if need be, so its location is not indicated on the map at all.

I made this one in a hurry, so it's lacked a lot of the detail props that the school enjoyed. If I decide to run the campaign again this would be one of the first maps I'd want to go back to and retouch for detail.

It was also at this point that I realized that my maps needed more margin space. There were some events take place off frame that I was unable to properly show because of the cramped nature of the frame I chose for the building itself.

[ZRTaylor]

Today's map hasn't really been used in the adventure yet. Again pressed for time I kept a lot of the props out of this map, and relied mostly on room layouts. Although I did use a couple specialty props such as the propane tank.

After this map I also changed my grass texture. Finally realized how horribly out of scale the grass looked. This was the first time I messed around with blending in other textures, though. With some success.

[Josiah VE]

I've never played a tabletop RPG and I'm not one much for zombies, but those are some pretty decent maps (especially for being under the crunch). They are clean and simple, very good for playing on I imagine.

[ZRTaylor]

Thank you. I try to make my maps with the gameplay first in mind, so I'm glad to hear you say that they look clean and simple.

My biggest worry about these maps is whether or not they really "sell" at a glance what they're supposed to be. I think the Sheriff's Office map is the weakest in that department because of the complete lack of props.

If you check back tomorrow I'll be posting something a little different. A map of the town the game takes place in, done in what I originally imagined as a faux USGS topography style. Although it falls pretty short of that mark, I would love your thoughts on how it could be improved.

Thanks for replying.

[Jacktannery]

Hi ZR. I really like your maps. I like the sparse, pared-back minimalistic style and your use of pale colour. I think they are very clear and very good. I like th elack of clutter - I think it fits with a Zombie game. Your shadows in the exterior map are excellent. What programme are you using? A 3D programme like sketchup or similar?

Comments:
- your grass is out of scale but the colour is good. Maybe just reduce the size of the texture by 50%?
- exterior/supporting walls tend to be twice the width of internal divider walls, esp in a school or other institutional buildings.
- watch out for wooden planks at the wrong scale, can be odd.
- some of your green and white internal flooring (cool institutional terazzo?) looks a bit digital.

Here are some examples of what I mean.

[ZRTaylor]

Jacktannery: Thanks for the feedback.

- Texture scaling is definitely my weak point so far. I'll try redoing the pattern file 50% smaller and see how that plays.

- Thank you for the info on interior walls. That's good to know for the future, and will help gameplay-wise since Savage Worlds has rules for shooting through walls and such. A thicker wall would be great visual shorthand for better cover/defense.

- Yeah, those planks look WAY out of scale. Yikes.

- The green internal flooring was supposed to be carpet, but I think I scaled it down /too/ far. Since making this map I've switched to a greyscale carpet that has less of a tiling issue, and can be colorized in GIMP to whatever color I feel fits the building.

For programs at this point I'm just using straight GIMP. I found a nice top-down reference photo for the school I wanted to use (although I had to completely make up the inside) and that helped me get the shading correct.

If you don't mind my asking, what technique do you use for the shadows in your maps? The Dwarf Goldmine especially has a great mood that would be great to have in my adventure's finale map.
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Today's posted map is one that I made of the town in which the adventure takes place. I tried to go for a faux topography map look, but didn't really have the time to polish it properly. Furthermore Roll20 sets a limit of 100mb of upload space on free accounts, so I had to keep the resolution to about half of what I would have preferred in order to save storage space.

[Jacktannery]

Hi ZR, well I have a complicated system of shading. I guess I could do a walk through, but basically I do, for interior darkish spaces:

1. create background (wall and floor) and some shadows under the wall (wall is on a higher layer than floor).
2. Place objects, then shadow below the objects a little bit. The key here is not to use pre-made objects, or the shadows will be horrible. Make your own without shadows. Easy way is to copy each object, turn it black, gaussian blur, then slide it under the object.
3. Designate 1+ light sources. Draw a circle around each lightsource, which is its reach, filled with a blended (FG>Transparent) warm colour, eg. ffc57b from the centre outwards. Then cut away sharply parts of this fading circle of light blocked by walls or objects. Set this to overlay, and duplicate it (so x2).
4. Add a layer of 50% opacity black and place it below the light layers and delete the walls from it, so it does not cover your walls and you can still see them. Go to the layer you made in 3, alpha to selection, go back to this black layer, and press delete.
That's it!

EDIT: actually your carpet looks exactly like carpet. I changed my mind - I think it's great carpet. I'd keep it.

[ZRTaylor]

Thank you for sharing, Jack. I'll have to give that a try on my next map. I've got three to get ready before this week's game, so I imagine I'll have a chance to practice.

[Jacktannery]

Here's an example. I extracted this from map 3 of the dwarven mines you mentioned.

1. Basic map without shading
2. Add shadow layer, reduce to 50%
3. add light layer, set to overlay, duplicate. Should look the same as mine.