I recently finished my 11-year long AD&D campaign with an epic final boss battle. And a good boss battle obviously need a good battle map.
My group is playing in-person, but we use a Virtual Table Top program displayed on a projection screen for our battles. This allow us to zoom out/in on various area, and have a more flexible approach to the area, but for those that prefer using physical miniatures, printing is of course an option as well.
For this project, I did most of the work in CC3+, but it involves using the VTT software as well (MapTool in my case). I’ll keep this article more an overview of the process rather than diving down into the technical details or making a detailed tutorial, but I invite anyone who has any questions regarding the process to drop by the ProFantasy Community Forums and post their questions there, and I will be happy to help.
Getting Started – Planning the Scene
The first thing when doing a battle map is obviously knowing where the stage will be set. Are you doing a dirty back alley in a bustling city? A deserted forest trail? In the snow-filled town square of a northern village? In a room in the good necromancers dungeon? In an underwater temple? Personally, for my own epic boss battle, the players would meet the evil dragon queen Tiamat in a cave inside a Volcano.
When setting the scene, there is also something hugely important that follows along, and that is the size of the battle map. Many premade battle maps often come in the size of a single sheet of paper, and with squares typically 1″, that means that there will be space for about 8 by 11 squares, or 40 by 55 feet, assuming 5′ squares. Personally, I am not fond of these smaller sizes, because it typically means that everyone will always be within range of all spells and ranged weapons at all time, and can easily cross the entire map in a single round (assuming no hindrances). This is one of the reasons I love using a digital approach, even when playing in a face-to-face game, since it takes away artificial restrictions like paper and table size.
For my own battle map, I knew I had to go extreme. After all, I was setting up a fight against a dragon. Dragons are huge. I am using AD&D 2nd edition rules, so a full-scale fully grown dragon should have a body more than 100′ long, tail not included. Now, with enemies that large, you may be able to get away by making them slightly smaller just to make this work, but it should still appear huge compared to the players for it to work. Obviously, my example here is rather extreme, but I am trying to highlight the point of making the battle map large enough to actually set up the scene you want. But also be careful about going too far the other route, if you want an ambush in a back-alley, limit your map to that back-alley, don’t map the entire city in battle map scale just because the players may try to move out of the alley.
I solved some of my huge map needs by having Tiamat be mostly stationary. The players where interrupting a ritual she was using to generate a portal to bring her into this world, which means she was physically tied down to the location, limiting her movement. I still needed a huge map, but I didn’t need to account for a huge dragon actually flying around.
Fortunately, CC3+ lets me make a battle map at any scale. In the end, I went with a 500 by 500 foot map (100 by 100 squares). This means I will need to cheat a bit with the actual size of Tiamat, but on the other hand, I also want the characters to be able to be able to maneuver over the map in a reasonable time, so I found that to be an acceptable compromise.
Do keep in mind the importance of creating the map in real-world scale, that will make everything easier later. If that map is supposed to depict a 100 by 150 foot area, do make it 100 by 150 in CC3+, and remember the scale in CC3+ is in real world units, NOT pixels or print size.
Drawing the Map
With the scene and size decided on, it is time to draw the actual map. I wish I had all the time in the world to make this map truly epic for that final, but I didn’t. And there is also always the question about how much time you should spend for making a single-use battle-map (I am not one of the people that can churn out a brilliant map in no time. I could have made the map much better than the current version, but it would have taken me a lot of time to do so). If this map was intended for publication, I would have spent more time on it, but this was just for my own players so my main focus would be to make an acceptable map, with focus on the different features of the map being clear. I think it is really important that the players should be able to read the map correctly when playing, something that can actually end up becoming more difficult if it is too detailed, especially if there are lots of details that only serve the purpose of making the map prettier.
Most battle maps in CC3+ will start out as a dungeon map, but the resolution of many of the city styles are actually good enough to use for a battle map, the main problem with city styles are that they usually don’t contain small-scale items at all. However, while styles in CC3+ are made the way they are to make it easy for you to make common types of maps in those styles, there are no technical limitation in CC3+ that prevent you from combining dungeon and city styles into one map. This can be very useful for that dark back alley for example. Thus, when starting your map, I recommend having a look at both available city and dungeon styles to figure out what styles to use for your map.
I have a separate article on the topic of combining styles if you want some more details about that.
For my own map, I decided to go with the Bitmap A style from Symbol Set 2, but with a liberal application of fills from other styles, such as the Creepy Crypts annual.
One thing to keep in mind when drawing the map is to plan for what features need to be on the map itself, as this will be just a static background in the VTT, and what features you need to be changeable, which then needs to be added in the VTT software, and not when making the map. The obvious thing here is the players and monsters, if I put in these in the map, they won’t be movable in the VTT. Of course, this also means you can’t add effects to these, so plan for that when making the map. Do keep in mind that you can still use CC3+ symbols in most VTT software, so if you like the tokens from the Token Treasury products, you can still use those, but you have to add them in the VTT after importing the map, not during CC3+ mapping.
