I’ve finally found a solution to battlemat woes. For years now I’ve been to-ing and fro-ing with flipmats, tiles, drywipe mats, all sorts. all in a futile attempt to get a fair representation of the WotC maps onto my table. Just when I thought there was no help on the horizon I stumbled across Poster Razor. Here’s what I prepped for last nights game, it took 5 minutes.
It’s so simple. you grab one of the untagged maps from the main WotC site. They have loads, including all the maps from Demon Queen’s Enclave (which would be a nightmare to reproduce any other way). Save them to your desktop. Fire up Poster Razor and it turns the image into a PDF that lines up asll the different sheets for you. You can scale the map directly from that program, no image software needed. I did it all on a netbook. Mess around a bit, I recommend having 6 squares of map across a single A4 sheet. Hit save. You now have a PDF that is extremely memory friendly. E-mail it to work, print it. Take a couple of minutes with scissors and tape and you’re done.
I can’t recommend this highly enough. Awesome.
Treehouse: 
Looking good! I will have a dabble with this. I’ve tried printing out the wizards maps before, however invariably they tend to be tagged and very low res.
Good find though.
Great tip and suggestion! I love it. It isn’t quite a relevant to the 0e games I play, but I’ve been wanting to start a 4e game recently, and this will definitely be a boon. Thanks!
Wow, great post. We’re a few weeks from starting DQE ourselves, and since the maps aren’t tagged they’re ideal for this experiment.
Was it hard getting the WOTC image squares to print at about 1″ square for lining up the mini bases?
Hi,
It wasn’t hard because the preview pane on Poster Razor is pretty accurate. I did it by eye and it came out fine. If it’s slightly too large, thats fine. Too small would be worse.
Cheers!
No mention of boards. You must love the boards!
You’ve lost me. Boards?!
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How did you avoid losing image quality?
I tried scaling up a map from Dungeon (the Nexus encounter from Siege at Bordrin’s Watchs) and the image lost a lot of clarity.
To be honest, I just left it as it was. It looks bad until you get it down on the table all in one hit. Then it looks fine. The fuzziness actually helps in a funny way. It gives you a bit of room for your own description.
Some of my experimenting looked far from fine 🙂
Of course, I was working from a 70 dpi jpeg and blowing it up to 500% so some fuzziness was to be expected…
PS. I hope you don’t mind that I posted about this on my own blog.