10/24/2014

Frugal GM Review: Village Maps from Paratime Design

Frugal GM Review: Village Maps from Paratime Design
Do you know what I pretty much suck at?

I'm specifically referencing making city/village maps, though I'm not vain enough to think the list stops there, not even when it comes to GMing.

Normally I use the Roleplaying City Map Generator, but frankly it isn't always an option and it still takes me a decent amount of finish work to get things where I want. If only there was a relatively inexpensive, yet good, collection of village maps that would work for tabletop and VTT.....

....but there is!

Tim Hartin, over at Paratime Design, has a set of great village maps. I specifically downloaded Village Map 1 & Village Map 3 (shown above) to file away for when I take back over the table in a couple weeks.

I was surprised by these maps a little bit. First off each map comes as a two page PDF, one with place names and one without. Actually this isn't completely true....I should probably note the maps come with and without building names. Village Map 01 still has some labels for the fields and pastures on both maps. I think this was a super minor oversight that doesn't detract from the overall map.

I'm usually not pleased with having maps be PDF only, but when I went to open these PDFs in Photoshop, I could. They weren't locked down and made unusable, which is great because these maps are HUGE, coming in at over 34 x 44 inches at 300 DPI. They are almost to a scale of 1" = 5', so reducing the resolution to that scale but 100 DPI took no time at all. I spent more time counting the number of grid squares to make sure I re-sized it right.

I've already recommended the plethora of free maps available from Paratime Design and I'm happy to recommend their maps for sale as well. These maps were $2.50 each and totally worth it.

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