VTT-Ready Maps & Legacy Maps

Hi all! 

I've had recently questions about the map dimensions and alignment to the grid, so I decided to do a short update about this. 

Legacy Maps (released 2015 - 2019)

If you have been my patron for more than a year, you might know that my map standards, style, and assumed use-cases have changed over the years. Back in 2015, I started drawing black & white maps on paper with ink pens and grey-tone markers. I scanned the maps, added some fancy background, and published it. I did not know much about virtual tabletops at that time and did most of my maps to be used on-screen or prints, but not for virtual tabletop (VTT) use. I call these maps now Legacy Maps and these include all maps released before January 2020.  

By default, Legacy Maps are not designed for online use.  They might have a grid, but the grid might be hard to align and their resolution per square might be too low for most current VTTs. They were mostly designed with old-school dungeon mapping in mind. Some of the legacy maps might have maps marked as "VTT versions", but they might not be optimal. The resolution might not be grid-based and the resolution is usually 70 px per square.

VTT-Ready Maps (released 2020 -)

In January 2020 I made a fairly big overhaul to my Patreon tiers and map standards. I started doing all maps with VTTs in mind and focus more on battlemap-sized maps, instead of large dungeons and such.  

All maps released in 2020 or later (listed as VTT-Ready maps in the Map Library) are done with the following specs:

• Maps use 140-pixel squares
• Map size in pixels is based on squares (i.e. you get the size in squares by dividing the pixel dimensions by 140)
• The grid is aligned to start from the top left corner of the map. 
• Battlemap-scale maps have 5 ft. squares (unless mentioned otherwise)

Recently I have included the following improvements for the VTT-ready maps:

• The map title on Patreon post includes the map size in squares
• The map file name has the map number, title, pixels per square, size in squares, and any additional tags about the map features. Example: 227-golemworkshop-140px-13x13-grid-noglow
• The Map Library listing now states the map type (battlemap, deckplan, city map, etc) and the required tier to unlock the map. 

I hope this helps to understand the maps and their sizes better.

As always, please feel free to give feedback and make requests to color and resize legacy maps to VTT-ready maps. I'll try to do this whenever I have some spare time. (In case I need to prioritize, requests coming from higher-tier patrons have right of way.) 

All the best, 

Miska