Dyson's Commercial Maps for Fantasy Grounds

[bigbluepaw]

Update: Updated the mod to v07 to make it playable with any ruleset and fix a few of the naming convention errors. Should be good now.

Original Post

This module containing 90 of Dyson's Commercial Maps is now available on the DM's Guild.

Check it out here!

Here are some of the details.

Overview

This module contains 90 maps from Dyson Logos. These maps have been:

* Instrumented with pins that link to stories and vice versa.
* Renamed, organized and gridded for impromptu play.
* Resized and optimized to minimize loading times.

Types of Maps

The maps included in this module range from small to very large playable space. In general, however, these maps would be best used in an exploration or dungeoncrawl manner. Note that these are not individual battlemaps meant to be used for a single combat encounter.

Interlinked Stories and Maps

Each map includes a pin to its corresponding story entry. The story entry links to the map as well. Furthermore, these story entries include:

* A link to the post on Dyson Logo's site detailing the map.
* An excerpt from Dyson on his original intent for the map.

Dyson has incredibly imaginative ideas for these maps, as you will see. The guy is a RPG genius. However, feel free to use them in your own way.

You can, of course, prepare these maps for your use by dragging and dropping story pins, encounter pins and more onto the map.

Genericized for Ad-Hoc Play and Search

Dyson had some original purpose for each one of these maps. The main goal of this module, however, is to provide a large source of maps that can be used in an ad-hoc manner for game masters running ongoing campaigns. As a result, the maps have been genericized. These maps have been:

* Retitled into two categories: Aboveground or Underground.
* Retitled to include possible uses for the map such as Keep, Temple, Mansion or Inn. You can use these descriptions to filter the list of maps by simply typing one of these words.

The goal of this effort has been to make it easy to find a map, supporting impromptu play.

Additionally, color has been added for a number of maps to more clearly distinguish trees, water and lava. Yes. Lava.

Gridded for Fantasy Grounds Play

All of the maps in this module have had a grid added. This means you can simply bring up the map, add a mask and drop players onto the grid.

Note that some of the maps included in this module have a grid drawn by Dyson. In some cases, the Fantasy Grounds grid does not exactly match the drawn grid. Of course, you can always manually change the grid to fit your purposes.

Secret Stuff Has Been Removed

As originally drawn, some of these maps included overlapping passageways and hidden doors. In these cases, such secrets can be obvious to players as the map is unmasked. Pfaw. Sneaky players.

As part of the development of this module, overlapping passageways and secret doors have been removed. To give game masters an idea of the original intent, text and arrows have been added showing how how passageways connect and where secret doors are hidden. See. No hints or clues.

Modified to Minimize Load Times

Another goal of the development of this module was to minimize the loading times of these maps in Fantasy Grounds. That effort included:

* Resizing the map such that 50 pixels equated to 5 feet.
* Running each image through an graphic optimizer.

As a result, all but six of the maps are smaller than 500kB in size. No delaying until that map loads for that one player with a slow connection.

Dyson’s Commercial Maps License

All of the maps included in this module have been released by Dyson Logos for commercial use.

"These maps are free for anyone’s use – they are released under a free, royalty-free, commercial license. This allows them to be used, reused, modified, remixed, mangled and published for personal or commercial use. The only requirement is that you credit the map or cartography to Dyson Logos."

Note that Dyson is supported through a Patreon account. Many of these maps were only released because his patrons generously contributed financial support. Please consider supporting Dyson on Patreon so he can continue this kind of work.

[Trenloe]

This is fantastic! Thanks for putting this together.

Was there a requirement to make it for the 5E ruleset only? These would be of use to any FG ruleset as there's nothing that's 5E specific in the module.

[bigbluepaw]

Thanks Trenloe. This was a big investment of time. Glad its appreciated.

No requirement to make it 5E only. I think I had read somewhere that you have to manually edit something within the files to make it allowable for any ruleset? I wasn't sure how to make that kind of change. If you can point me to the right resource, then I can update it and re-upload it to DM's Guild.

[Trenloe]

That's cool - thanks!

In the definition.xml file change: <ruleset>5E</ruleset> to: <ruleset>Any</ruleset>

[bigbluepaw]

OK. Its on the list.

[Gwydion]

Really great work. I know how much time/effort this stuff takes and it is much appreciated!

[rob2e]

Great work.

With the numbering, I noticed some anomalies. No Bo2, two C40s, etc. Is that purposeful?

[Bidmaron]

You should also include gridless versions because grid matching is frequently a problem.

[Trenloe]

You should also include gridless versions because grid matching is frequently a problem.

FYI - this module has not been produced by the original cartographer, so access to different/modified maps is not always possible.

From post #1: "Note that some of the maps included in this module have a grid drawn by Dyson. In some cases, the Fantasy Grounds grid does not exactly match the drawn grid. Of course, you can always manually change the grid to fit your purposes."

bigbluepaw has done a fantastic job, spending lots of time putting this together - for free!

[bigbluepaw]

Bidmaron, if the grid doesn't match your needs, you can always simply remove the existing grid. That should only be three mouse clicks.

rob2E, there will be a couple of maps that have the same index (B02 or C43) because I created multiple versions of some maps, for example with a water lake and a lava lake. I tried, however, to put an a or a b distinguishing the two. So it should be B02a and B02b. I'll revisit that. If you find any that stand out, please send me a PM or drop the note here.

Thanks Trenloe. In some cases, each 5' square might originally have been 153 pixels. Reducing the map sizes, in this example by a third, gives us a wonky drawn grid that FG will never exactly match. I could have kept the original map size, but it would have detrimentally affected load times. This was the compromise: maps that are mostly under 250 kB with grids that might be slightly off.