Wilderlands Maps

[Dave L]

Some might be interested to know that after a hiatus of nearly 5 years I have been able to come back to the Wilderlands maps and finish what I had started. I have just finished maps 16-18, finally completing the set, and have spent today achieving my original goal - stitching them together to make a complete copy of the whole Wilderlands Campaign Map.

156 hexes x 204 hexes - fancy an old-fashioned hex crawl, anyone?
The file is up on flickr and in the dropbox folder in my signature - it's 4.12mb for the png.
There are no text labels - I still haven't decided whether to add them or not.

I have no idea how many people are interested in such a thing, but if you are one of them, enjoy.

[Rafael]

Well, I AM interested! Sweet, my friend! Sweet!

[Havard]

A great map! fantastic work Dave!

-Havard

[finarvyn]

Agreed, Dave. Your maps are first-rate! 8)

[Dave L]

Well, Stage 3 in now underway - putting the labels on all 18 maps, as well as the combined map.

However, while working on the labels I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of Illustrator CS2 - yes, I know it's years old, but I finally decided it was time to learn how to make vector maps, with a little (a lot of) help from Thorf's mapping files.

After a week of sweat, frustration, and almost giving up, I have something that I think is worth showing.

So, I have a request. Please look at the two maps I have posted here on Dropbox and tell me what you think.

One is my old Gimp map with labels - zoom in and you can see the pixels and watch the text blur.
The other is my new Illustrator map - I have deliberately tried to copy the style I have used in the other map, the difference being that if you zoom in everything should remain crystal clear.

Feedback please.

[Vile]

Have you tried zooming into your new map (in Illustrator, before exporting to .png) and creating blow-up maps of areas?

[Dave L]

Have you tried zooming into your new map (in Illustrator, before exporting to .png) and creating blow-up maps of areas?

Hmm, I've never tried that. Never needed to.
I'm not sure the export function works that way - I have to crop the image to select the area to export, and it asks what resolution to use. I think it's options are 72dpi (screen resolution), 150dpi and 300dpi.

If you selected a smaller area, the PNG wouldn't be any better than just copying it from the large one, as I already use the 300dpi option for the files.

Although - just thinking out loud here - I suppose I could cut out a smaller area, then scale it to fill a larger section - making it 2 miles per hex, say. I'd need to do some sums to make sure I got the scaling right. I would need to scale each layer though, which would be fine except for the labels and terrain symbols, I think. So I'd need to redo those.

A fair bit of work the first time maybe, working our scales and finding out how to do everything in Illustrator (I've only had the software a couple of weeks), but as long as I took notes then doing it again should be a lot quicker.

Umm. It wouldn't add any more detail to the area though, but it would give you more hexes at a smaller scale, which would enable much more precise placement of villages, caves and ruins etc., so for a DM it would be a nice "semi-blank canvas" for them to fill in, I suppose. Is that the sort of thing you were thinking of?