Aonbarr Cartography
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Castle Ravenloft Ground Floor - Main Floor (100x70, 160px)
🕑 Added 2021-12-17 18:16:04 +0000 UTCEdit 20/12/2021: The downside of tackling Ravenloft floor by floor is that sometimes I miss a detail because it isn't referred to until later in the notes for the castle. The stairs in the north section of the chapel are made of wood, and this is important because it's meant to make it impossible to sneak up on the Strahd zombies - for some reason the stairs are mentioned in K16, but only described as wood in K29. I've reuploaded the files with this corrected, and I've also placed the versions without lighting under the Day and Night ZIP files, as well as the UVTT ZIP file, so you won't have to download both if you want to use the UVTT files!
Edit 21/12/2021: I discovered an error with the elevator trap shaft - I had neglected to account for the counterweight! I've moved the chains in the shaft to account for this, and while I was at it, made a few other minor changes - adjusted the lighting in the archer's posts (the light through the-arrow slits was much too pronounced), and cleaned up some minor details I'd missed here and there.
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Original Post : After more than a year and a half since I first thought I'd like to try making my own maps for Curse of Strahd (and later deciding to remake the already-completed set because "it looks nicer"), the finish line is fast approaching.
This is the first floor of Castle Ravenloft - an absolute monster of a map (we'll get into the limitations of that below). I spent a lot of time over the last week putting this together, and I've been having a lot of fun with it, but it's also been quite challenging.
I decided to rotate the dining table, because it just makes more sense to me this way, but I've provided a variant featuring the original arrangement too, and I added two marble fireplaces to the dining hall, because it just kinda felt right.
Now, for the gritty details: Unfortunately, the map is so large that I was forced to break from my system a bit - Ravenloft's maps will be 160 pixels per square (the highest my system could handle exporting this map at) rather than my usual 200, and for the UVTT file users, because the Ground Floor was exporting at 400MB, I had to limit the UVTT file to containing only walls, portals, and lights - you will have to manually import the JPEGs as the backgrounds for the scenes through the scene configuration. To that end, I'll also be supplying versions of the Ravenloft maps with no Dungeondraft lighting - that way you can just light the map entirely through Foundry if you'd like, rather than applying Foundry lighting effects on top of DD lighting.
I will probably export the upper levels of Ravenloft as PNGs when the time comes, but if they wind up being horrendously unwieldy (and I expect they may be), I may also provide WebP files, though I am unable to process them the way I do with JPEGs and PNGs, so unless I can come up with a solution, I may have to provide unedited versions of the ground floor to go with them.
My maps are made with assets from Forgotten Adventures, AoA, Tom Cartos' assets, and they come with grid/gridless, day/night, and a variety of formats - I'm working on making these formats consistent, but once I'm done, they'll be available as JPGs for each level, PNGs for levels above ground (for use as tiles in Virtual Table Tops), and UVTT files of the ground level and each level above for Foundry VTT.
Comments
Vincent - Aonbarr Cartography
You're very welcome! :D
Samantha Southwick
This is wonderful! Thank you so much!
Vincent - Aonbarr Cartography
Hi Samantha - thank you so much for signing up! :) The Roll20 file size limit is unfortunately so low that I basically decided I wouldn't even consider Roll20 when I originally made the maps, but as Roll20 recently got support for WebP files, I've taken the WebP conversions one of my Patrons made a while back, and compressed them even further so you can use them with Roll20. It took a while - Photoshop did *not* like these files... There is some notable quality loss, but if you don't zoom in too closely, it should still work - I hope that's OK! You can download them here - the fourth option is the one for Roll20 use! :) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TVRWgOdG7GZoqQPnsHY5RxHswp8pSe3R
Samantha Southwick
I just started DMing CoS so my players are likely a ways off from visiting the castle, but in the interest of staying ahead of the game, I wanted to get the castle maps all set up far in advance. The problem I'm running into is that I'm running the game on Roll20 and it is saying that the maximum allowable file size is 10mb. Do you happen to know if anyone has found a way to circumvent this issue?
Vincent - Aonbarr Cartography
That's worth a shot, actually - I think I tried something similar when I was exporting the Amber Temple, and the file sizes were still quite large, but I think the issue there might have been that I was stitching PNGs and JPEGs together, rather than just making a JPEG and cutting out the background. Thanks for the tip - I'll give it a shot once I finish up the first floor! I should probably package the versions without lights with the standard versions too, honestly - I was just a tad concerned the folders would surpass Photoshop's upload limit if I wasn't careful! And thank you so much! I'm really glad I could deliver the ground floor before you got there. Hopefully I'll have the rest done by the time you need it - I'm optimistically aiming for the end of the year to have the whole castle done, but with visiting family for Christmas, I suspect I'm being very optimistic indeed...
Vincent - Aonbarr Cartography
I should probably do more research into it - I tried previously to see if there was a way to do it, but I might have just been looking in the wrong places. It's worth looking again at least, just in case!
Drodinn
Nevermind. Just realized they're part of the UVTT zip files.
Drodinn
You might be able to export as a jpg with black for the "transparent" areas and just change that in photos hip afterwards when you add a transparency layer. I use GIMP so the terminology might be different, but that process should work. Also, your release doesn't have non-lighted versions. Was that by design, or are you planning on that in the future? On a completely other note, I love your maps, and I have been praying that you release ravenloft before my players make it there. They are heading up to the dinner on our next session, so this could bkt have come at a better time. Keep up the amazing work!
Mario Suárez
Amazing map! Did you try some plugin for Photoshop to work with webp? Just giving ideas. Please keep up the good work!
Vincent - Aonbarr Cartography
Honestly, I expect it might be a little difficult, but I will try to! The current plan is to provide PNGs *and* WebP files - the WebP files will be much more manageable in terms of size, but I can't edit them with Photoshop, so they won't have that faint blue tone or slight reduction in vibrancy that I apply to my maps.
Michael Bannester
Are you doing further floors as transparent pngs for modules like levels? I can definitely see an argument to not do that!
Vincent - Aonbarr Cartography
Thank you! I did load it up in Foundry myself and didn't have any issues, but my testing wasn't incredibly vigorous, so if you come across anything, please do let me know!
Michael Bannester
Looks great. Really interested to see how foundry handles it in game.
