New Images for Making Terrain Maps

A common practice on the East Coast of the US (and probably other places that I just haven’t been to yet) is for the TO to select a single terrain map for each round of the tournament. The players then set the terrain of every table to match the map as closely as they can. Then when the next round comes, the players set their new table to whatever the new terrain map is for that round. That way every game is played with basically the same terrain each round, but the players still get a new terrain map to play on each round. It helps to make the impact of the terrain each round consistent across the whole event, so no players feel like the terrain on the specific table they were assigned to has more or less impact on their game than if they had been assigned to a different table.

While I was planning my tournament for this year (Remember tournaments? Good times.) I decided that I wanted to try out some new terrain maps. The Epic Dwarf maps are great, and we’re proud to continue hosting them for the community. But I’d heard other TOs talk about making maps with specific scenarios in mind, and this idea really appealed to me. Also…. I hesitate to even bring it up…. but I felt like I wanted terrain maps that reduced the effectiveness of war engine spam a bit. It’s a hot button issue for a lot of people, and it’s been discussed a lot, so I don’t want to spend time talking about it here. But it was part of my motivation, so I felt like I should at least mention it.

The first stumbling block I ran into was … how to actually go about it. I was sure I could just open an image editing program and draw something crude. I was also sure that I could just arrange a table how I wanted and then take a photo of it. I eventually decided to go the software route. Even though I’m not a graphic artist (as you can clearly see), I’m still pretty technical and expected that I’d be able to muddle through it. I was also certain that I wanted to end up with a generic set of terrain images that I could quickly use to make new maps, instead of just directly making some table map images.

Making all the individual images was pretty annoying, but I’m glad I spent the time to do it. Once they were done, just dragging them around in an image editor to make new maps was really simple. And then it occurred to me that if the initial hurdle seemed annoying to me, then other folks must certainly find it annoying as well. So, to make a long story short (I know, too late), I decided to make the individual terrain images available here so other folks could just skip to the fun part too. You will also be able to find them on our Tools and Resources pages.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll get to use the maps I made at some point this year (lolsob). I hope to eventually build up a full map pack with multiple maps intended for every scenario, which I’d of course make available here. Any other TOs out there tried their hand at making terrain maps for events? Have some other (better) looking images you’d like to share as well? Let me know!