Revealable Exloration Map

[Austin Elieff]

Hey guys, first post on the site. Excited to delve into this aspect of GMing. I've already made a few maps via Photoshop and instructions from a 7 part YouTube video on Atlas Style world mapping. I'm runner a nautical campaign involving exploration of the unknown world with some friends and have a plan for creating a sort of hex crawl/exploration campaign.

My question is this: what would be a way to hide the map in a sort of fog of war that could be revealed as the players explore? I'm think of adding two layers, a gray or black fog for u known regions and a opaque blur for areas entered but not wholly explored. But I can't figure out how to have those hexes/squares revealed as the ship the players are sailing enter them. Any ideas?

[jfrazierjr]

Hey guys, first post on the site. Excited to delve into this aspect of GMing. I've already made a few maps via Photoshop and instructions from a 7 part YouTube video on Atlas Style world mapping. I'm runner a nautical campaign involving exploration of the unknown world with some friends and have a plan for creating a sort of hex crawl/exploration campaign.

My question is this: what would be a way to hide the map in a sort of fog of war that could be revealed as the players explore? I'm think of adding two layers, a gray or black fog for u known regions and a opaque blur for areas entered but not wholly explored. But I can't figure out how to have those hexes/squares revealed as the ship the players are sailing enter them. Any ideas?

Honestly, use a VTT for this purpose. I prefer Maptool(free, but a bit more work to understand the setup), Fantasy Grounds(paid, but I am not sure if it has FOW), Rolld20(paid)... there are of course others, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

If you want to stick with Photoshop, you need to learn and get very familiar with Layer masks as that is the exact type of purpose those are for(ie, hiding parts of an image). Your other option is layers, but IMHO, thats much easier to accidently provide to much information with a miss click.