Okay, here it is the custom made battle map that I am using to run my Keep On The Borderlands – more specifically the Caves of Chaos.  It measures 55 inches by 73 inches, which is why my excel version of the Caves of Chaos map is a bit different from the original.

I’ll walk you through how I put it together, and then give a room by room tour (at least for some of the rooms).

Ok, let’s get started.

I started off with some upholstery fabric that I picked up at JoAnn’s Fabric and craft store. They were running a sale and I got it dirt cheap. Usually this stuff sells for $25.00 a yard and I got it for $3.00 a yard. 2 yards = 6 bucks for the base.

The material used for the walls I got a similar deal on, but I only need half as much (actually less than that, but half is a good starting point.

If you should attempt an insane project like this yourself, I recommend very much that you choose a fabric that has a pattern that lends itself to making the 1” grid. If possible, get fabric that already has a 1” grid on it, like a checkerboard or plaid. The lines on this particular fabric are spaced at ¼” so it was pretty simple to make my grid.

Okay, for the next step I started marking my grid and gluing down my walls. If I had it to do over again (which of course I do), I would recommend drawing out the grid in its entirety first. I used a green permanent fabric marker. They are machine washable and really do a very nice job. A word of warning here, though. You have to let the marker dry for a couple of hours before you expose it to steam.

Why is this important? Well mostly because I used a lot of steam.

In order to attach the walls I used fabric glue, which comes in little rolls. The rolls come in a variety of widths from 1/8” up to 2”. I chose the 1” width, but the 7/8” would work just as good, if not better. In order to stick the walls to the base you cut a strip of wall and a strip of glue and then place the wall on the base with the clue in between. Then put a damp cloth over the wall and apply a hot iron (set to wool) for about 20 seconds. The instructions on the glue say to keep it there for 10 seconds, but I found that keeping it there longer really helped, especially with some other types of fabric, like denim, which I used for the pool in area G.

Here we can see what the whole thing looked like with all the walls done but no trees, water, or furniture. At this point I was experimenting a bit with the fabric markers to see how they would look for drawing in furniture and stuff. I decided to go ahead and cut out shapes for most of the furniture like tables and chairs later on because they added more dimension to the dungeon. After finishing the walls I went ahead and glued down the trees, water, and major furniture elements like tables, chairs and altars.

After finishing all of the gluing I went back with a fabric marker and drew in the rest of the elements that I wanted including furniture, fireplaces, the kobold garden, and the magic runes in the temple of chaos.

All told the project took about 50 hours of work, but it is really a wonderful little blanket to have around. My kids just love it. And as for gaming, it really does bring a whole new dimension to the game experience.

Want a close up tour of some of the rooms? Let’s get started.

Area 1: Entrance. I don’t show the pit trap, but will place it down when the PC’s discover it. The red star represents the cave entrance. There are no furnishings in this area, so it is kind of boring visually. The kobolds get to use the narrow hallway to hold back the PC’s if they turn aggressive.

Area 2: Dump. I admit that I had a hard time drawing trash, so it looks a bit like scribbles. When the PC’s go poking around they will find the rats and scorpions waiting.

Area 3: Also visible in this picture is area 3, the Storage area. Crates, barrels and bags are all drawn out. Mixing colors with the fabric markers is a bit difficult, but they are outlined with black and then colored in with yellow and bronze. The yellow doesn’t show up too well in the photos.

Area 5: This is the kobold king’s lair. If you are paying close attention you will have noticed that I switched areas 6 and 5 on my final map. Why? Well because I screwed up and glued in the king’s throne here. Not a big deal I guarantee the players will not know the difference. I tried to get a bit creative with the fireplace, the lantern, and the little playing cards on the table.

Area 6: This is the kobold main living quarters. Notice the large fireplace and exposed rug. The kobolds like to lounge here next to the fire. They also have a couple of oversized sofas.

Area 4: If you’re wondering what happened to area 4 so am I. At the time of this writing I’m just noticing that area 4 got left out. I guess I’ll stick the guards in the hall somewhere.

Obviously this continues on for the rest of the caves.  If you want to see the whole thing then you’ll just have to download the entire module.  I’ll post links for that next week, I’m just putting on the finishing touches.

Welcome back to Dungeons and Dragons Corner.

You can find Character Sheets Here.

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Making a battle grid is essentially as simply as making a large piece of graph paper with 1” by 1” squares.  One question that comes up from time to time is choosing the size of battle grid to use.

There are two ways to approach this question, but they all tend to come down to the size of the encounter that will be used.  If you are going to use a magnetic battle grid, then the size will be determined by the size of magnetic surface that you purchase.  I recommend getting the largest that can be most easily moved, usually 18” x 36”.

