Well, I feel a little bit stupid now. I was so proud of the JPG maps that I created for the Reavers of Harkenwold adventure for use in MapTool or other virtual tabletop programs. They’re good-looking adaptations of the poster maps that came in the Dungeon Master Kit for use with the adventure. I put a fair amount of time into them, include the time to format them to a 50-pixel grid scale for sharing on my blog.
Then earlier this week I saw a link on the Dungeons and Dragons home page to maps from The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond box set. Hey – that’s cool! I can use those maps for my game if I run any Shadowfell adventures. All I have to do is download them and resize them, and they’re good to go.
This got me thinking… if they had distributed maps for this box set, what about Reavers of Harkenwold from the DM Kit?
Yep. They have those maps, too.
Now, these are only available to D&D Insider subscribers, but I am such a subscriber. All the work I did to recreate those poster maps myself in MapTool was a bit of a waste – I could have just downloaded and resized the official, nice-looking versions from Wizards of the Coast directly.
The down side is that I feel like I wasted some time. The upside is twofold. First, I can redistribute the maps I drew myself on my blog, but I’m sure I’m not allowed to redistribute the official maps (you have to subscribe to DDI if you want those). Second, I discovered a whole BUNCH of official maps from other Wizards of the Coast adventures – Dungeon magazine adventures, Keep on the Shadowfell, Orcs of Stonefang Pass, etc. I can probably use those in future adventures.
For any of you DDI subscribers who want access to all of the official Wizards of the Coast maps, the gallery link is here. I guess when it comes to discovering this resource, better late than never!
Except WoTC maps are not all that great especially if they decide to use their tiles to make it.
Reavers of Harkenwold maps are original, not based on Dungeon Tiles (except, I believe, for a couple of tavern interiors). They’re really quite good maps, in my opinion.
I know what you mean about a lot of their maps; I’m not a Dungeon Tiles fan, myself.