Battle maps.

[frogglesmash]

What are the best places to find battle maps. Stuff like generic maps of bandit camps, taverns, mills, tunnels, city streets...

[Saintheart]

WOTC typically has the maps from its sourcebooks in its archives online - there's usually a few generic-ish bandit camps/small ruins/etc that cropped up across sourcebooks if you're prepared to wade through a lot of dross. Much of it isn't high-resolution or very easy to print out as a battle map, unfortunately.

Getting more detailed maps of stuff like city taverns or city streets is a little harder, although Google isn't that bad at finding relevant stuff. Getting creative with your search terms seems to help.

Dundjinni has its own forums where generous souls are often sketching out or producing nice-looking battle maps, and they often produce them at sufficient detail levels to be able to print it off at a 1" scale - concentrating searches on this or Campaign Cartographer (EDIT: Cartographer's Guild, not Campaign Cartographer) sites might well assist.

That said, if you're producing something generic, I've actually found it's almost worth DIYing it. I like MapTools now that I've had a long time to understand how the damn thing works. It's not intuitive at all and a pain to work with at times, but combined with a big library of overlays it can produce something at least passable if not memorable. For those purposes, there's a very big (and as far as I know, legal) torrent floating around -- 2.72 gigs -- titled "mapping_objects.zip" which a very kind person put up for public consumption of textures, overlays, etc and which could serve well for those purposes. It might be tough to find a seeder for the file in question, but it is definitely out there.

[Palanan]

Originally posted by frogglesmash
What are the best places to find battle maps. Stuff like generic maps of bandit camps, taverns, mills, tunnels, city streets...

The best resource I can recommend is the Cartographers' Guild (http://www.cartographersguild.com/content.php), which has fantasy maps ranging from cities, continents and worlds to specific encounter maps like what you've described. The quality ranges from beginner to professional, with quite a few of the latter, and the only downside is that it can take a while sifting through everything.

Also, the folks on CG are very supportive and they've produced some excellent mapping tutorials, so if you follow Saintheart's example and work up your own, you'll find that CG is a great place to improve your mapping skills.

[Crake]

Google Images is surprisingly useful for this too. adding site:cartographersguild.com to the search line helps, because that is a great website for just this stuff, but it's good to look beyond that as well. I find most of my maps (sometimes battlemaps, othertimes just flavour maps) on google images for use in roll20.