If you are doing something more fancy, like dwarven forge or some other 3D dungeon then be sure that all of your rooms are large enough for a battle to easily take place.  In general anything smaller than 3”x3” is going to be too small for maneuverability and players with fat fingers will have difficulty.

No this is not realistic.  There are no buildings that I know of where the smallest rooms are 15’ x 15’.  Most bedrooms are 10’ x 10’ and there is plenty of room for more than 4 people in most of them, but this is one aspect of the game where realism really does get in the way of the fun.

If possible, I would really recommend that you keep your rooms in general to at least 4 squares wide or deep, and all passageways should be at least 2 squares wide.  This will make for more tactical choices as well as allow for more terrain options and features.  Also players will appreciate the added room for their hands.

Be sure to have fun with it!

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Last time I talked about how to make a large dungeon map on standard 8 ½” x 11″ paper.  You can see that article here.  And personally I think it works pretty good.  Sometimes, however, you know that you’ll be re-using a map a lot, or you just want something sturdier.  Here are a few ideas.

• Print it on Card Stock.  You can get card stock in various off-white colors at pretty much any office supply store.  There are several specialty paper stores as well, but the office supply stores usually sell for less, though the quality of paper won’t be as nice.
• Print it on paper and then glue it to cardboard.  This is particularly useful if you are going to build a 3D dungeon.  Tape or glue (I recommend glue in this case) the map to the cardboard.  Now you have a perfect template for building your 3D dungeon, or you can use it as-is.
• Print it on clear plastic sheets.  Depending on your printer and or copy machine resources you can print (black and white generally) to clear overhead projector sheets.  Again these are available in office supply stores, though they can get expensive fast if you are using large maps.  Why would you do this?  Well, if you happen to have an overhead projector it works nicely for overland maps.  However, a more common use would be to apply them to a magnetic game grid..  Slip the map onto the grid and you get the benefit of the magnets as well as a more interesting map.
• You could also glue the paper onto even more sturdy backing, such as plywood or even sheet metal, however that is probably going to the extreme.

If you have access to a laminator then by all means laminate to your heart’s content.  Alternatively you could apply clear contact paper to the map.  

As always, have fun with your game.

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Making fun, interesting dungeons from scratch can be difficult.  Bringing them to life at the game table can be really tough unless you are spend a lot of money buying pre-printed dungeon tiles on a 1″ grid.  So how do you get your newly created dungeon onto a 1″ battle grid?

Enter Microsoft Excel.

Ok, Microsoft has a lot of bad press, but this is a trick that will save you time.

Convert your map to an electronic image.  If you don’t have a scanner, visit a friend who does.  If you are downloading free maps from Wizards of the Coast or another site then you will already have an image to use.  The sweet thing here is that it doesn’t matter the format or size of the image, though I recommend using jpg because the file size is smallest, which works well if you plan to email the finished product around.

Now open a blank workbook in Excel. 

• Change your print margins to .5″ all around (1/2″ border all around).  You can go smaller if you like.
• Click Insert | Picture | From File. 
• Browse to the image that you saved on your computer.  Select it an click insert.
• The picture should appear in your workbook.
• Move the picture to the top leftmost area of your workbook, so that the top left corner of the map is covering cell A1.
• Click on your zoom, and change it to approximately 40%.  This will show you how many pages the map will cover when printed.
• If you don’t get the dotted lines for the pages click print preview and then go back.
• However, you’ll want to go into print preview anyway, so open it now and count the number of squares of your dungeon that appear on the page.  Assuming that you are using standard 8 ½” x 11″ paper and printed portrait then you will want 7 squares to appear on the page so that you get nice 1″ squares when you print.
• If there are more than 7 then cancel print preview and adjust your image size by dragging the bottom right corner diagonally down and to the right.
• Go back to print preview and count the squares.  If the squares are too big, then go back and make the image smaller.
• When you have the right size of squares, print the pages.
• Generally speaking you will end up with several pages.  After they print, lay them all out on the table, or the floor if you have a very large map.
• Cut the bottom ½” border off the top row of pages.  This will allow you to tape or glue (I prefer clear tape applied to both sides) the second row to the top row.
• Cut the right ½” border off the left most pages.  This will allow you to glue or tape the next row of pages together.
• The idea here is to end up with a ½” border all around your nice map but still have plenty of room for assembly.

 You can do up an entire dungeon level in one evening and save yourself a ton of time explaining and drawing maps for players.  Personally I like to let my players keep the maps of the areas they have cleared.

Hope this helps and have fun!

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