ETCR - Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in DD3

[johnnywiggle]

Shindig - am deeply impressed by your efforts. Have been DMing ETCR for (embarrassing pause..............) the last year and my PCs have been in the castle for the last month or so. Well, the best excuse for the lengthy game time is that we game only fortnightly and I've been running them all over the countryside first.

Anyway, the biggest hassle I've found with running the game is accurately depicting the floor plans well. I've been generally using the freely available maps on wizards.com (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ag/20061031a) and blowing them up for use on my laptop screen (17") or printing them off. The laptop screen at 17" is generally too small for most of the bigger encounters; and the resolution of the maps too poor. Am deeply impressed with your rendition of the game's maps - there are so many inconsistencies between the encounter maps and the orthogonal maps. I've just been through every stairwell to see if they should climb anti-clockwise or clockwise, for example! I love the level of detail in your renditions - knowing little facts like the middle statue in Sergei's tomb is of cruder construction for example - only things that DMs would pick up on. I'm sure you're finding the book a challenge to DM too. As much as I love it, the constant cross referencing between the adventure text and the encounter maps is a nightmare. My bugbear is that information from both those sources within the book doesn't naturally correlate. I've been DMing encounters and suddenly realised the map is wrong or incomplete in the true description of the text. I thoroughly understand and appreciate how drawing out and mapping the entire castle has expanded your knowledge of the module.

Am slightly torn at the moment. Do I use your excellent maps (with due repping, hat doffing etc) by printing and/or maptooling on a new monitor. Or do I buy CC3 and go through the cathartic experience myself..........

Cheers for your excellent work

[Shindig]

@johnnywiggle
I totally understand the dilemma. When I started this, I didn't really...'want to' as much as I became frustrated at a) the inconsistencies, and b) Wizard's idiocy in providing only 'keyed' maps that, if you want to utilize for players, you have to edit anyways. (They finally started posting 'clean' maps in 4e.) Unlike many Ravenloft dms, I actually liked the 3.5 maps. Yes, they are inconsistent but I liked the style. I originally was going to keep all of the floors blue as they had done, but then, well, I just started getting carried away, lol.

The worst part of the inconsistencies in the maps is that they are so darned minor to casual observation until battle starts and you realize, "hey, the dining room door moved 5 or 10 feet from where it was on the other map, what gives?" It seems like such a little thing until you set the minis down and realize that it changes the tactics quite a bit. Great adventure, just wish they had not rushed it quite as much. Also, if you have not found it already, Fraternity of Shadows has a handy errata sheet for the adventure.

Stairs. Good grief! Thank goodness I had all three modules to work with. The 1st ed was the best and became the 'go to' map for figuring stuff out. Here is a good way to keep the stairs straight: Draw a mental line from the front entrance all the way to the back chapel, bisecting the chapel. Every spiral stairway NORTH of this goes UP as you walk clockwise. Every spiral stairway SOUTH of this goes DOWN as you walk clockwise. Once that was figured out, I just had to be careful to keep track of which tiles the stairways appeared at, as that was sort of a hodge-podge in some of the side areas. You'll see those areas as you run the game.

I strongly urge purchasing a flat 23"-24" monitor. $170.00 will get you one and it will pay for itself in a year with ink costs. Projectors also work, but I prefer the under-lighting (especially with some of the miniatures, like Caller in the Darkness, that has a hole underneath that captures the monitor light and gives it a nice, other-worldly glow.) If you're using Maptool, make sure to up the memory usage on the very first small screen that comes up after you click on the icon. It's default is 256 mb which will not load these maps well. I upped it to 1 G and that works nicely, especially on the 3rd floor with the outside walkways.

CC3 is a great program but has a tough learning curve if you are only used to Windows based programs and have not used a CAD based program before. Like me. But then I found some great tutorials that explained its functions quite well and now I love it. But I would not have attacked this whole thing if I could have found something online that I could use, that is why I HAD to post these when I completed them. I have 'borrowed' more than my share of maps for my game, and it was high time that I paid my dues back to the online community.

I am preparing another module and doing some map work again after being busy with work for the past year. I am going to figure out why I have not been getting e-mails from this site when someone tries to contact me or adds to this post and correct the problem. If you have any further questions, message me, and I will be checking this site weekly from now on.

Thanks for your kind words!