k so ive only been dm'ing for about a year or two now, and i'm running into a little bit of a problem. i currently own lots of the WoTC dungeon tiles, and those have been great for me to use in my games. the problem is, as most critics of the tiles will agree, there is limited flexibility. i know old school dm's will either tell me "when i was your age, i didn't have any mini's or maps...and we were grateful!" . i understand, but i'm WANTING some visual map representation mainly for the sake of movement and tactical positioning.

normally when i dm games, i describe the area and whatever else in pretty good detail before actually showing anything on the game table. i love the imagination part of dnd, so i want to keep that spirit alive in my games...to a point. while i dont like the limitation of the tiles, i do like the level of immersion that they give. ive noticed that when i put down a map (sticky tack to black foamboard...pre-built tiled map) just for the encounter, my players always like what kind of setup i've made. they enjoy the tiles as much as i do.

anyway, for this upcoming session i'm going to be running, i'm going to be putting them in a sewer environment. i have some sewer tiles from the City tiles set, but its not nearly enough, and its pretty limiting visually. so my options are to get a battlemat and draw it out (loses the immersion and cool visual effect) or i can find a sewer map online someone and print it out and play on that (limited flexibility). AHHHH! what the heck am i supposed to do here? i want to immerse the players and give them something cool to look at on the game table, but i also dont want to limit the map as to whatever i just put down on the table.

suggestions??

Go with a TLX setup and do what I do: don't fill the rooms with monsters or props before the PCs get there. My players do just fine with this and we have an agreement that either they don't metagame the layout or I will have to take game-time to set things up.

This obviously doesn't ALWAYS apply, but it does MOST of the time. Things like mazes, catacombs, lost in an unknown location, etc just can't have this.

Terraclips might be the right item for you as well and it is only a matter of weeks away according to Denny and Co.

When I was running War of the Burning Sky, what I did was throw the battle maps into Photoshop, slice them into 6x6 sections, and then print them onto card (or I re-created the scene in TLX, but that didn't work for pretty much every part of the second chapter, as it was all outdoors and pre-Hinterlands).

By cutting it into 6x6 tiles, it fits neatly into my storage and becomes re-usable; I won't be able to use it for future parts of WotBS but I can use it in future games. I toyed with the idea of even putting it on foam core, but ultimately I got lazy and just printed it on card.

(This took me forever to figure out, because I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed:
1. Outline a six square by six square section of map.
2. Copy it to a new PSD.
3. Stretch the corners until it's 6" x 6".
I kept trying to figure out at what ratio of pixels per inch I needed to print out the map, etc etc, before hitting myself in the forehead and doing the above.)

There are also programs like Campaign Cartographer that can be used to create a printable battle map.

The Auld Grump