Map 14 of 26: The Chemical Plant

Though 14 maps have been finalized, over the years I have popped out dozens that I experimented on or toyed with. There are some locations which just about every mapmaker just has to produce as though the creation of that map is a rite of passage. Two of those locations are a certain vigilante's cave and a nice chemical plant for the creation of his main villain.

Yesterday, at Baltimore Comic-Con I had the privilege to meet Jerry Robinson. He signed a copy of the Batman Archives Vol. 1 for me and as a comic book collector and a lover of DC's prodigal Archive series, this was a great moment and one that I will cherish. So having met the Joker's creator, I felt the need to dust off and clean up a Chemical Plant map I started back around 2005.


Oddly, you'll notice that the elevated catwalk has access steps and ladders on only one side. I like the idea of the map being the third player and forcing its own will upon the game. Here we a place where grounded characters fear to travel hoping they won't be knocked back into an area they can't escape.

You'll notice more orange terrain from me again. I like house ruling an area to have special rules and not forcing feeding my rules onto a player. With these elevated chemical vats, you could just rule them as Water terrain or you could rule them as blocking or you could do what I plan to do and rule that these squares are poisonous and anyone starting in them takes Poison damage.
With that, I'm off to tinker with the next map.
As always, thank you for reading.

Map 13 of 26: The Nightclub

Oh heck yeah, I've hit the half way point. I'm about 2 maps behind but I feel I can hit my personal goal. With Map 13, we're back to beautiful, unsymmetrical, biased maps.

Let's face it... most of us are not kids playing these expensive miniature games. Sure the companies say they are marketing to children, but most players I meet are pushing 30, balding, and single. So we need a man's map and nothing says "manly" more than a Nightclub with dancing girls and poles and couch rooms.

Like the Dark Alley map, I wanted this map to appear as though it's night time. I wanted to invoke the image of Kingpin or Black Mask sitting at a table when Batman or Daredevil came crashing into the bar.


It was a bit of an artistic liberty to put the dancing girl on the map, but I felt the map wouldn't look right without her. None of the gaming companies print bystanders on their maps so I felt this was a unique leap. I toyed with the idea of not making the bar hindering terrain, but in the end I knew this map would see a ton of play from my Batman Ally team and I wanted to maximize the amount of hindering terrain.

I also wanted to make the couch rooms and bathroom fairly disgusting and I think I have succeeded. My girlfriend was personally grossed out by the stain on the couch. That's a sign of success in my book.

As always, let me know what you think. Hopefully I'll have another map up next week.

Thank you for reading!

Map 12 of 26: The Resurrection Pool

If I was on schedule for completing 26 maps in 52 weeks , then this Wednesday I would be posting Map 15. Well here's Map 12 and 13 should be up in a day or two. Map 14 has a lot of touch up work to finish, and Map 15 is about half done. Anything beyond that is still on graph paper and in the planning stages (except for the 3 part Helicarrier map.)

Brave & the Bold gave us loads of League figures and I felt Ra's deserved a map of his own. I wanted to push the Anubis theme that was so prevalent in the 90's Animated Series. I love the whole look of that show. I also wanted to do a map with a strong Egyptian influence and this was the perfect time to bring that into play.

I also wanted to create a perfectly symmetrical map, where no one side had an advantage over the other. While symmetry is important in tournament play. I personally find it boring to play on continuously. I like a map that forces you into making compromises.

One difficult was trying to come up with a grid color that showed up against the floor tiles I wanted to use without the grid becoming too radioactive. The blue/gray lines hopefully will print well, but this may be a work in progress.

The past few maps have also had special terrain areas. I toyed with the idea that the green pool waters would be Water terrain however I felt the pool deserved its own rules. Feel free to send me suggestions. I'll post them here. I'm leaning towards something hideously broken, like characters on their starting click take D6 damage when starting their turn in the pool while characters not on their starting click heal D6-2 when starting their turn in the pool.

I'll have the next map up in a day or two and put the kids to bed before you check here again. The next map goes NC-17.

Thanks for reading!

First shots of the printed maps! (continued)

First shots of the printed maps!

I was able to get two maps printed: The Dark Alley and Deadly Cargo. They look great. I'm happy with the visual results. If I ever mass print these, I may add a black border around the perimeter of the map. The Deadly Cargo map, I may need to rework back to square one. Visually the map is impressive. However game play wise, the two symmetrical openings to the ship means that most of the games played on it would have very little chance to roam out of the middle of the map. Oddly I'm no great photographer and I couldn't take a decent photo of either map. Either the camera flash was so bright it made the miniatures look radioactive and toned down the maps colors or it was too dark and the map wasn't visible. On the Dark Alley photos, the elevated terrain lines look orange but in reality are quite red. Anyway, here are some low quality shots for you to enjoy.

Map 11 of 26: Asgard!

Man, its August already!?! I need to start ramping up the design production or 26 maps by February 2011 will not be happening. This week, its Asgard time! Good old-fashioned, public-domain Asgard.

Recently one of my loyal supporters posted this comment about my maps...

