Dungeonographer, take 2

I tried making a map for this coming Sunday's To A Bloody Pulp game using Dungeonographer.    This time I tried to get it down to 2 pages by 2 pages, but miscalculated on the margins, and got 2 pages by 2 pages plus 5 more scraps of pages.    I decided to avoid drawing in walls and doors this time.  I know there's a way to "snap" the wall drawing to the grid lines somehow, but I haven't found it yet.   I decided to keep it as simple as possible.   This time I did make a 1-page DM's map/tape together guide when I made the main map.

I do still resent how much trial and error is involved in learning this thing, when it was billed as "intuitive" and "easy." 

First batch of Fantasy Dip

I decided to start giving some of my fantasy and historical miniatures the Miracle Dip treatment (who am I kidding, eventually it will end up being the whole lot of them).   Since Katie wanted a miniature for her game, I had the Elf/Dwarf and the Women and Halfling Boxes (she's playing a female elf assassin--Stabby Jane) out on the table and decided to do the dip to those 2 boxes this week.

Here's a picture of the whole bunch of them dipped:

And here's a close up of one elf, one dwarf, one woman and one halfling, dipped:

It's hard to tell from the pictures, but the dip does bring out the details, especially on faces, robes and hair, but does give them all a Zach Snyder darkness.  (It really does improve the cheesy looking large areas of bare flesh, the wood elf druid looks 100% better).

Dungeonographer and its kin

Okay, a week or so ago I bought the proversions of Hexographer, Hexographer 2, Cityographer and Dungeonographer.    They were advertised as simple and user friendly.   I had used several mapping programs in the past, a version of Campaign Cartographer and a tile-based mapper, both included in the "AD&D Core Rules CD-ROM" from the late 90's.   Campaign Cartographer had a steepish learning curve, but I got the hang of it, and the tile-based mapper was really, really easy and I could make a town, dungeon or outdoor map in no time flat.

Well, I'm finding that the Hexographer bunch to be a big disappointment.   First of all, the on-screen display is TINY.  I even increased the display size on my PC from 150% to 200% just so I could see things a little more clearly.   Second, far from intuitive and easy, it is very clunky.   Selecting things to alter or remove is difficult, and half the time I end up just plopping down a second example of the thing to be removed.   The instructions are lame.    It's going to take an immense amount of trial and error before I can figure out how big to make various hexes or squares.   It doesn't say "how big a piece of paper do you want" but rather "how many pixels per hex"  what the fuck, how the fuck would I know that?  Is the answer "many?"   The instructions for changing the size of map elements are as clear as mud.

Campaign Cartographer was tough, but at least it was very easy to select a building icon, change its size or orientation without putting 6 copies of the building on top of the first one. 

I did complete one project using the Dungeonographer program.   I generated a random dungeon and saved it as 1 inch per square PDF and printed it out as a battlemat.   My fault that I didn't print out a 1page version to use as a guide to putting the thing together.   So, I trimmed off the margins and taped together the dungeon level.   It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle.   It's okay, but I don't know if it is better than drawing by hand.   I found that if you generate a random map, it doesn't let you modify the floor tiles (unless there's a trick I'm missing).

I decided that it would be easier to add numbers by hand than to insert text labels, which I can do, but which is a process I find far too slow (why not just turn on a text button, click on the map and type "2"?).  So, here's a picture of Dungeon Map 1, with a few miniatures for scale:

First Crusade Era foot knights

Some Perry Brothers  first Crusade era/Norman, foot knights attacking

Beware the Wrath of David S. Pumpkins

Any Questions?

Freakin' Ice Trolls

I painted up some freakin' ice trolls.   Man, I hate those ice trolls.

Chicken Hag for the knights

A little painting work this week.

First:  some kind of giant chicken-lizard thing

Second,  a Green Hag

Next, some robed knights

Finally, some old school guys from Jason's box of discards: