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MightyIgoo
2011-10-06, 07:16 PM
Hello!

So I was thinking about campaign maps, that is the designing and laying out of maps for a dungeon crawl or grid or whatever-have-you. It occurred to me that, while it may be traditional to draw these out by hand on great big sheets of paper or special erasable mats, some of you out there may prefer to (a) design maps on your computer, or (b) reproduce a map more than once.

Working up until recently in the printing business, I wanted to offer an idea for getting your maps printed out large-scale, and cheap. If you don't need anything more than a black-and-white reproduction, look around your local area for a print shop that does blueprints.

Blueprints are usually printed on cheap paper using black toner, and are fairly inexpensive per square foot. For example, the place I worked at had large-scale plotter printers that could print on rolls up to 36" wide and however long you liked. A sheet that was 24 inches by 36 inches, or 6 square feet, would run $1.20.

The difference in price is partially because of what kind of ink is used. Liquid or solvent inks (like you'd buy for your inkjet printer) are more expensive than cheap toner (like in a laser printer). The other cost issue is the price of the paper they print on.

If you want color, you're probably better off at Kinko's or FedEx Office or whatever they're calling themselves, but for maps that you're not going to use for more than a few sessions, this seemed like a good option. Just have your map in a printable file format (we preferred PDFs), with a monochrome or binary color format. Especially with PDFs, you could print the map to scale, 1 inch grid intact.

The same print shops may also be able to scan large maps, to keep a digital copy of your hand-drawn maps. Price will be dependent on whether the scan is in black-and-white or color, and the quality of the scanner used.

Hope this helps someone out there.

nihil8r
2011-10-06, 10:34 PM
thanks for the tip :)