I'm running a new campaign for Star Wars, and am currently running my PCs through "Long Arm of the Hutt" (the expansion to the beginner's game for EotE).

While all of my players are happy to embrace the narrative style of play and to get away from strictly measuring distances and worrying about flanking and attacks of opportunity, they still love their miniatures and maps. So, with that in mind, I'm wondering if anyone has had any success in creating maps (preferably maps that can be printed to scale) for this adventure? I have the PDF of the adventure, but when you scale the maps in there up to 400% or so, the resolution becomes terrible . Similarly, there are lots of areas that they just haven't made maps for within the adventure.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

As a proof of concept:

Just google for "long arm of the hutt maps" (or whatever adventure) and you ought to be able to find decent pictures.

42 minutes ago, AEinhorn said:

I'm running a new campaign for Star Wars, and am currently running my PCs through "Long Arm of the Hutt" (the expansion to the beginner's game for EotE).

While all of my players are happy to embrace the narrative style of play and to get away from strictly measuring distances and worrying about flanking and attacks of opportunity, they still love their miniatures and maps. So, with that in mind, I'm wondering if anyone has had any success in creating maps (preferably maps that can be printed to scale) for this adventure? I have the PDF of the adventure, but when you scale the maps in there up to 400% or so, the resolution becomes terrible . Similarly, there are lots of areas that they just haven't made maps for within the adventure.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The reason why your resolution is turning out so badly when you resize the maps so much is because they're raster images. In other words, they're made up of pixels, as opposed to vector based images. Any raster image can really only be safely enlarged 150% or reduced 50% before it starts to lose resolution. This is because the computer has to either add or subtract pixels in order to resize the image.

1 hour ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

As a proof of concept:

Just google for "long arm of the hutt maps" (or whatever adventure) and you ought to be able to find decent pictures.

Oh, I've got access to all of the maps included in the adventure. But they're low-resolution graphics, not meant to scale up when printed large enough to move figures around the map. I was hoping that someone had fan-made maps that were higher resolution, larger scale. Also, as I wrote, several encounters in the adventure don't have maps provided, and so far a Google search hadn't yielded results. Hence the reason I thought I'd head straight to the community.

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The reason why your resolution is turning out so badly when you resize the maps so much is because they're raster images. In other words, they're made up of pixels, as opposed to vector based images. Any raster image can really only be safely enlarged 150% or reduced 50% before it starts to lose resolution. This is because the computer has to either add or subtract pixels in order to resize the image.

I understand the reason why they don't scale up properly. I know all about the difference between vector and rester graphics. I wasn't asking "Why won't these images scale up?" I know why, and that's why I was wondering if any fan-made, higher-resolution maps had been made by anyone.

10 minutes ago, AEinhorn said:

Oh, I've got access to all of the maps included in the adventure. But they're low-resolution graphics, not meant to scale up when printed large enough to move figures around the map. I was hoping that someone had fan-made maps that were higher resolution, larger scale. Also, as I wrote, several encounters in the adventure don't have maps provided, and so far a Google search hadn't yielded results. Hence the reason I thought I'd head straight to the community.

I figured that picture might have been a better resolution than the one in the PDF, so I thought it might be helpful.

Part of it might just be my paradigm, because when I use maps, they are generally about the size of a piece of 8x11 paper because I hand-draw most of them. I figured if you were talking about blowing it up 400% that the pics you had access to were maybe 4x5 or something. Sorry if it wasn't helpful.

3 hours ago, AEinhorn said:

While all of my players are happy to embrace the narrative style of play and to get away from strictly measuring distances and worrying about flanking and attacks of opportunity, they still love their miniatures and maps.

At the risk of being "that guy" I would strongly recommend weaning them off this. I've had to go through this with my mini-loving group, so I'm aware of the challenge. But in this game, maps very quickly become an unreasonable constraint. Considerate players feel like they can't leave the map without making you do a lot of work, or finding another way to represent where they are (which bogs down the action as they try to accommodate). Inconsiderate players will wonder why you don't have a map for wherever they decide to end up on turn 2. Then you'll find yourself having to juggle multiple representations, which is more work.

In the above example, what if Teemo decides things aren't going so well, and escapes to his sail barge? (he's gotta have a bolt-hole...he's a Hutt!) One or two players might give chase, which might go through a town and into the desert; meanwhile the others are pinned down by Gammoreans, and maybe one flees to release the gladiators, the other gets to the communication centre to try to shut down the sail barge remotely...

Maps are great for giving flavour and an overview, but it's really hard to make it work for very long for so many of those classic SW elements, like speeder chase, catwalks above yawning chasms, splitting the party, etc...a SW encounters can cover a LOT of ground in any direction including up and down. And once they're weaned, there is a considerable feeling of liberation with them knowing they can go off where they feel works best, and split the party without causing the GM a lot of headaches.

At most I might offer that map as a handout, just for the flavour, then use one or more whiteboards to mark positions, or even 11"x17" graph paper works well.

On 1/27/2020 at 4:29 PM, whafrog said:

At the risk of being "that guy" I would strongly recommend weaning them off this.

Yeah, this. I made the mistake of running the Act 1 ambush with a map, and all the negatives of not just painting the scene with words was immediately apparent. Even I fell in to the whole grid square version of combat. It's just not conducive to what the system plays best as, which is narrative improv.