The year is coming to an end so I figured I'd show off some of the mapping progress I made and share a couple of tips and tricks I learned.

At the beginning I was somewhat limited in terms of styles and symbol sets but after getting the humble bundle last year I have a lot more options and found my new go-to city style.

Also loving this retro deckplan style. Perfect for player handouts.

One of the problems I have is obvious bitmap tiling with large maps. I tried to mask it by layering a different woods bitmap on top using blend mode and scaling it up. There's still some tiling visible but it's not as bad as before, and it still looks good when zoomed in to street level.

I applied the same bitmap layering trick to my dungeons as well as placing random scatter terrain to add some visual interest. Next I experimented with lighting as I felt my maps looked somewhat flat.

I experimented some more mixing and matching bitmaps from different styles and got a bit more bold using ambient lighting.

I hope you folks had an equally productive year and I'd love to see the progress you guys have made.

Keep on mapping and happy holidays everyone.

I recently got to keep my old work Macbook m2 pro for personal use. Installed CC3+ using Sikarugir without much issue, just had to pick the right Wine version. The installation process was very similar to Linux.

You're right, it's not worth getting into legal trouble for. DMsGuild seems like the best place for D&D maps but it's also very restrictive on what is allowed (only campaign settings supported by the current edition of the game etc.). My best bet is to focus on making more original maps then.

Ahh, after reading up a bit more on copyright laws I think you're right @ScottA, it would be a derivative work and not transformative. Perhaps the argument could be made that making maps for VTTs alters the meaning/purpose of the original work. If anyone happens to be knowledgeable on copyright laws and can give some insight on this that would be interesting.

You bring up a good point. I'm not an expert on copyright laws but as I understand it would be considered transformative work and it's not my intention of claiming authorship of the original work. I believe it would be more of an intellectual property issue. In any case I should look into this further to avoid legal trouble.

Looking at the DMsGuild (a branch of DriveThruRPG in partnership with WotC) content guidelines it looks like selling maps is allowed, for example https://www.dmsguild.com/product/242842/Zhentil-Keep--Forgotten-Realms-Stock-Maps is very similar to the maps I have made. This only applies to Dungeons & Dragons content however. I suppose the best thing would be to contact them about the finer details.

Thanks, that is very insightful. 'Pay What You Will' sounds like a good idea actually, at least to start with. Ultimately the most important thing is to provide fellow gamers with nice maps for their games. Best of luck!

Thanks all for the feedback, as always it's very appreciated.