Do you use maps in your campaign?

Micah

Micah

I'm working on a great new feature for Obsidian Portal that should allow you to upload your maps and integrate them into your wiki. You'll be able to place markers that can link to pages in your wiki.

Anyways, it's still in the conceptual phase right now, and before I expend a lot of effort, I want to know how many people use maps in their campaigns. Do you draw the maps yourself, or get them from an adventure module? Can you make them available as an image (JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc.)? Do you use any mapping tools such as AutoRealm or Campaign Cartographer?

Most importantly, is this a feature you would use? Would you go to the trouble (assuming it's not _too_ much trouble) of uploading maps? I don't want to spend a lot of time and effort on this, only to learn that 1 in 20 people actually use it.

deadshot

I would love to use maps on the sit especially of areas that the party hasn't completed. Kanis is notorious for not wanting to leave a dungeon until he's searched every room and I think it would be great torture to have that unfinished map on the site as a constant reminder to him of what he's left behind. :)

Seriously, I would like to archive maps and most of the time I am converting them to jpegs whether I make them in autorealm or scan in a mod map and then use that. I prefer jpegs but will work with whatever programming option works best for you.

outrider

yes it would be very useful. I'm not sure how the campaign maps would fit but the local maps of towns and other things would be good

Micah

With cost of bandwidth and storage, the mapping feature would probably be the first for-pay, premium account feature. Free accounts will probably get 1 or 2 small maps (like, 400 pixels per side), and paying accounts would probably get many more and would allow much larger sizes.

Also, if the image is larger than the window, there is a chance that I can get it to scroll around, like Google Maps. At first, there will probably be no zoom feature, but that would be nice. The goal there would be to have a single, high-res image for the campaign (like a giant 2048x2048 map) that can be zoomed in and out to see greater detail.

One main question that has not been answered is how many of *your own maps* do people use? If people are planning on uploading maps from off-the-shelf adventure modules, that's a big no-no. Those are copyrighted images, so distributing them over the Internet is no good. However, and I'm no lawyer, but it might be OK for people to upload copyrighted images as long as they are private only to the campaign. That would be the equivalent of photocopying it out of the book and handing it to all the players. Nobody has been sued over that...have they?

Micah

I just added the code to do the mapping, and it is _*AWESOME*_! We still need to do some more testing before we push it to the live server, but I am extremely excited. I think anyone who uses maps for their campaign will love this feature.

Keep an eye out over the next week. I think you'll be pleased!

AidanDark

I use maps constantly, overland more than city, but having a way to upload maps will be a great help to me :)

dahlillama

I use maps, mostly for cities and such. A lot of the time they are real city maps, or maps I've lifted from the Star Wars source books and then modified slightly, or used straight up.

That's the only thing I would be concerned about. If I use a map out of a sourcebook, would I be able to post it here legally, or is that not covered by fair use?