It’s a rainy day. Is summer gone? It felt so short.
Recently I started running an Arden Vul campaign. You know the one: 1122 pages of PDF + maps. For my Stonehell game, I let players map and they’re using Gridmapper, at the moment. I need to be precise when communicating the dungeon map to players and they need to draw it correctly. Sometimes there are questions and there is some back and forth. And I start wondering. Should I switch and do the “slow reveal of the published map”?
All I know is that I don’t want to use a resource intensive web app to do it. When I start Discord, Roll20 or Jitsi, my laptop’s fans start going crazy and the thing gets hot. I don’t like that. So if I can get around Roll20, I’ll try it.
For the first session, I just used Gimp. I shared a window with the map. The image has two layers: the lower layer is the map, locked; the upper layer is totally black, the fog of war. Shift-E is the eraser. I use a fuzzy brush with 200px diameter. N is the pen, with 10px diameter. R is for rectangle selections, should that be necessary. With that, I’m actually pretty good.
Yesterday I started wondering about MapTool. It’s a big package because it comes with all the Java libraries included. Then again, why not? As long as it works…
My problem, of course, is that I don’t use a plain Debian system and so I had to convert the .deb file! Uuugh. I was getting the following error:
dpkg-deb: error: archive ’Downloads/maptool_1.13.2-amd64.deb’ uses unknown compression for member ’control.tar.zst’, giving up
Here’s how to fix it:
# https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/669004/zst-compression-not-supported-by-apt-dpkg # Extract files from the archive ar x maptool_1.13.2-amd64.deb # Uncompress zstd files an re-compress them using xz zstd -d < control.tar.zst | xz > control.tar.xz zstd -d < data.tar.zst | xz > data.tar.xz # Re-create the Debian package in /tmp/ ar -m -c -a sdsd /tmp/maptool_1.13.2-amd64.deb debian-binary control.tar.xz data.tar.xz # Clean up rm debian-binary control.tar.xz data.tar.xz control.tar.zst data.tar.zst # Install dpkg --install /tmp/maptool_1.13.2-amd64.deb
When I tried to add a new map, however, I ran into another problem. Here’s how I set it up:
I enabled the grid and tried to tweak it:
No matter what I tried, it wouldn’t work. It seems that the grid requires something like 65.5 pixels/cell! Notice how the grid deviates ever so slightly from left to right:
On Discord, I was told about the Auto Resize feature.
Auto Resize is a feature to quickly resize (ie., rescale) map images to fit the current grid. – Auto Resize
I somehow didn’t quite get it to work. Perhaps picking a simple 7×6 room isn’t good enough when the whole level is 91 cells wide. So what I did instead was this:
With this image file, it’s now easier:
And now it seems to work.
Players now have the option of installing their own MapTools, or I can run two instances of MapTools: The first one is the server, for me, and the second one is for the players. The window still pops up on my laptop and I share it using Discord or Jitsi.
Since I have campaignwiki.org at my disposal, and with the help of @frotz, here’s a setup that doesn’t involve me fiddling with my router.
On the server, edit `/etc/ssh/sshd_config` and make sure you have this line:
GatewayPorts yes
If you had to change it, reload the configuration:
systemctl reload sshd
Here’s how I started a server:
Share this player password with your players.
Here’s how to use ssh to forward that port:
ssh -N -R 51234:localhost:51234 sibirocobombus
This command produces no output. While it runs, the port is forwarded.
In this case, `sibirocobombus` is my alias for `alex@campaignwiki.org:999` (user, hostname, port). In my `~/.ssh/config` I have this:
Host sibirocobombus User alex HostName alexschroeder.ch Port 999
Therefore, ssh connects to alexschroeder.ch on port 999 with user “alex” and makes sure that any connections to port 51234 for the IP numbers for alexschroeder.ch (which incidentally are the same for campaignwiki.org) are forwarded to port 51234 on my local machine, which is where the MapTool server runs that I started up above.
With that in place, I can tell my players:
And in theory… it should work!
Related:
2022-06-30 How to communicate dungeon maps to players
#RPG #MapTool #Arden Vul
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
Strange. Level 5 was easy, no rescaling necessary: 80 pixels per cell.
– Alex 2023-08-02 09:20 UTC
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Quick Q - Did you try out owlbear.rodeo?
Last time I tried it was 1.x, I see 2.x is out now.
YMMV
– Starmonkey 2023-08-02 20:34 UTC
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I signed up for Owlbear Rodeo 2 and spent a few minutes trying to import a map. That didn’t work and so I didn’t investigate installing Owlbear Rodeo 1 locally. I also read through the arguments for why they abandoned Owlbear Rodeo 1 and in a way I didn’t want to burden myself with abandonware that runs on a server…
– Alex 2023-08-02 20:54 UTC
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Could you do something like use Gimp locally, and upload/export a player view to a simple map? Then you’d only have to upload a new player view when the visible area has changed.
An *old* java-based dungeon generation/drawing tool (dungeonographer) used to do that - it would export an image to a server, and then display it as a static image and if you needed to update the view for the players you would just export again.
