Need the following:
colour treatment of the raw map image scans similar to the map tiles
single good looking generic for each location in 3:4 ratio
(low priority) interesting crops and close-ups of features in the map
I’m not entirely happy with the front of the encounter cards - its difficult to get a decent image for these cards and I’d like to favour human made images where possible. Also, i think the front of the card works better in a portrait orientation during play – you can sit them up in the box and more easily thumb through the location numbers.
So leveraging the map images, I’ve come up with an alternative image template for the front of encounter cards.
I think they are a really good improvement overall that also makes the map tiles themselves much more interesting.
Some images depict actual encounters in miniature, or details referenced in descriptions. It would be great to have an optimum generic image for all maps, top heavy for default rendering of an encounter. But also variants that are different regions of the map or close-ups that might be interesting and add variation to the card fronts.
I made cropped versions for all cards in encounter-deck.csv. The images are numbered in the order they appear on the csv file, i.e. ‘C1 The Chasm 1.png’ is the first line of the three Chasm lines.
I uploaded a zip of all images to dropbox/card-decks/encounter-deck.
It was easier for me to find good crops for some of these illustrations than others! Some of them have a single focal point, so the different crops just feel like slightly different framings, but others really lent themselves to focusing on different parts of the illustrations. Anyway, I might want to tweak some of them when I see the final exports and where exactly the text boxes end up!
All looks good from here – I think its a great improvement using the map images over the hit and miss generated ones. I’ve put a complete front of card export in ./card-decks/encounter-card/export plus a contact sheet of all the cards below:
Sometimes the encounter itself does not have a good representation in the map image. The idea in this instance is to use a good default version of the map image as a background.
Also, there are some interesting parts of the map images that don’t have a relevant encounter – they are just something interesting in the map image, either from the artist or based on something i mentioned in the general lore of the ziggurat. Finding these might be a good prompt for creating new encounters in the future – especially as they will have a good looking image to start with.
