Roadside Encounters: Mostly Boring Battlemap Theater
Before a game of Falling Tides, I was complaining about the difficulty of getting a decent battlemap of a woodland road. If I had a combat encounter in a crystal palace floating through space, I could probably get a battlemap for it, but a new map of a path in the woods? That's harder to find. And if I do find something, it probably has a grid on it, making it obnoxious to use in a VTT. The trouble is just that I'll only ever need at most one battlemap of a temple on the edge of a caldera, but I'll have many roadside encounters in a long campaign. Of course, I could reuse one of my existing road-in-the-woods battlemaps, but that can quickly diminish the effect of having a nice battlemap in the first place.
And one of the other players said, Hey, let me tell you about the project my partner and I are starting.
Source: Mostly Boring Battlemap Theater, used with permission
Mostly Boring Battlemap Theater has just launched on Patreon, with the explicit goal of making detailed scenes and corresponding battlemaps for those ubiquitous, mundane encounters, between the place where the party sets out and the cool impressive battlemap where they have their climactic combat encounter. So far, they have a tavern, the entrance to a mine, a dock on a forest lake, and roads through various biomes. Mostly boring, maybe, as the name says, but actually very exciting for me, because this promises to be exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for.
I am still, in theory, committed to finding more ways to include cool, dramatic encounter locations, as I wrote about earlier this year, but … well, in truth, I'm playing with hexcrawls lately, and they need an awful lot of regular roads through biomes. Mostly Boring Battlemap Theater promises to be quite helpful where those come in.
I highly encourage you to take a look and see if this is something you're interested in.
Source: Mostly Boring Battlemap Theater, used with permission
Disclosure: I'm not being paid or compensated in any way for writing this post, but I do play in a ttrpg with one of the creators and I was compensated for helping with some behind-the-scenes stuff pre-launch.