Summer plans and Upcoming Maps

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the radio silence. I've been working on some new maps and collaborations to bring you some fresh special content, finding out about new stuff, and wrapping up things at work before my summer vacation begins. 

Upcoming Maps (WIP)

Let's start with the upcoming maps.

Currently, I have the final version of the Escape Pod Landing site map done. This is going to be my first 200px per inch/square map release. (More about this below). 

I have the Pallisade Park battlemap featured above done and ready for wrapping up the map pack. This map is based on an old mapvember map but completely redrawn.

I also have the Ice-World Prison Map with line art and base colors are done and a "space dungeon" map close to the finishing line. These both are going to be large 25x50 battlemaps with multiple levels (full map and 25x25 maps with separate levels coming for both).

Besides these, I have the following maps allocated for June release:

• Trollball arena (Fantasy sports arena; Epic tier custom map)
•  Fantasy City Map (For an upcoming sourcebook; collaboration)
• Giant Robot Remnants (A map for an Astraterra adventure; music collaboration)
• Crystal Nest (A map for my Star Wars campaign)
• Ancient Alien Ship deckplan (base done, featured above)
• Secure Warehouse (layout done)
• Car Crash Site (draft done)

I would like to list a couple more maps, but I'm not sure about their release yet, as they are a bit more experimental, which I'm going to use for some token/tile asset and animation tests. 

Animated Maps and Online Assets

I have started figuring out a bit about how to make animated maps and map assets for virtual tabletops. I'm not sure about the first releases yet, but I've planned to spend some of my summer vacation to learn more about these. More news about these later this month. 

Voting

As June was closing my backlog was already quite full and I've been thinking about June's map poll. I still have a few options for the last half of the month. I'll return to you about the poll shortly.  

Foundry VTT Map Module

Besides the animated maps and VTT assets, I've been figuring out ways to deliver pre-configured maps. For a few months, I was looking into the possibility of making maps prepared with dynamic light for virtual tabletops. At first, it seemed that there was no practical way to do it through Patreon, but Foundry VTT solved this issue. 

I already published a starter kit of my old maps pre-configured with walls, doors, and lights for Foundry VTT. This was released as exclusive content for Foundry licence owners and if you are a Foundry VTT license owner, you can get it here.  

This release was also a proof of concept for me that it is possible to do those maps and distribute them easily. 

This month I should release a Patreon exclusive module with new maps. This is a reward available to all of my $10+ tier patrons. I'll aim to do at least 2 releases per month at first, but let's see how this goes. If there seems to be demand and I can get my workflow smooth, I'll probably try to do a Foundry-ready version for all of my full map packs. 

Upcoming Changes to Tiers

Related to new content and general streamlining and focused support for online tabletops, I'm going to make some adjustments to my tiers starting the 1st of July. 

I do not have a final outline of the changes yet, but these among some other things have been under inspection and revision:

• Increasing the map size from 140px to 200px per inch/square.
• Adding a Patreon-exclusive module with Foundry-ready maps to $10+ rewards.
• What to do about the PDF maps. Making PDF collections of the maps require a lot of work, while the demand, in general, seems very low. There also some other practical issues with this taking into account the number of map variants I usually have for each full map release + the maps are not really designed anymore that often to fit on one page. A few people have asked if the backstories and fluff could be released as PDFs. This seems like a useful option and fairly simple to do. I might still do occasional map collections, like before.

I guess that's all for now. So, you can expect a bunch of new releases by the end of the week and several more by the end of the month. 

Thank you for your support!

All the best & stay safe,

Miska