Battle Map Gloomification (CC3+)

The most common complaint about my series of Barovian maps is that they are too bright, almost cheerful looking, which is really wrong for the setting.   I made the maps with the Dungeons of Schley (SS5) using the sheet effects pretty close to standard.  That makes for bright, easy-to-read maps that are, in fact, rather out of character for Barovia. 

Above: Original "Bright" Image

My first attempt at fixing this was to use Photoshop as a post-processor where I reduced saturation and darkened mid-range and dark colors to make it what I called Gloomy.  While that worked, at least after a fashion, adding a post-processing step is something to be avoided.  I just don't want to add extra steps to what is already a time-intensive task. 

My current approach is to set some global effects inside of CC3+ to achieve pretty much the same thing without the baggage of a trip through PhotoShop. 

This post shares the settings and shows the results in the two snips of the Mourning Gate area in this article. 

Adding Mist to a Campaign Cartographer Map

 Recently, I have been drawing a lot of Barovian maps.  That land is heavily misted, it's a major story element that really could use more presence on the maps I have drawn.  

Initially, I ignored this element as the mists are going to change dramatically over time and not showing any, maximizes visibility for the battle map at the cost of flavor.

I decided I had to have mists in the bathhouse that I located on one of the maps so I muddled through and developed a technique that works for me. Allowing a quite misty appearance without necessarily obscuring all of the details.  

At the request of a fellow CoS DM, I have taken on the task of updating the maps to have cobblestone major roads.  While I am at it, I have opted to add some misty areas to the maps.  This post highlights how I am going about that.

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Undead Fortitude (Roll20 Implementation)

 Undead Fortitude is one of those niche abilities that can occur never or often in a game.  As I have been running Curse of Strahd, I've had it occurring a lot.  The math is easy, but I'm lazy and want as few button clicks as possible.  Well, my laziness has been rewarded thanks to a thread I discovered on app.roll20.net.

A user by the name of keithcurtis posted a macro that enables a 1 click, 1 data entry path to displaying the actual DC and the relevant saving throw.  Pretty nifty!

Swarms of Medium or Small Creatures

Work in Progress...

D&D 5e has plenty of swarms most of which are medium (1 space) swarms of tiny creatures like: Rot Grubs, Ravens, Insects (Wasps), Rats, Bats, and quite a few more.  

The only non-tiny creature, medium swarm I have found is the Skeletal Swarm, which is a Large (4 space) swarm of medium sized creatures, which sticks closely to the pattern of the other swarms.  

As a DM, I  have bumped into situations where I have a large group of relatively low powered small or medium sized creatures creatures that are more powerful than the typically nearly trivial individual member of a swarm.  These groups could be productively lumped into a swarm to speed play.  I want to explore how I might do this in my games in this posting -- essentially, how to make something like a mob of villagers a single swarm instead of a bunch of individuals to manage.