– Frotz 2023-08-02 22:12 UTC
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Hm. I guess I could mount a folder and whenever I save players need to reload in their browser? Hm. I could write a little piece of Javascript that reloads the image automatically every 10s? With appropriate caching (HEAD requests and all), it might work…
– Alex 2023-08-03 08:40 UTC
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I love Arden Vul, we’re 54 sessions in ♥ (out of 244 total in our larger tag(boatmode) campaign).
I don’t use a revealing map—the only time I did was with Isle of Dread, where I used GIMP. tag(ChangeTheName)
However, for Arden Vul, it often happens that there’s like “they find a map from room 3-114 to 5-321” or similar, so it’s good to have those player-facing vtt pngs available to crop from. I think they could’ve done a li’l bit better of a job hiding secrets on those.
– Sandra 2023-08-03 12:11 UTC
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Wow! That gives me hope! Let’s hope this turns into a long campaign. 😄
– Alex 2023-08-03 12:30 UTC
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For running The Halls of Arden Vul, I use a PDF app that has two nifty features.
First, it lets me make hyperlinks between separate PDFs (so to find a room I go to the maps, click on the room, and it takes me to the description. I link not every room but maybe one in five or so; as long as I can click on a “nearby enough room” it’s fine. I haven’t linked them all up in advance but I link as I go. I also can link within the text itself, to items and spells and creatures. I also have a blank notebook PDF that also can have links to or scraps from other PDFs + my own scribbling. I also have the 1e DMG+MM+PHB in there—I bought legal PDFs of them a few years back and am finally getting some use of that; Arden Vul often enough refers to some obscure 1e thing. One of the biggest was when the player characters were commanded to die—turns out the 1e books define that as “being stunned for 1 round”. And I have pirated PDFs of the six core books from 5e, although there I get more use of 5etools, an app that uses pirated data.
(I don’t feel too bad—I’ve bought three copies each of the PHB+MM+DMG over the years and one of each of XGE, VGM, MoFo, MoMu, and TCE.)
We use a rules-heavy, homebrewish mashup of editions—I also often need to refer to 2e books, Rules Cyclopedia, the original Moldvay Basic (Expert not so much) and some of Stuarts books like VotE, FotVH etc. Our campaign is set in al-Qadim and I have two copies of The Land of Fate and one copy of everything else, and on the walls I have maps of Zakhara and of just the northwestern Crowded Sea. So with so many books canon in the campaign, I’ve told them that I need to DM from home. But with this PDF app, I could DM without a problem as long as they don’t leave Dabab Island (which is where I’ve set Burdock Valley).
Uh… yeah, Arden Vul just being a small part of our much larger campaign makes this part sound super daunting but it’s something we build up gradually 🤷🏻♀️
Second, the PDF app also lets me scribble and type directly on the page! So I can scratch out stuff they find and take, and people they kill. Our game is super logistics focused.
Searching is also great. “We cast Locate Object on a Boot of Elvenkind”. “OK, hold on and I’ll look up the closest one.” And I have a few just plain old bookmarks but I try to keep ’em to a minimum so I don’t have to scroll through a dozen bookmarks. Faction table, Broken Head, Potions, Rings, and Was Sticks, and the encounter table for where they currently are.
However, the PDF app is non-free and there’s no way to back-up the cross-document links (the scribbling, I can back up). If this tablet gets lost or damaged, the campaign is in trouble.
Also we have the rule that when they wanna look at one of their diegetic maps, their characters need to take them out of their cases and unroll them. They can only look at the map as their characters are. My players are naturally inclined to be very anti-hammerspace, always accounting for what they have in each hand and such. I love my dorks ♥
– Sandra 2023-08-04 06:37 UTC
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I was wondering about that PDF app. This all makes me think that megadungeons, hexcrawls, anything that is going to be visited multiple times should be presented in a medium that is perfect for editing. Like HTML. We already have great HTML viewers. So frustrating. Adding links within and between PDFs would be useful, in any case.
I use a Markdown → HTML pipeline for my larger setting. In this campaign, that’s Elredd in a multi-referee Greyhawk AD&D 1st ed campaign. The latest edition of the player map is in this session report. I haven’t decided what to do about the Arden Vul maps.
– Alex 2023-08-04 08:06 UTC
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For my larger setting we have a player facing wiki that they do a ton of work on every week, and for secret stuff I have a huge SVG file with 60 layers in Inkscape. I can zoom from the continent down to a tiny island. I’ve also tried tons of paper systems but 🤷🏻♀️
– Sandra 2023-08-04 13:18 UTC
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Oh wow, the SVG gets you infinite zoom, I guess. Using Inkscape? Neat idea!
– Alex 2023-08-04 21:26 UTC
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Oh wow, I just saw gamespace.app. That seems to be the sweet spot!
– Alex 2023-08-04 22:08 UTC
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Did some setup and I think I’m still wasting a lot of time. Perhaps I should have stuck to sharing a paint program.
– Alex 2023-08-06 21:38 UTC
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I am currently using GameScape. I still get a lot of lag in Firefox while I'm running the game, but the features are about right.
– Alex 2023-10-04