When looking at my own map, in retrospect, I wished I had saved that central glow for the VTT part of the process since it ended up being a thing, and I also see that I should have treated the 5 colored crystals as tokens as well, since it was a goal for the players to destroy them. If I had, I could have removed or replaced the tokens when destroyed, which I was prevented to do with this map. But hey, lessons learned.
Exporting or Printing the Map
With the map done, it is time to print it or export it.
Printing is relatively straight-forward. In the print dialog, there is a setting for scale. If you are doing the common 5′ squares, just set the setting to 1″ paper distance equals 1′ drawing distance, and yes, CC3+ understand those foot/inches symbols. You’ll also need to set up how many sheets of paper to use in the tiling section. You need to calculate this from the size of the map, but as I stated above, you generally can fit 8 by 11 squares (40 by 55 foot) on each page, so if your map is 70 by 100 foot, you’ll need a 2×2 tiling. Of course, note that these scale options only work as intended if you mapped your map in real world scale as I mentioned earlier. If you fudged the scale earlier, you’ll be running into issues now figuring out how to correctly scale it for print.
For use with a VTT, the way to proceed is to export your map as an image you can import into the VTT. I’ll briefly explain here, but there is an entire article on this. Now, most VTT’s have different settings regarding how many pixels they want per square, but for simplicity, I’ll assume 100 pixels per square, and I’ll just continue to use the common 5′ squares. The main trick when exporting to a VTT is that you need to get the sizing exact. The best way of doing this is for the export, make sure to first know the dimensions of your map. For example, mine is 500 by 500 foot. It is also helpful to know that this means 100 by 100 squares. Then, in the save as dialog, pick the Rectangular Section (JPEG or PNG) export type, as this will allow you to manually specify the edges of your export, which is needed for that accuracy. (The problem that occurs if you don’t do this, is that CC3+ will include the border in your export, which normally is fine because it looks good, but for VTT use, that border also takes up space, and suddenly your map isn’t just 500 feet wide, but it is 500 feet plus a border, and you need to work out how many pixels are needed for the border, and when importing it into the VTT, lining up the grids become real hard because of that border; so exporting without the border is a must for VTT use).
After selecting the export type, hit the option button, and type in the export size. My map is 100×100 squares, and I wanted each square to be 100 pixels, so that’s an even 10000×10000. Now, that is on the large side of things, on the edge of what I can actually export, so for such a large size, you’re almost certainly needing to disable antialias completely. Most probably, you’ll do something far smaller for a regular battle map, especially if this is one of your first attempts, you should start much smaller. Now, back in the Save as box, after having given it a file name and clicked OK, you should remember that since we picked a rectangular section export, it won’t export immediately, but you will need to define two opposite corners of your export first. Now, this is the point you need perfect precision to only export the exact area needed so that our calculation with pixels per square lines up. The easiest way to do that is to enable snap (Right click the snap button in the lower right, ensure both snap and cursor snap is on) and then first click in the top left corner of your actual map (thus inside the map border) followed by the bottom right corner. Thanks to snap, you’ll be able to click precisely at the edge. You can also use this trick to export parts of your map, since snap should normally line up perfectly with the corners of your grid squares, but you’ll obviously then need to calculate the pixel size to export based on the section to export rather than the whole map. Anyway, once you have clicked both corners, your map should start exporting, just wait until it is done.
Using the Map
Now, if you printed them map, this is easy, just put it down on the table, dig out those carefully painted miniatures and have fun.
If on the other hand you are using a VTT like me, it is time to fire it up. Procedures vary from VTT to VTT, but most of them allow you do define a map or a scene, and then insert the map you exported from CC3+ into the background, and then put tokens and other elements on top.
In my case, I inserted the map, and then added tokens for my players and for the monsters. Most of the tokens I used came from other sources than CC3+, but you can import your Token Treasury tokens into your VTT (Just keep in mind they must be imported for private use, you cannot let others use them) and use those on the map.
In addition to inserting the tokens, I also inserted some lighting bolt images between the crystal and the central ritual portal with Tiamat. The reason I added these here and not in the map in CC3+ was that I could then remove them as the players destroyed the crystals, visually indicating their progress on the map.
And that’s basically it, after this, only the actual play remained. In this case, the player characters managed to defeat Tiamat and save the world, ending the campaign on a positive note.
The Tiamat token was made by Tom Cartos, freely available here, while the lightning bolts are from 2 Minute Tabletop here.
If you have questions regarding the content of this article, please use the ProFantasy forums. It can take a long time before comments on the blog gets noticed, especially for older articles. The forums on the other hand, I frequent daily.