"A lot of your other maps are very original but sometimes one starting area has a major advantage over the other (WWII, Amazon Island). I'm sure you planned it that way but I wouldn't want those nearly as bad as the two I mentioned."
The beauty of not working by assignment and having complete creative control means that I can create completely unbalanced maps and not need to worry about the promotion of the meta-game. Playing on painfully symmetrical maps becomes tedious for me. I've always felt gaming companies sacrificed scenario play in order to foster a tournament environment.

In a classic defend-the-keep scenario the defenders should have an advantage. When playing around with an Asgard map, the initial designs changed a few times. The first design had less open space and a tree-lined shore for hindering terrain. But that design bothered me. Why would the Asgardians give any quarter to the enemy on their shores? And quickly with that thought I eliminated any hints of hindering terrain.

Don't get me wrong, I love the official Asgard map. It's water heavy with a neat special rules twist. Variety is the spice of life. However, I yearned for that classic Asgard of my youth.




In the next few days, I'll be the biggest hypocrite and give you one of those boring symmetrical maps I was just lamenting.

Until then, thanks for checking out my site.

Printing Time...

Over the past months, I have recieved scores of private messages and emails from fans asking to buy my maps. I wanted to announce that I am very close to working out a deal with a local printer to print atleast two of these maps in a small run of a few hundred. Once I have maps 11 and 12 finished and posted on this blog, I will be adding a poll where everyone will be able to vote on which two maps will be printed. Currently I am hoping that when everything is said and done I can price these at around $20 for two maps.

I'll have more details in the next few weeks. In the meantime, feel free to give a shout out either here or on HCRealms to lobby for your favorite map (except for the Martian Balls April Fool's map which for the good of humanity will never be printed.)

Next map... we get mythical.

Map 10 of 26: The Dark Alley

Yup, I'm not on pace to hit 26 maps in 52 weeks. With tonight's submission, I'm about 2 maps behind where I should be. So while my goal is definitely farther away than it should be, it's not out of sight.

One of the playing fields I've wanted to see for a long time is your typical grungy and dark alley. All the good urban heroes tend to bust criminal tail in this environment. You can easily imagine Daredevil, Batman, Spawn or the Green Hornet chasing down some goons on this map.

With only 16 x 24 squares to work with, it's difficult to provide adequate spacing for all the urban nooks and crannies you want to depict. The unique thing about this map is that line of fire from elevated terrain to elevated terrain is unblocked by obstacles, but there isn't a lot of opportunity for unobstructed line of fire from grounded to grounded level.

The other thing I wanted to do was a bit of seediness to this map, so I figured a small adult entertainment center was in order.

The last unusual feature is the placement of the starting zones. I would have liked to drape the starting areas across the top and bottom of this map but the intersections between clear terrain, elevated terrain, and starting areas was difficult to depict.

Oh and one other thing, this map does line up from side to side.

Map 9 of 26: Deadly Cargo

Two maps in one evening!?! What the heck is happening?

So there has been some back log in my mapping. I've got maybe 30 half-started maps in the works. A lot of times I see map requests and I've already got some of the framework started.
A few days ago XFORCE1982 over at HCRealms posted that he was looking for a spaceship map with some alien eggs. I knew I had downloaded some eggs previously from the Dundjinni forums, so I thought this would be one I could knock out of the park.

Dundjinni is great for a lot of things, but seamless tiling is not one of them. Once I exported this as a bitmap out of Dundjinni and into Corel Paint Shop Pro there were hundreds of off kilter lines that had warp outside their respective grid. It took a few nights of work to get this looking tolerable.

Another big dilemma was how to transition the hatches from interior ship to open outer space. I think the way I handled this works and the more transparent lines at the entrances make sense.

So XFORCE1982, I hope this works and maybe if we're lucky XFORCE1982 will take a few pictures of the map in action for the blog!

I'll see you again in a few days!

Map 8 of 26: Mighty Pants

So I play a lot of games and these games force me into acquiring a lot of stuff. Scientific notation would need to be used to count the point cost of all my painted and unpainted Warhammer 40K figures. I'm currently painting both a 28mm Carthaginian army and a 28mm WWI German army. I have shelves of old D&D, Marvel Saga, & West End Star Wars rules. There are binders full of Overpower and the decipher Star Trek CCG.

And then there are shelves of hero miniature games. The closet is full of colossal, never-biodegrading gaming goodness: two Galacti, one big Spectre, a Starro, a Sinestro, three Sentinels, one Advanced Sentinel, two Anti-Monitors and one Foom.

That's right one... one, big, buck naked Foom. Sure, I'd like me an Orange Foom. I'd like me the purple-panted Foom as well. But I need to make room for Dr. Manhattan and I still have yet to find room for the Great Cthulhu.

But the panted Foom calls me. He adds no different game play. But he's a dragon that wears short shorts. That's silver-aged awesome. I want him so, but the house, garage, attic and basement are stuffed with useless gaming crap.

What I like more about Foom owning pants is that it means there are times when he chooses to wear or not wear pants. Owning pants means you may own a dresser or a closet. They need to be cleaned, hemmed and maintained. I'd venture to say most of us own the commando, unabashed Foom. Many like me may want the more modest Foom as well. Many of you might have questioned where the pants go when he's not wearing them.

So for all you inquisitive and greedy collectors out there, I give you Mighty Pants, a hidden place behind the Great Wall where the Foom can let dangle his great balls.