Electronic maps

Okay, I admit it, I play role-playing games. Perhaps that doesn't have the same stigma it used to, but I'm used to down-playing that aspect of my life, as I'm also a religious person who doesn't feel like explaining to close-minded and misinformed people that D&D is not a satanic game. Especially not the way I play it.

Anyway, I'm the game master for my particular group, which requires a fair amount of preparation. Okay, it doesn't really, but I really, really love the preparation part. I even made a map for the fantasy world in which the game is set. I used to have a remnant of a newsprint roll that I would use, so this is a fairly large map.

The trouble is, as most people know, when you fold and unfold a map too many times it begins to disintegrate at the folds and corners. If I didn't do something my map would fall apart, and it would be difficult at best to make a new one.

Fortunately at the time I was working for a company that had a records retention department that liked me. They had a large-format scanner. They let me scan my map one day and made an image file of it. Unfortunately the map was in pencil, and the scan came out very light. It's hard to read anything very well.

This last weekend I got tired of having a near-useless map file and took my photo editor software (not Photoshop, but a cheaper knock-off) to it. Using the faint lines I traced over them with my software, then cleaned the whole thing up, put location names and various other bits on separate layers that can be turned off when I don't want to see them, and generally made it all look pretty good.

Now I not only don't have to carry around a 3' x 4' sheet of paper (which is an awkward size when you're wanting to view something in one small area), I can use my software to print out maps of any scale, or smaller maps of specific sections of the map. In short, it's going to make my job as game master a little bit easier.

Next time I need a map I'm going to save time and draw it electronically. I admit that some things are difficult to draw with a mouse, but for what I'm doing it works well enough. Anyway, I'll leave you with a sample of the finished product. The original map is 5100x3600, here it's condensed to 10% of that size. Revel in (or fear) my geekiness!